We have all had to deal with anti-sponsors, people in a client organization who don’t want you to get work at their companies.  Dealing with them tests a professional’s rainmaking prowess.

One rainmaker I know advises his people to “nuke’em,” by going to their bosses and pointing out that they are obstructing progress.  I have no doubt that this man does just that and does it successfully.  It’s not an approach for all professionals in all situations.

My colleague, Gary Pines, a proven rainmaker, took a different approach with an anti-sponsor, whom I will call Marie, who was blocking our chance to work at an old client.  For some reason, she took a dislike to Gary and Harding & Company.  We are not sure why, but perhaps it was because on our original assignment we were brought in by the Managing Partner of her firm, without Marie’s knowledge or approval.

Whatever the reason, she was trying every tactic she could to make sure we got no more work.  She said that the members of the committee she was working with didn’t want us, though we knew from moles on the committee that this wasn’t true.  She said that we were more suited for a small piece of work, awarding the larger share to a competitor.  Even when the competitor failed to produce results, she continued to resist hiring us.  She threw up barrier after barrier.

Gary, a cheerful, likeable, gentlemanly person, might have been able to nuke this anti-sponsor, because of his relationship with the Managing Partner and several key committee members assigned to selecting consultants.  Instead, he chose to win her over.  Over the next eight months he wore away her resistance.

He remained irrepressibly sunny and helpful to her.  He included her in most of his communications with the firm, demonstrating that he wasn’t trying to go around her.  He was helpful above and beyond what was required, in spite of her sour responses.  During one meeting with her at which she was raising objection after objection, he leveled with her, saying, “Marie, somewhere along the way we got off on the wrong foot with each other.  I don’t know why or how and I don’t care.  From today, as far as I’m concerned, we’re starting fresh.  I want to work with you, I want to help you and I want you to be a success.”

She absorbed the message without comment, but from then on things began to change.  In communications with others at the firm, Gary made a point of mentioning Marie positively, if she provided him even the remotest excuse for doing so.  He stayed in touch with her and continued to be positive, polite and helpful.  And he wore her down.  Today, she is a strong sponsor for Gary and our firm.

Turning around an anti-sponsor is one of the toughest challenges a professional can face.  It takes emotional intelligence and maturity to resist taking personal affront at someone like Marie and to do what Gary did.  It also takes a lot of hard work.  But the return on the effort can be huge.

Rain making requires building a referral network by maintaining contact with people over the years.  That’s how most rainmakers sell accounting, actuarial, architectural, engineering, legal, consulting and other professional services.  Much of this work is done by phone, because phone calls cost less in time and money than do face-to-face meetings and because they allow conversation to flow to productive subjects in a way that email doesn’t.

But, something there is that does not love a call . . . namely me.  Left to my inclinations, I would use the phone only in emergencies and for ordering pizza.  I am, in fact, an expert at avoiding making phone calls.

Here are some things you can do to avoid even the most essential calls:

• Tell yourself that the probability of anything good coming out of the call rounds to zero and give up immediately.  The statement of probability is true, which is why the tactic works so well.  Of course, if you make enough calls to enough people, the cumulative probability of something good happening gets quite high, but let’s not think about that.
• Take a quick look at your email in-box before calling.  This highly recommended tactic almost always works, because you immediately surrender control of your day to responding to urgent, if not always important, matters.  By the time you are done, you must move on to something else and can put off calling until tomorrow, when you can repeat the process.
• Tell yourself that your calls will be unwelcome and you will become a pest.  Years of personal experience and experience with hundreds of professionals show me that this statement is untrue, as long as you handle yourself properly, focusing on the other person’s needs rather than pushing a sale. Still, imaging myself being rejected for being pesky feeds my personal insecurities so effectively that it stops all effort cold.
• Treat calling as if it is something you must squeeze in on top of everything else you must do.  That way it is the first thing that gets squeezed out.  For this to work you must never acknowledge that calling is equally or even more important to the firm and to yourself than the other things you are responsible for.
• Repeat to yourself over and over that bringing in business isn’t really your responsibility or, at least, shouldn’t be.  Of course, this can be career limiting, but a dedicated call avoider won’t let that stop him.

There are other trivial techniques for avoiding the phone—sharpening a pencil, going to the bathroom, getting coffee; I have tried them all—but the five I have listed are the best for busy professionals.  Just recognize that when time comes around for promotions (or layoffs, for that matter) and your business development contribution is reviewed, these excuses won’t help you.

