Professionals sometimes ask me if it is best to send a prospective client an email before calling her, especially if it is someone you don’t know well. They are usually looking for affirmation. I respond with this story:

Many years ago, I was taught how to make cold-call appointments with senior executives by Bruce McNaughton, a brilliant rainmaker who could get a meeting with anyone. We were to send letters (no email in those days) to people we wanted to meet, and he would come in a week later to show us how to follow up with a call to the execs’ assistants. Something went wrong and the letters weren’t sent. When I told Bruce this, he asked for the phone number of the first person on the list of those who should have received a letter. He picked up the phone and called the man’s assistant. “My name is Bruce McNaughton,” he said. “Has Mr. Smith received the letter I sent?” Of course, the assistant said he hadn’t. “Well, never mind,” said Bruce. “It said this . . .” He proceeded to describe what we were looking for, was passed on to the Chief Financial Officer and got us a meeting. The letter hadn’t been necessary, but Bruce knew that sending one would make me more comfortable with calling.

So, yes. Send an email, if it makes calling easier for you, but realize that you are doing it as much for your own comfort as you are for the executive you send it to. And what if your emails don’t get sent, call anyway.

When my rainmaker-in-training clients talk about how hard it is to make time for business development, they often complain about the quantity of emails they get. Just throwing most of them away unopened takes time.

During one such discussion, a client named Steve posed the question: how many of the emails that we send out get tossed unopened, especially bulk, direct marketing mailings of whitepapers, newsletters and announcements. The answer: a lot. Just like us, busy clients faced with dozens of emails every day make blink-of-an-eye decisions about what to open and what not with a bias towards not. The busiest people, the c-suite executives we most want to remind of our services, don’t even make this decision themselves. A secretary is likely to trash anything that looks like a bulk mailing, before the boss even sees the notice of its arrival in her inbox.

As Steve noted in answering his own question, it’s important to see the problem from the client’s perspective. That isn’t too hard, because we all receive so much spam and bulk mail everyday. So, why do you open some of this mail and not others? Experience suggests that we are more likely to open emails when the subject line is personalized and provocative.

Our knowledge of many of the people we send emails to gives us an advantage over the spammers. We can often address the recipient by her first name in the subject line, something spammers try, but often lack the knowledge to do. If the recipient’s name is Katherine, and we know that she goes by Kay, rather than Kathy or Kate, we can differentiate our mailing from the spam by using her name in the subject line. As one executive secretary told me, “Everyone likes the sound of his own name.” Personalization also requires that Kay be the only person listed in the address column of your email In some cases we can further personalize the mailing by citing why the material in the mailing is relevant to a specific issue of importance to her. (“Kay, Relevant to Your Richmond Facility?”). If you can’t do that, you can at least make it provocative. (“Kay, Are New Trends in Exec Comp Causing Turnover?”)

I heard today that Steve has used this approach and found that his response rates have improved substantially

Too much success could lead you to using these techniques too often or to use them manipulatively. Two cautions.

1. Beware of deceptions. If you know a prospective client is called “Johnnie” by those who have known him for a long time and “John” by everyone else use the latter in your email. “Johnnie” would imply an intimacy that you don’t have, and a deception, no matter how small, is no way to attract the attention of someone you want to know.
   

Last week my contact management software reminded me to call Lois. She is the logical point of contact at a firm where I would like to do business. I have known Lois for five years and her boss for six. Over those years I have made 25 calls to one or the other of them, and exactly five have been returned. The last time I spoke with Lois, she informed me that they were working with a competitor. That was almost three years ago. Since then all efforts to contact Lois and her boss by phone have gone into a void. A few e-mails lobbed in for variety have also received no response.

What should I do? What would you do?

The answer, of course, depends on the reason my calls have gone unreturned. A little voice inside me says that Lois and her boss want nothing to do with me. But I have learned through many years of experience that it is the voice of my own insecurities. More probably, they find us too expensive and are uncomfortable saying so. Or they realize that my calls are not urgent and treat them as such. Or they are just busy. Still, three years is a long time. Whatever the reason, I have little enthusiasm for making the call. Another little voice inside me says that this is a waste of time, that nothing will ever come of calling these people. Once again, experience responds, cautioning me that one more call will cost me little, to which the first little voice says that a time comes to give up and refocus one’s energies elsewhere.

My deliberations were interrupted, and I put off deciding what to do.
This is a true story about a client I have been pursuing, except Lois’s name came up on my tickler file a couple of months ago, not last week. I did call and this time Lois called me back to invite me to pitch on some work. There was only one competitor and our chances of winning were good. Today she called to give us the go ahead.

I have many such stories after 30 years of business development. Over the years I have learned that an unreturned phone call means that someone did not return my call and little more. Others reinforce this belief. Christy Williams, a friend of mine, ran into a contact she had been trying to reach for months, leaving many messages. All her calls went unreturned. When she met the man at a conference, he greeted her enthusiastically saying that he had recently referred her to a prospective client. She thanked him and said, “Let’s stay in touch.” “What do you mean?” he responded, “We’ve been in touch.” He equated her unreturned phone calls with their being in touch.

A big part of rain making is persistence. Still, several times a week a name comes up on my tickler system of someone who has not responded to previous calls. And still, after all these years, the little voice inside me says to give up, that it is not worth the effort, that the person doesn’t like me and doesn’t want to talk with me. It is by learning to override that voice that I have become successful.

Actuaries and engineers aren’t known for their sales ability. They are seen as an introverted lot, more comfortable crunching numbers than with the kind of socializing that selling requires. Though there is limited truth to this stereotype, we have found that some actuaries and engineers quickly become effective business developers. This is true of some quite introverted and technical ones. Some outperform professionals one might expect to have greater interpersonal skill and so more of a sales bent, such as strategy consultants or executive recruiters. Some become rainmakers.

Professionals are smart people and run the risk of confusing understanding with mastery. Once they understand something, they want to move quickly to the next challenge. Though understanding may equal mastery in some areas, it’s not true of selling. Selling is a performing art, more like playing the piano. Understanding how a piano works is easy, but mastery requires practice. It requires going back to basics again and again. Engineering and actuarial sciences require a similar discipline. While there is room for creativity, rigorous attention to procedure is also essential if the actuary is to make sure that his numbers add up and the engineer that his bridge won’t fall down. They aren’t above doing routine and repetitive activities.

Selling requires meeting and a call discipline, which is also based on routine and repetitive effort. Some groups, which are perceived to be more dynamic than actuaries and engineers, are put off by such routines or feel compelled to vary and reinvent them. They require constant mental stimulation, if they are to remain engaged. Lacking that, they quickly abandoned their efforts. But the actuary and engineer keep at it, with a routine of calls and meetings, which eventually leads to a sale.

Let’s hear it for old fashioned hard work and those willing to do it to find a new client!