Networking takes time, and for professionals, time is scarce.   Lack of time can force us to pass up an opportunity to help a network contact.  Because help is the coin of networkland, these missed opportunities lessen our value as networkers.  Miss one such chance and no great harm will be done. Miss again and again and the cumulative harm will be substantial.

Here are three things to have ready to give, so that you don’t have to take time to get them each time you want to give them to a contact.

1. The Key Resource

Clients often ask their professional advisors for referrals to other providers. If a specific kind of provider is requested frequently, it pays to vet a few of them, so that you can quickly and comfortably refer them in the future.  Whether or not these providers can also refer clients to you is of secondary importance. 

A management coach, a PhD psychologist, frequently gets requests for referral to counselors who can help a client’s family member or friend with personal problems.   She has verified two or three psychologists who do that kind of work and to whom she can refer these clients. 

Clients sometimes ask a structural engineer for advice on problems in residential buildings, not his specialty.  He developed a list of engineers who did do residential work whom he could refer.

Note in both these cases, the need for help is probably urgent.  When the need is urgent, the value of the referral is high.  You don’t want to come up empty handed when the contact turns to you at so critical a moment.

2. Note Cards

When a client is ill or has a death in the family, you may want to send a sympathy card and feel an electronic one too impersonal.  When a client has a birthday, gets promoted, or has a new child, you may think of sending a card of congratulations.  You have every intention of buying a card, but don’t get around to it and the moment passes. 

This may seem a small thing; but it’s not.  We all appreciate it when a friend recognizes our successes and our tragedies.  Doing so with a card takes little effort and is good manners, whether or not the person is a network contact.  With network contacts it helps advance a relationship. 
But, we seldom go out and buy the needed card, we are so busy and distracted.  You are far more likely to write a personal note, if you have the card in your desk in anticipation of needing it. 

The next time you visit an art museum or high-end stationer, buy some all-purpose, conservative cards and keep them in your desk.  Having them at hand allows you to draft a quick note immediately on hearing news from a contact that warrants so personal a response.

3. The Special Book

Books make excellent gifts, because they have low cash value, but high intrinsic value to the right reader.  If you find yourself recommending a book often, buy a few copies so that you have them ready to send as gifts.  Some of the books I do this with include:

1. The New Strategic Selling by Heiman and Sanchez.  This guide to planning and monitoring a complex sale is best-in-class and an important resource for professionals and others who sell.
2. Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman.  The author helps people overcome thinking habits that get in the way of their success.
3. A Primate’s Memoir: A Neuroscientist’s Unconventional Life Among the Baboons by Robert M. Sapolsky. I give this book to those who have suffered and enjoyed the difficulty of cross-cultural communication.  It makes them laugh and so is among the kindest gifts a person can make.
4. My current favorite business book. When I read a book that I think has an important message, I will send them to contacts I think will appreciate them.  For example, I have done this with:
   o  The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen
   o  The Logic of Failure by Dietrich Dorner et. Al.
   o  Strategy and the Fat Smoker by David Maister, which I reviewed here.

(I would be interested in hearing what books you give or recommend to your contacts.)

A little foresight will make you a better networker, because you will be able to give more and in networking, you have to give to get.
 

Working for a large firm allows you the opportunity to use firm marketing efforts as excuses to call clients, prospective clients and other important contacts.

Rainmakers make the most of these opportunities that others largely miss. Because firm marketing efforts do little good, unless someone uses them to meet or stay in touch with a market contact, these missed opportunities result in massive waste of marketing dollars,

Printed materials yellow and curl on the shelf until they are thrown away. Tickets to sports and cultural events go unused, each empty seat representing a waste of several hundred dollars. The receptivity of clients to such offerings often surprises the professional who takes advantage of them for the first time.

The first few times a professional uses a firm marketing effort to make contacts can be transforming experiences. A management consultant who had recently started to bring in business had this to say:

We recently moved our New York office and had an open house to show our new space to clients and other friends of the firm. We were all asked to invite people and most took it as a civic duty that they fulfilled by inviting two or three guests. I saw it as an opportunity to call all my contacts. I was surprised that so many accepted, but even when someone didn’t come, it gave me an excuse to talk with them and see how things were going. In the worst cases, I didn’t talk with them, but left them a message that reminded them I was thinking about them.

