Rainmaking Performance Standards – Part 3 of 3
In two previous posts, we described the importance of developing appropriate performance standards to succeed at rain making and provided examples of the kinds needed by professionals.
Again, performance standards are measures by which you can determine:
• The degree to which you are succeeding or failing,
• The degree to which you are on track to succeeding or failing,
• How your performance compares to others, and
• Where you should devote your attention to improving your performance, either by doing more or less of an activity or by doing something additional or different.
There are many consequences for insufficient appreciation of rainmaking performance standards. Here we will describe two of them.
The Build It and They Will Come Fallacy
This fallacy occurs when professionals rely on one event or series of events to produce the leads that they need. This can be giving a speech or series of speeches, writing an article, having an exploratory meeting with a potential client’s senior executive or in many other ways. Having had the event, the professional stops further effort and waits for the phone to ring.
Those making this mistake have poorly develop persistence standards (a subset of performance standard), They don’t realize that how low the probability of getting much work from a single event is. They need to understand that follow-up over weeks, months, and years, will probably be necessary to turn up business from the effort. Performance measures in this area might include numbers of relevant new people met through this process and the number followed up with over time.
Both of the authors can cite a few examples of leads obtained through one simple event, but many more from events that were only a part of a longer effort.
Get Them While They’re Hot Fallacy
This fallacy occurs when, after completing a marketing effort, professionals, focus exclusively on hot prospects that are generated, e.g. those who make positive statements of interest in hiring their firm, and ignore all others who showed milder interest. We have seen this often when professionals run an educational seminar for prospective clients. Those attendees who show immediate, keen interest in the relevant service get lots of attention, as they should. But that doesn’t mean everyone else should be ignored. There is often huge, if longer-to-develop, potential in others who attended and were favorably impressed by the workshop, but have no immediate need. A firm which tracks the steps taken to follow up with interested as well as hot prospects after running a seminar, will have more success at developing rainmakers.
Performance standards are a major, if underappreciated, tool for developing rain makers.
By Gary Pines & Ford Harding