Slippage refers to the difference in price for a stock between what the investors estimates he will pay and what he actually does pay, due to changes in price that occur during the process of buying. Efficient buying reduces slippage.  It is a concept that applies to selling professional services, too.

There are times when a client or prospective client or network contact is more than usually predisposed to help you.  This can be, for example:

• When you have just finished an excellent piece of work for the client.
• When the prospective client becomes excited about your potential to help him.
• When you have just had a conversation at a conference with a network contact that shows the potential you have for helping each other.

The value of such opportunities fades as time passes.  The client’s desire to help you in return for the excellent work you did ebbs as she gets absorbed by other urgent matters.  The prospective client loses some of the enthusiasm generated at your meeting.  The network contact also forgets the conversation you had as the days go by.

This is one of the reasons that rainmakers feel a sense of urgency about following up.  No matter how busy they are, they find time to follow up on such opportunities, recognizing that all their hard work to produce them loses value as time slips by.

I don’t want to overwork this metaphor.  Following up too eagerly can be construed as desperation or as being mercenary.   But, in my experience, among professionals far more is lost from slippage than from pushing too fast and too hard.  And, of course, I am not suggesting that you give up on an opportunity if a week or three has slipped by before you act.  Better late than never.

Still, as a New Year’s resolution, you could do worse than committing to reduce rainmaking slippage by following up on opportunities while the glow you have created burns brightest.

Jenny, a young professional at a big firm, had spent four years in a specific practice area.  Because of her smarts and interpersonal skills, she was seen as having high potential for rapid advancement.  This assessment was confirmed when a senior executive at a client where she was working invited her into his office to talk about another issue he was facing.

Jenny quickly realized that the issue was outside of her area of specialty, though well within her firm’s capabilities.   After a ten minute conversation, she offered to identify the right person at the firm to help with the matter, but by the time she had done so and could get back on the executive’s schedule, he had found someone else to work with.

It is doubtful that the executive expected Jenny to have a ready-made solution to his problem; he knew what she specialized in.  He was, more-likely, looking for someone who understood his organization, could understand his problem, participate with him as a thought partner about it and marshal the right resources to help him.  If that was the case, Jenny didn’t demonstrate the confidence and technique to serve as this kind of trusted adviser.  She lost the opportunity to advance her relationship with the client and to provide him greater value by cross selling a number of her firm’s services.

This is a limitation of many narrow specialists, including many who are older and more experienced than Jenny.  They don’t know what to say and do when presented with a problem outside of their specialty, other than to off-load it to someone else as quickly as possible.

So, what are people in this position to do?  They need two things, the right mindset and good questioning technique.  I will address the first of these here and the second in a later post.

The mindsets of trusted advisers and specialist differ on several dimensions, including:

Goals:

• Specialist:  To prove my knowledge of the special characteristics and implications of the client’s problem.
• Trusted Adviser:  To help the client articulate his concern and its implications and bring him the resources that can help him solve it.

Role:

• Specialist:  Solver of the client’s problem.
• Trusted Adviser:  Thought partner, representative of the client’s interests and needs within your firm and with others who will assist in providing a solution, the one who marshals the right resources.

Method:

• Specialist:  Ask questions that, by their nature, reveal command of the specialty and allow scoping of the assignment in detail.
• Trusted Adviser:  Ask questions that help the client explain and develop his own thinking on the matter at hand by helping him amplify his own beliefs and judiciously challenging them.  When appropriate, empathize with the client showing a shared understanding of the stresses, costs and opportunities that he faces.

Resources:

• Specialist: Largely from within own practice
• Trusted Adviser: From wherever needed; inside the firm, inside the client organization or elsewhere

Duration:

• Specialist:  Often one, and seldom more than two or three conversations, prior to submitting a proposal.
• Trusted Adviser:  Often several conversations, in order to ensure that the right problem is being solved and the right resources applied.

Once you have the right mindset, you are ready to learn technique.

(For over 15 years Harding & Company has helped hundreds of professionals make the transition from doing and managing client worked selling it.  Among our duties is helping the people we work with recognize it when they are avoiding the hard work on developing relationships and generating leads.  This is the third of a series of posts on the most popular avoidance tactics.)

