Professionals rely on anecdotes to make their abstract services more tangible to prospective clients.  Claims like:

• Our experience helps us see things that your people might miss.
• We will really fight for you.
• We do the tough jobs for you.
• We can access people you can’t.
• There is a better way to look at your problem.
• We are creative.
• We really listen well.

may sound boastful or argumentative or simply sound the same as the way all your competitors sound.  And they certainly aren’t memorable.

A well-told anecdote overcomes all of these problems.  As described by Peg Neuhauser in her book, Corporate Legends and Lore, well-told means it contains four elements: plot, character, action and outcome.  In an earlier post, I showed how changing the character can change the message of an anecdote.  Here I will discuss action.

By action, Neuhauser means just that, usually in the form of somebody doing something.  An action, unlike an abstraction such as a “business unit” or “increased market share,” can be visualized in the mind’s eye.  The little movie it creates makes the anecdote sticky, because a client will remember it well after she has forgotten the abstraction.

This is easily seen by these two descriptions of the same event, which could be alternative sentences in a longer anecdote:

• The RIF (reduction in force) affected 50 people.
• She met with the three supervisors individually and then with the other 47 employees in a group in the cafeteria to tell them that they had all been let go.

Or by these descriptions of a thing, a new headquarters:

• It increased their visibility and enhanced their reputation for innovation which is a critical element of their brand.
• For a week after the building opened traffic actually slowed down on the expressway, it’s so unusual.  When people read the newspaper or see a story about the company on TV, they always see a picture of the building, it has become so much a part of their identity.

Adding an action isn’t always easy, because professional services don’t always center on actions.  What are the actions associated with a contract or an audit?  When faced with this situation, try having the character in the anecdote (The CEO stood before the board and . . .) or the client’s customers (Customers stood in long lines for over . . .) do something.

Put an action in your anecdote and your clients will listen in rapt attention.

Karl Hockenbarger emailed me an interesting comment after reading my article Hindsight Isn’t Perfect When Selling Professional Services, which was published in Business KnowHow.

Here is Karl’s comment:

What is left out of the story is often more telling than the story itself, and relates precisely to the purpose of telling the story. 
 
I was executive director of a not-for-profit which assisted inmates in a state prison during their last year before parole eligibility to support their transition from “inside” to “outside” life (an unofficial precursor to today’s focus on re-entry).  The Chairman of my Board of Directors was a successful real-estate developer specializing in strip malls.  He totally disapproved of my wearing a cowboy hat and boots.  To make his point of how inappropriate my dress was for an executive position he told the story of one of his deals in which the loan officer of the bank they were approaching for funding opened the branch office on a Saturday morning to meet with my boss and his partner.  My boss showed up in a business suit, the banker in his golf shirt, and the builder partner in muddy work boots, blue jeans, and a T-shirt.  My boss was mortified.  (end of story)
 
I asked if they got the loan, which they did.  Suddenly his attitude toward my dress changed, although I did put the hat in its box in the closet, when he realized that his partner showing up straight from the work site gave credibility to their efforts instead of showing disrespect to the banker, just as my boots were part of the uniform of the corrections officials we worked with. 
 
Did John correct the perception that this one account was his sole pursuit?  Without feedback COmmunication becomes SOLOmunication.   
 

Read these two versions of the same anecdote told by a litigation support consultant:

Version #1

Sometimes losing is almost as good as winning.  Not long ago, a major power company was sued for breach of a twenty-year power contract.  The plaintiffs were asking for damages in excess of one billion dollars, the value of the damages hinging on the discount rate used in their calculation. 

Multiple experts offered the defendant ways to calculate the rate.  We spent many hours educating the general counsel on the credibility of the alternative ways to calculate a discount rate and persuaded him of the intellectual superiority of our approach.  When the arbitrators compared our estimation of the discount rate with the one provided by the plaintiff’s expert, they found ours more credible.  The power company ended up paying the plaintiff only $115 million, far less than they would have had to pay if the plaintiffs had won or one of the other experts’ calculations of the discount rate had been presented.

Version #2

Sometimes losing is almost as good as winning.  Not long ago, a major power company was sued for breach of a twenty-year power contract.  The plaintiffs were asking for damages in excess of one billion dollars, the value of the damages hinging on the discount rate used in their calculation. 