I know from other sources that sixteen of his contacts accepted his invitation.

Documents, printed and electronic, also provide reasons for calling clients. Once a month, an accountant at a big firm would visit the closet where the firm kept article reprints, white papers, printed cases studies and related materials. He would scan the vast quantities of materials while reflecting on his contacts, and so match as many contacts as he could to the subjects of the documents. For example, he would match a white paper on the accounting issues of doing work in China with an accountant at a client expanding there. He would then call the contacts to ask their interest in the document or send it with a note.

Call discipline, essential to rain making, often gets put off for want of adequate reasons for calling. But, good reasons for the calls are all around you. Your firm’s marketing department provides some of the easiest.

I recently gave a speech to a group of architects during which I referred to a structural engineer, whom many of us knew. One of the architects corrected me, saying, “He’s not really an engineer, though. He’s a salesman.” “Yes,” I agreed, “he certainly is a big rainmaker for his firm. But why do you say he’s not an engineer?” “Because he’s not practicing his profession,” said the architect. To which I responded curtly, “Yes, he is . . . at the highest level.” We looked each other in the eye and then decided not to have that argument and went on to other subjects. Pity. If we had argued, we might have learned something.

So, instead of debating with the architect, I have done so with myself, as I often do. After winning and losing the argument from both sides several times, I called the engineer (or former engineer) in question and asked him what he thought. He was extremely busy and, I sensed, thought me either mad or with far too much time on my hands to be bothered by such an angels-on-pinhead issue. And he stunned me with his answer. He wasn’t sure, but leaned towards the view that he wasn’t a real engineer any more.

Instead of a definitive answer, I came away with a second question, is it important whether an engineer or actuary or architect or accountant or lawyer or consultant is practicing her profession when selling? I find it best to deal with these questions simultaneously.

The first question comes down to what practicing your profession means. The simplest definition is using one’s specialized education and training in a specific area to solve a problem. 

The answer to the second question—is it important whether or not selling is practicing your profession—depends, of course on your point of view. Here is mine:

One of the pernicious aspects of the professions is the pecking order among specialists. This is, arguably, most egregious among architects, where designers look down on project architects, who look down on construction administrators, who look down on specifiers. Name a famous architect and it will be a designer.

Pecking orders exist in other professions, too. Strategy consultants outrank all other types of management consultant, for example. Trial lawyers outrank other litigators, who are effective at negotiating settlements. Structural engineers outrank their more common brethren, the civil engineers.

In some professions, like architecture, the rankings remain rigid over time. In others, the rankings have changed. Over the past twenty years, the prestige of mergers and acquisitions attorneys has risen from the dregs of the profession to one of the most acclaimed specialties. The status of the general counsels, working inside a corporation, has also risen over the years, as the corporations have given them more power.

There are two strong arguments I can make for saying that a professional who sells her firm’s services is practicing her profession. First, she uses that education and the knowledge she has gained from experience to understand the client’s business issue, translate into a set of technical needs, assemble a team that has the right set of technical abilities to address those needs, and then with the team, develops an affordable solution to the business problem. She may not work at a drawing table or CAD machine, she may not write briefs or argue a case in front of a judge, or do many of the other tasks which she studied in school to earn a professional degree. To say that doing this is not practicing a profession is like telling a pianist that he is not really a musician, because he composes music.

The second argument for including rainmakers among those who practice their profession is based on an analogy. If a general counsel or in-house architect is still considered to be practicing her professions, then logic dictates that professionals who sell their firms’ services are, too. One is the buyer and one is the seller. Both buyer and seller use their technical knowledge to structure and negotiate the transaction. Why should the person on one side of the deal be considered to be practicing her profession and the other not? The general counsel doesn’t plead cases before a judge or write contracts and the in-house architect doesn’t design buildings any more than the professionals who sell do. But they do use the specialized knowledge in other ways.