Many people feel awkward about calling former clients and other business contacts.  They imagine getting a negative response, and this imaginary image becomes so strong that they accept it as if we were real.  These people say things, like “ he’ll think I am just calling to sell them something” or “ she’ll be annoyed with me.”  These people fall into the trap of believing that they can read other people’s minds.

If you find that you say such things to yourself and that it deters you are making calls, remember the following:

1. People generally accept without question your stated reason for calling them.  Even if they suspect that you may be calling to sell them something in your first call, they will quickly learn that that is not your primary motivation, if you focus on providing value to them in each conversation.  This value can include recognizing them as people and friends, providing some information that might help them, offering an introduction, and the like.  The more you call people and provide such help, the less they are likely to ascribe to you a mercenary motivation.
2. Even if they do suspect that a hope for new business is one motivation for your call, few will be offended.  After all, most are in business, themselves, and in business everyone must live by selling something.

(For over 15 years Harding & Company has helped hundreds of professionals make the transition from doing and managing client worked selling it.  Among our duties is helping the people we work with recognize it when they are avoiding the hard work on developing relationships and generating leads.  This is the second of a series of posts on the most popular avoidance tactics.)

Some people avoid the hard work of business development by convincing themselves that their efforts will produce no results.  That being the case, there is no point in trying.  The most common version of this tactic is expressed in words: “I don’t know the right people, so calling or meeting with them won’t turn up any new business.”

This statement must stand up to two questions:

1. Is it true? In my experience it is seldom totally true.  Such universal statements seldom are.  Most of us know more people than we realize.  Also, people’s circumstances change over time.  Someone who was not in a position to hire you in the past, may be able to today.  Phil, a consultant, called a former client whom he thought would never amount to much.  Since they had last talked she had moved to another company.  It proved a better match for her, and her career took off.  She hired him for a small project almost immediately after his call.  I have many examples like this, including one critical to the early success of my own firm, which I have related in an earlier post.
2. If it is true, so what? That you don’t know the right people will seldom relieve you of the responsibility for bringing in business to advance your career.  So, if you don’t know the right people, you must ask yourself how you can meet them.  There are many ways, including meeting more people during your client work, attending professional association meetings, conducting research that will require you to interview those whom you would like to add to your network, cold calling, to name but a few.

Remember, even if your base of contacts is not as strong as you would like, it is always better to be talking to someone in the marketplace than to be talking to no one.  If you are talking to someone, something good might happen.  If you are not talking to anybody, the probability of success is infinitesimal.

(This is one of a number of posts on The Perfect CRM being published today.  Links to the other posts can be found at the end of this one.)

I am not a technology expert by any stretch, but it doesn’t take an expert to be shocked at the frequency with which professionals complain of their firms’ CRM systems as burdens, rather than touting them as assets.  I have worked with thousands of professionals at well over 100 firms and do not recall one instance of a general rave for a firm’s systems.  I can’t recall one endorsement of a firm’s system by a user.  But unsolicited complaints are loud and constant.  This is true of professionals who lack technological sophistication, but also true of technology consultants who are in a position to assess a CRM system both as technologists and as users.

Some of these complaints result from conflicting goals of firm management and those of the individuals professionals who use the systems daily.  For management, the information captured in the CRM system represents a major asset that must be carefully protected.  Though the individual professionals may share this view, for them it must be a real-time, flexible tool for their business development efforts.

Also, problems can arise when a system designed for dedicated sales forces is applied to the professions.  The management of the sales force of a product company differs from that of a professional firm.  In a product company sales people report to sales managers who report to the head of sales.  In a professional firm, the most productive sellers are senior partners who don’t necessarily view themselves as reporting to anyone, and certainly not to a sales manager.  Staff marketing, business development and IT personnel are often, albeit wrongly, seen as second-class citizens.  These factors complicate implementation a CRM system and enforcement of its use.