The attorney representing the company asked several experts to calculate the rate.  He spent many hours with the power company’s general counsel evaluating the credibility of the alternative ways to calculate a rate, and selected our experts’ approach.  When he took the case before arbitrators, they found his arguments both intellectually superior and more compellingly presented than those provided by the plaintiff’s attorney.  The power company ended up paying the plaintiff only $115 million, far less than they would have had to pay if the plaintiffs had won or one of the other experts’ calculations of the discount rate had been presented.

These are both accurate descriptions of what occurred, but the points of view differ dramatically.  In Version #1 the consultant is the hero and the plaintiff’s attorney isn’t even mentioned.  In Version #2 the defendant’s attorney is the hero and the consultant a helpful sidekick.

Is one version better than the other?  Why?  Might one version be preferable in some circumstances and the second in others?  What circumstances might they be?
If you were an attorney listening to the story, which version would you find most interesting and compelling?  Why?

If you used this anecdote describing your services to an attorney considering using you on another case, what different messages might the two versions send to him?

An anecdote is a simplification of a complex bit of history.  How you choose to simplify sends a strong message to the listener.  You should choose your words carefully.  It is especially important that you choose your hero for the story with the listener in mind.

* * * * * * * * *

For more on this topic, please see the new edition of my book, Rain Making: Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field. This is a new edition of my earlier, bestselling book, with about 49-percent new content.

I collect rainmaking stories.  There is something visceral in our fascination with a story, especially when we believe it relates to us.  It’s what primitive man must have felt when sitting around the campfire listening to the clan’s best hunter tell how he brought down a mammoth. 

The value of stories to emergency workers has been documented by Gary Klein in his book Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, (MIT Press, 1998).  Again and again, I hear that it is the stories I tell that really show how rain is made.  But you have to be careful with stories.

Contrary to the popular dictum, hindsight isn’t perfect.  Even if the storyteller has a good memory and is impeccably honest, she will give you a distorted version of the truth.  She cannot reduce what took hours, days or months to a story without distorting what really happened.  This is common in rainmaking stories, which often suffer from a false appearance of linearity.

A friend and client, John is a strategy consultant who has proved his rainmaking prowess at three firms.  He participated in a class I taught at one of these firms to add local color and an insider’s perspective.  On request he told the story of how he brought in (or as he said with great modesty, helped bring in) a large engagement from a prestigious client.  Justifiably, the audience found this story more interesting than mine, which were about people at different times and in different places.

One participant then commented that this story told them what they really needed to do, pick a company and go after it with a singular focus, because the demands of client work would not admit the broader effort that I had proposed. 

Of course, John had meant no such thing, but in looking back at the pursuit, he had mentioned only those things that related to the company in question.  He left out the fifteen other companies he had identified as targets when he joined the firm.  Over a year later, he had given up on some of them and was still pursuing others. His story skipped all that, creating an appearance of linearity, as if he had known from the start that the company in question would hire him.

In reality, his pursuit had been more like going through a maze, backtracking from many dead ends before finding the true path.  That story would have been a good one, too, but if John had told it he would have had to leave out pieces of the story he did tell.  Stories always simplify.

I encourage you to collect stories from rainmakers in your firm.  They will be interesting and educational, but they always leave something out.  If you remember that you are less likely to take a lesson away from a story that the teller never meant to give.

Professionals sell by telling stories about clients they have worked with. Through these stories they make more tangible the value of their services. In earlier entries I have discussed some specific kinds of anecdotes (Sadder-but-Wiser and Watch-Your-Step anecdotes). This entry will address two closely related issues of their composition, their length and their truthfulness.

They are related because when you shorten an anecdote you inevitably have to leave out important facts, resulting in a distortion of the truth. By definition, anecdotes are short, meaning that if one gets too long, it ceases to be an anecdote. I have worked with hundreds of professionals, helping them construct anecdotes from the experiences of their clients and have always been able to bring them down to a tight six sentences. Sometimes, they should be preceded by a statement that highlights their significance (“Confidentiality is critical in matters of this kind. An owner of a florist shop didn’t realize this and . . .) in which case they might stretch to seven.

Of course, I am not the final arbiter of anecdote length. (That, I think, is done by the Anecdote Certification Board in Brussels.) And it doesn’t much matter if one runs on into an eighth sentence. But surely there is no such thing as a twenty-sentence anecdote.