To say that a professional is no longer practicing her profession, because she makes her contribution to the firm by selling, is not only inaccurate, it is harmful. It is pernicious, because the person who says that selling isn’t practicing a profession is attributing a professional inferiority to sellers and is most likely justifying his own sales ineffectiveness on the grounds of professional purity. He is saying, “I studied to be an architect and want to remain one, so, of course I can’t sell anything.” This form of elitism is not good for the speaker nor for the one who has supposedly given up his profession. Because I like a good rant from time to time and because I feel a passion about this subject, I want to say, :”Stop being such an ineffectual dweeb and be a real architect (or actuary, accountant, engineer …) and sell something.”

Maybe it’s just as well that the architect and I didn’t have that argument after all.

Back in June I promised to post ideas on finding the time for business development, and haven’t done so. Things slowed down for us this summer, so I wasn’t pressed for time, myself. The time subject just didn’t seem interesting.

Summer is over, and, for now at least, the economy chugs along at a good clip. Once again my clients are struggling to get their client work done, and, once again, putting business development calls and meetings at the rear of the train. Many professionals are afraid to do any marketing for fear that the client called might want to hire them, when they have too little time to do it.

They forget that calls made today are unlikely to turn up business today, and will preserve relationships that you will need when the economy turns (see The Lead Glut and It’s Consequences). So, now both you and I are ready to talk, once again, about making time for business development.

Logically, there are a limited number of ways to find time in an overloaded schedule. You can: 1) replace some other activity (sleep, comes to mind, though some of you readers might not find that suggestion funny), 2) increase your efficiency somewhere, and so, free up time for business development, or 3) you alter something else you are doing so that you derive business development value from it, too. We call this Two-for-One marketing. I will address Two-for-Ones today.

In the first group of professionals that I ever coached, Jim had the most difficulty finding time for business development calls and meetings. He had taken on a workload that would have broken someone else’s back. During one coaching session he said he would be unable to make any calls the following week. He would be meeting with clients in Boston all day on Monday, in Detroit on Tuesday, in Milwaukee on Wednesday and in Memphis on Thursday and Friday. He would be in meetings or at airports most of the day.

I have a rule that I shared with him of not letting a day pass without doing something, no matter how small, to further my efforts to develop business. Jim agreed to try this approach. On his return, he told of how at each client site, he had dropped by the office of a person he knew but was not scheduled to meet. He would stick his head into the contact’s office and say, “I’m here to meet with x and just wanted to say hello.” This led to a brief conversation without taking much extra time. In most cases he arrive a little early at the client’s offices and took ten minutes before the meeting started to look up the additional person.

By Wednesday Jim already had a pay-off. The extra person he visited in Milwaukee gave him a modest lead, which had the potential to convert into something big.

James McKinsey, the founder of McKinsey & Company, believed in Two-for-Ones. According to his biography, he encouraged all of the firm’s consultants to have lunches with prospective clients. The consultants would be having lunch anyway, so why not get some additional value from it?

Other Two-for-Ones that I have seen people use are:

• Talking with seatmates on airplanes
• Making calls on cell phones while commuting
• Going to a sporting or cultural outing that you would go to anyway and taking a client with you

Different consultants, seeing the same client situation through different disciplinary lenses, can come up with strikingly different guidance. Three of us, all of whom consult to professional firms, thought it might be interesting to see how our different orientations influence the advice we would give to a client about the same topic: Things you shouldn’t say or do at a competitive presentation of your services to a potential client.

We are: a) presentation coach Sims Wyeth who can show a wet blanket how to set itself on fire when on a podium, b) marketing consultant, Suzanne Lowe, author of Marketplace Masters: How Professional Firms Compete to Win, who can get a burlap bag full of cats, dogs and canaries humming the same tune, and c) me. Our firm helps professionals becomer rainmakers.

I decided to establish criteria by which submittals (all from me) for inclusion in my list of Five Biggest Presentation Don’ts could be rated. To do the rating I assembled a committee of fifteen totally objective judges carefully selected to ensure inclusion of representative members by gender, education level, geography, political leanings, age, race and ability to hold their liquor. After assuring myself that all fifteen could meet the last criterion, I asked them to rate 114 entries for the things you shouldn’t say in a presentation of your services to a prospective client. Each submission was rated on three criteria, which are:

a) Relevancy: Thou shall not talk about things of no interest or importance to the client.
b) Redundancy: Thou shall not say things said by your competitors.
c) Believability: Thou shall not tell any whoppers, or anything that sounds like one.