Here are some of the more common complaints that a perfect system must address:

• Barriers to changing data:  A professional must be able to add, delete and change information about a contact rapidly and easily.   Systems requiring that all changes flow through a central point to control quality, create an impossible barrier to effective use.   The better systems allow professionals to change data at will for contacts assigned to them.
• Inability to blind sensitive information: A professional needs to be able to post sensitive information on the database without fear that it will be seen by other users.  When a client provides the professional with a home phone number or other confidential information, the professional needs to be able to store that information on the database where it is accessible to him with confidence that it will not be as accessible to all.
• Learning barriers:  If the system isn’t easy to learn, busy professionals won’t bother with it.  With a half-hour of instruction, a professional should be able to get basic functionality from the system.
• Clumsy data manipulation: The user should be able to sort by any major field; such as by last name, company, location, area code or zip code; and that sort should bring up just the relevant contacts.  It should not result in a list of all contacts listed alphabetically by field, requiring busy professionals to scan through many lines of data to find what they want.
• Difficult data management: Accessing the database; making changes to it; adding notes; scheduling follow-up calls, meetings and reminders; associating related documents such as proposals; and similar activities must be easy to do with a minimum of formal training.  Professionals are busy people focused primarily on serving their clients, not on tinkering with a CRM system.  Time spent wrestling with the system is time away from clients and selling.
• Adjudicating primary contact responsibilities:  Many professionals feel proprietary about their contacts.  They resent others in the firm calling or meeting with their contacts without their consent.  Sometimes they resist sharing a contact, even though they haven’t done anything to maintain a relationship, themselves.  A good system will remind a professional that he has not made contact with a specific client in, say, nine months.  It will then remind both the professional and firm management, if he has not made contact with that client for a year.  The timing of the reminders should be modifiable, depending on specific circumstances.  This allows management to reassign contact responsibility, when the current relationship manager has been inattentive.

Perfection may not be possible.  But CRM systems could be better adapted for the needs of professionals than they are.

Post Epilogue

The Perfect CRM is a series of essays by industry experts on the topic of client relationship management tools. Each expert will draw upon years of experience to outline their vision of the perfect CRM system. This exercise will provide you with new insights into what works, what doesn’t work, and what you should consider when implementing a CRM system.

The experts include:

• Tim Klabunde, Author of the CRM Chapter in the Marketing Handbook for the Design and Construction Professional
• Bernie Siben, Author of A Horse of a Different Color: Marketing in the Public Sector
• Bobby Darnell, Former Director of National Accounts at Reed Construction Data
• Mel Lester, Owner of the Business Edge
• Matt Handal, Contributing Editor of SMPS Marketer

Visit these sites by clicking on the names to read each expert’s take on the perfect CRM.

(For over 15 years Harding & Company has helped hundreds of professionals make the transition from doing and managing client worked selling it.  Among our duties is helping the people we work with recognize it when they are avoiding the hard work on developing relationships and generating leads.  This is the first of a series of posts on the most popular avoidance tactics.)

Time shortage is a real problem.  It becomes an avoidance tactic when you book yourself so full of other activities that there is no time left make calls and having meetings.  People who use this tactic never say no to additional client work or to requests for help on internal projects.  They protest that it is impossible to say no and impossible for them to delegate any of their work to subordinates.  Yet, others we work within the same firms do both.

If you think you may be falling into this trap, remember that if, five years from today, you are doing exactly the same type and mix of work you are doing today, your career is stalled.  Selectively, you must say no and in the overwhelming majority of firms you can, if you can legitimately claim that saying yes will reduce your business development efforts.  For that claim to be accepted as legitimate, you must demonstrate call and meeting discipline.

If you never delegate, you’re holding both yourself and your subordinates back.  No matter how you feel about it, eventually firm management and your subordinates will recognize this fact, placing you at a vice.

At some future time, when promotion or retaining your job depends on your success at business development, your arguments that you did not have time for it will not help you.

In an excellent recent post, Jeffery James writes of the mistakes experts make when teaming with a salesperson to sell a complex technical product.  They are all too true; so true that they make me cringe.  I could cite a few more.

In fairness, though, there are also mistakes that clueless salespeople make when teaming with a management consultant, accountant, engineer or other professional to sell a professional service.  These include:

• Believing that a good salesperson can sell anything and trying to sell a complex service as if it were a widget.  Some salespeople are good at selling professional services and some aren’t, however good they are at selling something else.
• Not respecting the expert’s expertise.  I have seen more than one salesperson try to structure a service without the expert or ignoring the expert’s advice.  This most often happens when the salesperson tries to negotiate a reduction in scope for a client that wants a price decrease without the expert’s input.  They may make the sale, but the results are seldom pretty.
• Not recognizing when it is inappropriate to sell.  Professionals are in an advisory role and there are times when it just isn’t appropriate to try to sell something.  A consultant whose firm was acquired by a technology company arranged a meeting with the skeptical CIO at one of his clients to explain how the change in ownership would improve his firm’s service.  Not recognizing that this was an educational meeting and probably never having met with a C-Suite executive before, the salesperson tried to sell the CIO something.  The CIO felt tricked into a sales meeting which was not what he had agreed to or expected.  I could cite several analogous cases.  This kind of behavior can cost the firm a client.
• Not respecting the expert’s relationship with the client.  The expert has a qualitatively different relationship with the client than most business developers will ever have.  Not necessarily better, but different, because it is based on the client’s respect for the professional’s knowledge and advice.  Some salespeople act as if the relationship between the professional and the client didn’t exist, even though the client and professional have known each other for years.  I have known cases where the client told the professional that he didn’t want to see the salesperson again.
• Not keeping the expert informed.  Business developers will sometimes run with an opportunity without keeping the expert informed, even when the expert is working at the client and turned up the lead.

Of course, many business developers don’t make these mistakes.  To avoid these problems with those who might, a professional firm should:

• Hire the right kind of salesperson:  Those who would sell professional services have to be smart, curious and eager to learn about the nuances of the service in question, and respectful of the professional’s expertise.  They should also be tactful on-the-job sales trainers.  When possible recruit some of your business developers from your professional team, using a few years in full-time sales positions, as a part of their career development.
• Set ground rules for every meeting.  Make clear what the client’s expectations are for any meeting and what behaviors are appropriate and what are not.
• Set ground rules for every pursuit.  The same can be said for every opportunity pursued.
• Assign primary and secondary relationship responsibilities for key members of a client organization.  Both business developers and firm professional staff members should have such responsibilities.

When a sales-savvy professional is teamed with a professions-savvy salesperson, they can work wonders.  It’s a combination worth striving for.

One of the best rainmakers I have met in recent years called me the other day, because clients had stopped hiring him.  Naturally, he found this disturbing.   Who wouldn’t?  He wanted to talk about the cause and what to do about it.

Demand had dropped because of events in his primary market with which he had had nothing to do and which were beyond his control.  Until recently, his practice had been growing at over 20 percent per year for several years.  His efforts in new markets weren’t producing sufficient results yet to stop the dive.  For the first time in his career, he found himself unable to land sufficient new clients.

It is a credit to his awesome rainmaking abilities that this hadn’t happened earlier in his life.   I know from personal experiences and those of many professionals whom I have worked with that the first time this happens, it can bludgeon a person’s self confidence.  This is especially so, if one is emotionally insecure, as many rainmakers are.

If this happens to you, I suggest the following:

• Remind yourself that everyone has streaks and slumps.  This is partially a matter of luck.  If you flip a coin enough times, it will eventually come up tails ten times in a row.  That it does is a function of probabilities and luck rather than of your flipping skill.  You probably haven’t lost your touch; your luck has just turned.  Of course, this also means you weren’t quite as good as you thought you were when the luck was running your way and you had a streak of wins.  That humbling bit of logic is good to keep in mind when you are winning a lot.
• The probabilities of a certain run of wins or loses changes over time with market conditions and other factors.  Just as a field-goal kicker will score less often in a season with lots of gusty crosswinds, so you will win less often when the business crosswinds work against you.
• The probabilities of winning go down, if you have to enter a new or under-developed market, and go down substantially.  This if for factors I have described elsewhere (See my book, Creating Rainmakers, Chapter 2, “What Rainmakers Know or the Mathematics of Selling”).
• Of course, you should review what you have been doing that might have reduced your rainmaking effectiveness.  There is always something that we can do better.  There are always areas where we have become a bit lax with success.  Fix these problems.
• Refocus on the markets where you can get the most traction fast and have at them.

This all leads to my main point:  Beating yourself up over a slump won’t help you.  First, for the reasons I have described, it is probably inappropriate for you to do so.  Slumps occur for even the best rainmakers, and the rainmakers’ errors are usually a relatively small part of the cause.  So, question what you have been doing, but don’t question yourself.  Wallowing in self recriminations or the (false) realization that you have been a fraud, not a rainmaker, all these years, is counterproductive.

If my friend, the rainmaker, was guilty of anything, it was of not diversifying his market rapidly enough.  He had made sincere efforts to do so, but those efforts had been stalled due to the high demand in his core market which consumed his energies and time.  If that is a mistake, it is an honest and understandable one.  Indeed, it is one that most of us would make.  All this doesn’t resolve one’s revenue shortfall, but it does put one in a better mind-frame for doing something about it.