Let’s assume for the moment that the ACB in Brussels officially draws the line at seven sentences. Now we must face the dilemma: We must distill a problem that took a client five years of mismanagement to get into and eighteen months of our work to extricate them from down to a mere seven sentences. And we must be truthful. The ACB insists on the truth. It is absolutely nuts about the truth. What are we to do?

My solution to this problem is to do my best to meet this standard: If the client were sitting there with me when I told the anecdote and were asked if it were true, she would say yes, that it is essentially true, though it’s a simplification.

Of course, I am not the arbiter for standards of truth in anecdotes, either. And the ACB, while good at counting sentences, is notoriously ineffective at discerning the truth. So, you can probably put as much hokum into your anecdote as you like and no one will know. But this is the standard I use, and I sleep well at night.

Coincidently, this week blogger Skellie also posted an article on anecdote length. In his case they are for use in blog postings.  It’s well worth a look at http://www.skelliewag.org/mastering-the-anecdote-39.htm#comment-3324

To finesse a sale is to maneuver around facts that might hurt your chances of winning the prospective client’s business were she to know the whole truth. Those who know the term use it to describe words or acts which are legal but deceptive. We can legitimately call finessing a sharp practice. Or is it?
The Lowest-Common-Denominator Finesse (hereafter referred to as “the LCD Finesse”) is, perhaps, the most common. Many a rainmaker uses this finesse effectively to win work. They use it most often to make past client work seem relevant to the current prospect when she might not see it that way, if she knew the whole truth. If we are selling to a bank and have limited experience with banks, we might describe work we did at an insurance company as being for “another large financial institution.” When talking with a prospective client from a Zurich-based bank about work we did for a pharmaceutical company based in Geneva, it becomes “another large Swiss company.” By this logic, hotels and airlines are lumped together as travel-based businesses.

A little of this is innocent enough. After all, the descriptions we give are true. But we are withholding information which might make the client uncomfortable with our credentials. How far can this go before we cross the line into unethical behavior? Years ago, while pitching to a precision aircraft parts manufacturer, I referred to a former client in an anecdote as “another metalworking company.” This was an exceedingly low common denominator. The company in my story made the metal straps that tie goods to pallets to for shipping. The two companies had almost nothing in common, and the aircraft parts manufacturer would almost certainly have discounted my story, if I had told him the whole truth.

But the story did have a message, one important for the client to hear and that was relevant to his situation. Was I wrong to tell the story in a way that made it compelling to him? I am not sure. Would it have been better to tell it in a way that made the differences between his company and the one in the story blatantly clear and in doing so risk his rejection of a point that was imprortant for him to hear? That doesn’t feel right either. I can say that we did use the LCD in the story we told, he hired us and later provided us with a good reference many times.

Anecdotes are used for many purposes in selling professional services. We have already seen the Sadder-But-Wiser anecdote (see April 17, 2007 posting, Sadder But Wiser), which is used to show a prospective client that long ago you learned a lesson through hard experience that will serve her well today.

Rainmakers also use anecdotes to tell a prospective client in a polite compelling way that she might be wrong or to get her to look at her problem from a different perspective. We call these Watch-Your-Step anecdotes.

The late Peter Sarasohn, an attorney and a rainmaker, would use such an anecdote when asked by small business owners nearing retirement to do the legal work required to turn over the business to their children. Typically, the children would issue stock in the company and give a portion to their parents to support them in their retirement. When such a plan was proposed, Peter would tell this story:

Not long ago I met with a couple who faced a problem that I see from time to time. Much like yourselves, they had worked hard for many years to build a solid business and had turned it over to their children on terms similar to the ones you are suggesting. It started out well; the couple moved to Boca Raton and enjoyed life. But then the business took a hard turn, and the children had to close and liquidate it. The couple had no other retirement income. There wasn’t much I could do for them. That it wasn’t the children’s fault didn’t make any difference.

Note how this story was told in a way to make the listeners identify with couple in it, giving them a chance to feel first the pleasure of retirement and then the desperation of losing everything they had worked to build, including their financial security. It allowed Peter to raise a point tactfully when a more direct “I think we should consider the risks before we . . .,” might sound argumentative or patronizing. He avoids saying “I think . . .” or “I suggest . . .,” which would focus attention on himself and his brilliance. Rather, he reports what he has seen and heard of the couple’s experience and lets the story and its obvious implication for his audience stand in place of a recommendation.