Ranked from weak to laughable, the committee chose the following five things not to say:

1. We are organized into seven practices (or studios). Only one judge rated this entry, the others falling immediately into a deep sleep upon its being read to them. The insomniac judge’s mark was for lacking relevancy. As he dozed off, too, he muttered, “The client doesn’t care. Tell her about the part of the organization relevant to her and skip the rest.”
2. We want to be your partner on this matter. Three judges revived enough to give this claim three marks on believability. As one judge said, “The last time I tried that one, the client said, ‘Really? How much money do you plan to put up?’ This is just an inflated way of saying you’ll give good service.”
3. You will be our most important client. “I bet you say that to all the girls,” said one judge in falsetto. The other judges tittered quietly at that comment, while the funny one added his mark to five others on the basis of believability. Said another, “Even if it’s true, what will happen to your other clients, if I hire you? If a client comes along who is even prettier than I am, what happens to us.”
4. We are the oldest and largest . . . This got ten marks. The first six for being totally irrelevant. Again a judge said “The client doesn’t care.” To which I said, “What if there are many fly-by-night competitors in this field and you want to show you’re different from them?” “Then tell them that,” snapped a judge. “Say, ‘In a field where a lot of companies come and go, we are committed to being long term providers, and the age and size of our firm prove it.’” One judge also gave a mark each for redundancy and believability, saying, “I once attended competitive presentations where two firms claimed to be oldest and largest. Because their definitions of what they were oldest and largest of differed, both were telling the truth. The selection committee members weren’t impressed.”
5. What makes us special is our people. Every member of our totally objective panel rolled on the floor at this one. One laughed so hard, he rolled under the conference table, and we had to listen to his sporadic te-he-he’s for the rest of the meeting. The other judges marked this one down by 38 points, giving it the lowest score in recorded history. (I know, there were only fifteen judges, but they had become drunk with their power by this time and insisted they had to have more than one mark each to give this one the rating it deserved.) Thirty of these marks are for redundancy. One judge exclaimed “Don’t ever say those words! Don’t ever say them, because everyone does at every presentation!” She began to mimic presenters, saying the overworked words again and again in different tones of voice with mock sincerity, causing a howl of laughter once again. “Your people’s specialness must be in a way that is important to the buyer or he doesn’t care,” explained one. The final mark is for believability. The oldest judge said, “It sounds like so many warm words to me. I don’t want warm words. I want meat.”

We all adjourned to the cafeteria for lunch.

If you would like to submit additional things that shouldn’t be said or done in a presentation, Suzanne, Sims and I would be glad to pass them on to our totally objective board of fifteen judges for rating. To see a marketing expert’s choices for presentation don’ts, go to Suzanne Lowe’s blog. To see a presentation coach’s choices, go to Sims Wyeth’s blog.

Rainmakers aren’t born, they are made. All of our research and experience shows that. And usually there is an event when someone suddenly gets it. They get an insight into selling that allows them to embrace it.

Some people have that experience early in their lives. Rainmaker and civil engineer, Steve Rush, got it one night as a ten-year old selling newspaper subscriptions door to door in Ohio. To win a contest, he had to get fifteen new customers to sign up and he was three short. For three hours he went house to house, but no one was interested. He was ready to quit, but his mother said, “Let’s try just one more.” The next three houses in a row signed up. Steve learned perseverance and the numbers game aspects of business development.

Most people get it later in their lives: Rainmaker and architect, Guy Geier, got it one day on the golf course with a client from a Japanese company. He had had little success at selling his firm’s services until that day. And he suddenly knew why. That day he realized that having the creative and technical skills and track record on similar projects weren’t enough to win. Those things might get you in front of a client or even short-listed for a project. But, in the end, prospective clients go with the firm they feel most comfortable with and that usually means they have a relationship with someone there. He realized he needed those relationships, himself, and could not delegate that part of the effort to a business developer.

A management consultant in her late thirties, whom I will call Naomi for no particular reason, was going through the motions of trying to sell without much success. Following a suggestion, she asked for a meeting with one of her clients, an executive with a Fortune 100 company based in a southern city. She began her meeting by saying, “I’m looking for some advice. I’m at the point in my career when I need to start selling business, and I want to do it the right way. You’ve seen a lot of professionals in your day, and, I’m sure, some of them have sold to you in ways you found appropriate and others didn’t. I want to know what I should be doing.”

The client reflected for a moment and said, “You should ask me more often. I know most of the leading business people in this city, and I would be happy to introduce you, now that I know it would help you. But I’m busy, so it would help if you reminded me from time to time.” And that’s when Naomi got it. Most clients aren’t offended by being asked for business, as long as it’s done appropriately. And many are glad to help, if they know you want the help. Networks are made up of people trying to help each other. But you have to ask.

Attorney Eric Bergner got it over a lunch he had arranged between two friends, one with a major cable TV company and the other a screen playwright peddling a script. Says Bergner, “The two hit it off immediately and it was obvious they would do business together and they were so appreciative. A lot has come back to me from that simple act, which I enjoyed doing. It changed my whole orientation about selling, from looking for things for me to looking for things for other people.”

A Canadian actuary made a call on a prospective client. During the meeting, the client mentioned that the agent at an insurance company, who had been assigned to her company, wasn’t returning phone calls. Knowing the company, the actuary offered to call in her behalf. The next day, when he, too, had not received a return call, he called the switchboard and learned that the man in question had quit. His voicemail had accidentally remained connected. The actuary spoke to the replacement, who promised to call the client. The actuary then called the client, himself, to explain what had happened. She said, “Gee, I mentioned the problem to the actuary we use, and he didn’t offer to help.” At that moment, the actuary got it.

Of course, some never get it. But, it’s a memorable moment when you do.

The words you say today can hurt you in the future.
 

Many professionals are so busy these days that they obsess about their workloads.  This is especially true of those who are just below partner level.  These people are the backbone of a professional firm.  They run many engagements and are responsible for quality control.  In a hot economy, they bill sixty to seventy hours a week, and often more.  They also have many non-billable responsibilities, such as interviewing job candidates, training recent hires, and representing their office, practice or studio on committees.  It’s no wonder they are obsessed with the workload.
 

One result of this condition is the devaluation of leads (see my posting May 7, 2007, “The Lead Glut and Its Consequences”). If they think about leads at all, professionals in these circumstances are likely to dread them, because they can’t handle additional work and dislike turning a client away.  When a client or other business contact asks how things are going, many of these people and many partners, too, are likely to respond with words like:
 

–I’ve never seen it so good in all my years in the profession.
–Our biggest need right now is for more people. 
–We’re running flat out. This is the best year we’ve ever had.
 And even:
 

–A little less work might even be a good thing.
 

I caught myself using this last sentence not long ago.
 

These statements are all true and also advertise the demand for your services, but they have a drawback:  They can discourage a contact from referring business your way.
 

If you have been in the professions for long, you know how quickly business conditions can change.  Within two or three months you can go from hardly being able to keep your head above water to standing high up on the beach with an ebb tide taking the water further and further away.  Because it takes time to convert a referral into lead and a lead into a new assignment, the claims you made two months ago that put off a referral can deprive you of a lead today, when you really need it.
 

That’s why, in good times and in bad, some savvy old professionals always say
 

–We’re always looking for more work, though . . .
 

These are words worth remembering.  True rainmakers are always looking for more work.
 

My firm is fourteen years old this month. This anniversary is an appropriate time to reflect on one of the people who helped me get it going. When I started, I had one client, a large technology consulting firm. To gather information needed for my work, I interviewed a number of their senior partners, and one of them was Charlie. At the end of the interview, he asked me what kind of work I did. I told him, and he asked if I could help with a problem which he described. I said I could, and he signed up for a project on the spot. My spirits soared, I so needed the work, only to crash two weeks later when I got a call to say that Charlie had quit, so the project was over. I had met the man once in my life for an hour, and he had never seen the results of my work and was in some kind of career turmoil. I wrote off the whole thing to bad luck and thought no more about it.

Three months later, I sat at my desk, sick with the realization that the two small projects I was working on were coming to an end, and, having no leads, I had little prospect of starting any new ones. Looking at my contact list, I knew that I had worked it too hard and couldn’t call these people again, because it might damage the relationship rather than generate leads. To not call anyone was to admit failure, so I asked myself who else was worth a try. Among the seven or eight names on this grasping-at-straws list was Charlie.