During my days as a location consultant, I competed for a project to pick a low-cost location for a plant to manufacture meat slicers. Our competition was the consulting arm of a construction company which would give the location consulting work away for free, if the prospective client would also give them the construction project for the new building. The company’s sales were plummeting, as more and more customers chose cheaper foreign imports. Management planned to relocate, so that they could cut costs and drop their prices.

At my meeting with the management team, I asked, “What if relocating your plant doesn’t get your prices far enough down to allow you to compete?” I asked this question because I knew it would puzzle my audience. After all, I was the location consultant, and I was questioning the value of moving. “What do you mean?” asked the CEO and I got what I had wanted, an invitation to tell this story, rather than volunteer it:

A few years ago, Plumbing Fixtures, Inc. (name changed) was struggling to hold its own against Brazilian competitors who were undercutting their prices by fifteen percent. The head of the business unit decided to move aggressively and shifted all his manufacturing to a low cost area in Louisiana and dropped prices by twenty percent. He was a hero for about a week. By then the Brazilians had figured out what was happening and cut their prices by thirty percent. Plumbing Fixtures had created such a price umbrella that the Brazilians could drop their prices by that much money and still make a profit on the sale. Plumbing Fixtures went out of business.

On the basis of this story, instead of being hired to only look for a new location, we were hired to make two additional analyses. First, we calculated how much money could be saved by upgrading the company’s manufacturing processes. Second, we reverse engineered the competitors’ product to see how much we could save through a redesign. We found that both a new location and afresh product design were necessary to cut sufficient cost out of the business to compete with the Europeans.

Once again, in just a few sentences the weakness of the prospective client’s plan is made clear. Redefining the problem this way made the free site search offered by our competitor look hasty and without consideration about what the prospective client’s real needs were.

So, if you think a client’s solution to a problem is wrong or needlessly risky, you must tell her to watch her step. An anecdote is a good way to do that.

We have all learned something the hard way, and those lessons tend to be well learned.  Those of us with little gray hair can use these experiences, the way rainmakers do, to persuade the client that we know better than to make such mistakes again.  Though we might not want to point out a mistake we made this week, stories about mistakes earlier in our careers can be compelling.

Bob Hillier, an architect who knows how to bring in business, showed how powerful the sadder-but-wiser anecdote can be, when a prospective client said to him, “I’ve had some bad experiences with architects. How can I be sure you’re going to bring this project in on budget.”  Everyone in the room knew that the engagement hung on the answer to this question.  I looked at Bob.  He responded with the following story:

When I had only been in business a short time, I won a project to help renovate a classroom building at a local university.  Our design substantially exceeded the client’s budget, but I thought it was so beautiful that I could talk them into spending the money. When I met with the facilities manager, he looked at my design and immediately asked what it would cost. I told him, and he handed me back my drawings and told me the engagement was over. I said I would redo the work to fit his budget, but he said no, he couldn’t work with someone who didn’t listen to him. I’ve never forgotten that lesson.

With that story, so much more effective than promises or statistics, he won the engagement.

This story is powerful on several dimensions.  We all can identify the young architect trying to build a firm.  We can feel his devastation on being fired.  We all know that this lesson was well learned.  The listener was a facilities manager.  He could identify with the client in the story and feel the satisfaction of dealing abruptly with an architect who doesn’t listen.  He had probably wanted to fire several architects over the years but didn’t want to incur the costs of starting the projects anew.  The anecdote also shows that Bob is not just another posturing professional; he has enough humility to reference his own mistakes.

Here is a story that I heard an attorney tell to an accountant he was hoping to get referrals from:
When I was a young lawyer, I was trying a case in front of the judge with a reputation for being hard-nosed. I found myself getting so wrapped up in my client’s case at one point that I stopped and apologized. The judge got mad at me right there in front of my client. “How dare you apologize,” he said. “If you don’t feel emotional about your client’s case, why should I?”  Ever since then, I have never felt embarrassed about being emotionally committed to my clients’ cases.

This story is far more persuasive than a statement like, “I will really fight for any client you refer to me.”
So, think back to mistakes you made early in your career.  Is there grist in them for a good story that will make clients want to hire you?  Would you care to share your story?  If so, please post it on this site.