I tracked him down through his former secretary, called him and left him a message. I can still remember the message from him I found in my voice mail the next day. In it he said, “I’m so glad you called; I wanted to talk with you and didn’t know how to reach you.” That call resulted in the biggest client my little firm had for its first three years. That client was the difference between success and failure. And, I could so easily have never made that call!

I learned several important lessons from Charlie and this experience:

¨ It’s always better to be talking with someone out in the marketplace than with no one. If you are talking with someone, something good may happen, but if you talk to no one, you are almost assured of failure. It’s easy to come up with reasons why it isn’t worth calling someone—you can eliminate your entire contact list that way—but if you don’t call a person, you are unlikely to get his business. Call discipline is essential.

We’ve all done it.  We’ve gone to a networking event to rub elbows with prospective clients. When it comes time to sit down for the meal, we know we will be spending at least an hour with the people to our left and right at the table.  This is more time than we will spend with anyone else, and we want them to be worthwhile contacts, in other words, prospective clients.  But there are a lot of hangers on in attendance, all trying to get the coveted seats next to these same clients.  If we leave it to chance, there is a strong probability that instead of a prospective client we will be sitting with hangers on.
 

So, we go through an awkward dance.  We walk into the banquet room and up to a half-filled table.  We try to look as if we were passing by on our way to another table, a table where we belong, and just happened to stop here for a moment to reorient ourselves. When a tall woman approaches the table, we do-se-do left to get to a position where we can get a glance at each others’ nametags before committing ourselves to sitting together.  Her tag revealing that she isn’t a suitable partner, we allemande right around the table trying to find one. Round we go, shaking hands, looking for a partner.  Everyone smiles and nods, the nods designed to get a closer look at our tag.  We see a promising seat between two well-groomed men and circle a little faster to get it.  Before we can, a woman we recognize as being from one of the companies we have targeted, steps forward and takes it.  So, we sashay back to the left, round we go again.  In the end we take a chance and ask, “Is anyone sitting here?”  “No. Join us,” says the gray-haired man with a frozen grin.  Honoring our new partner with a slight bow, we take our seat.  He introduces himself, and we learn that he works for a competitor.  Too late.  Politeness dictates that we make the best of it.  It’s not an effective way to get a seat.  It’s certainly not dignified.  There must be a better way. And, yes rainmakers have found some.
 

Here is what three of them do:
 

The Instant Dignitary
 

My colleague, Gary Pines, is more effective at working a room  than anyone else I know.  At big events there is often a reserved table for dignitaries.  These include the top people in the organization and major speakers, people well worth knowing.  Gary says, “Often there are extra seats at these tables, either because someone didn’t show up or maybe it’s just a big table.”  So, Gary asks if there is an extra seat, because he would like to sit there.  He cautions, “About half the time I’m told no.”
 

The Happy Coincidence
 

A young strategy consultant told me this story about the biggest rainmaker in her firm, whom I will call Alan:  “There was a person Alan wanted to meet.  Somehow he learned that the guy always went to meetings of [a specific association].  So Alan signed up for the next meeting and asked me to come with him.  During the cocktail reception, he asked someone to point out the guy he wanted to meet. That’s how he learned what the man looked like. Then he led me over to a corridor that everyone would have to walk down to get to the banquet hall  He picked a spot and said, “Stand here and talk with me,” and I did, keeping up a one-sided conversation, while he watched people go by.  When the guy he wanted to meet passed, Alan turned and followed him to his table.  He asked if he could sit there, as if he had arrived there by coincidence.  They spent two hours together, and a few months later, the man became a client.”
 

The Small Favor
 

When one of the most prominent executive recruiters, one who has helped many corporate boards select new CEOs and presidents, is invited to a social, charity or cultural event, he calls his host and asks who else will be coming.   Then he asks his host a small favor, to seat him next to the specific person he most wants to spend time with.  I have this information from both a social friend who has recieved one of these calls and from a former colleague.  He always does this.  Always.

So I ask you, why take just any old seat, when a little effort would get you a good one.