(As in prior years, I am  only posting once a week in July and August.)

Harding & Company services are built using information gleaned from interviewing rainmakers and those who have observed them.  The database now includes information on over 300 rainmakers in management consulting, accounting, executive search, architecture, engineering, law and other professional services.  These interviews run for at least an hour and often longer.  We add to the database as we gain information on additional rainmakers or more information on those already in it.  It has been a major source of differentiation for our firm.  We know what rainmakers do.

So, it was fun to learn from Enforce: The Insurance Policy Enforcement Journal (Volume 7, Issue 1, published semi-annually by Anderson Kill Wood & Bender, LLP) that lawyer Eugene Anderson, one of the first rainmakers I interviewed long ago, built his practice on a database foundation.  As described in Enforce:

. . . an enthusiasm that kept him working 12 hours a day, seven days per week drove Mr. Anderson to delve deeper into insurance industry “lore” than anyone had before—that is, to unearth and contrast what insurance industry executives had told regulators and policy holders about policy language while getting it approved and selling policies, with what they told courts when denying coverage years later.  He pioneered building databases of such information—before personal computers were ubiquitous.

Armed with his “can,” Mr. Anderson kept winning business, to the point where he was billing $35 million per year.

Databases as differentiators is an old concept.  Shortly after World War I, Felix Fantus (yes, his real name) selected a site for a new office furniture  factory.  Firm lore has it that his wife, a former geography student, helped him by recording information on towns they considered on index cards.  That database became the foundation of The Fantus Factory Locating Service, one of the earliest management consulting firms, which later became The Fantus Company (now a part of Deloitte), where I began my consulting career.

But it is worth reminding ourselves of databases’ strategic value from time to time, so that we recognize the opportunity to create one, when we come across it.  Opportunities to create them arise in all of the professions.  Two weeks ago, an architect brought me a new business idea that lent itself to the creation of a database, and I was reminded of how two other architects had built successful practices off of databases.

Of course, competitors can create databases of their own, but it will take time and money to do so.  There is usually a first mover’s advantage, and, at the very least, a head start of one to three years.  Databases are one of the best differentiators when selling professional services.

Professionals learning to develop business often struggle with finding a reason for calling clients and other important network contacts, when there is no urgent matter to discuss.  You can have frequent conversations with a network contact, as long as the net value of the sum of those conversations is sufficiently high to meet her hurdle rate. If it doesn’t, she won’t return your calls or will find other means to use her time more productively.  The hurdle rate varies from contact to contact and tends to be higher with the more desirable contacts, such as senior executives.

Note that most contacts will not mind the occasional low-value conversation, as long as the net value of the sum of all exchanges with you is high.  This logic presses us to find ways to provide the needed value.  With some contacts the personal relationship is strong enough that interest in each other provides sufficient value.  For the rest, we must constantly be looking for information and ideas that our contacts would find valuable.  That can be a challenge.

Joe Flom of the law firm, Skadden, is one of the world’s greatest rainmakers of the past half century. I find it revealing that he used to hit upon a conversation topic that he would use with his business contacts for a while, and then come up with another.  His colleagues used to refer to these topics as his flavor of the month.  Over the years I have seen other rainmakers do the same, though they seldom have a name for it.

Not having had the opportunity to observe Flom over time I can’t describe the characteristics of his flavors of the month.  From broader experience, I think a flavor must:

• Be a valuable insight or piece of information tied at least peripherally to your business
• Be topical enough that it is easy to bring into conversation
• Lead easily to a question that gets the other person talking

Recognizing a promising flavor is a knack worth developing.  They come to you more frequently than you might imagine, if you are looking for them.  To build the habit, from time to time ask yourself the following questions:

• Is there a contrarian story to a current trend?
• Do you have an example of an interesting solution to a common problem?
• Do you know how a leader in a field does something that others struggle with?
• Is there an impending change in technology, regulation, competitive environment of other area your contacts need to be advised of?

I was reminded of this subject recently when I found myself discussing flavors of the month with several contacts over two weeks.  The subject of flavors of the month had become my flavor of the month.

Do you know how your clients spend their time?  You should.  That information can help you in numerous ways.  First, it will reveal their priorities, and to a large degree, their priorities are yours, too.  You want to work on things that are most important to them.  And knowing how the client spends her time will sometimes reveal opportunities to cross sell other services your firm offers.  A lawyer I know, who was trying to schedule a meeting with a client, learned as a byproduct that the client was planning a trip to Boston.  “What takes you to Boston?” asked the lawyer.  “We’re thinking of acquiring a firm up there,” responded the client.  The Boston office of the lawyer’s firm ended up doing the legal work associated with the purchase.  If the lawyer hadn’t been curious about how the client was spending this time, this never would have happened.

Knowing how a client spend her time can also tell you when your priorities are out of sync with hers.  A management consultant I once worked with couldn’t understand why a client delayed authorizing a project that would save his company over $40 million.  When he finally asked the client what was holding things up, the client replied that he was currently working on two projects that would each save over $100 million.  He would get to the consultant’s project once those efforts were completed and he had more time.  With this knowledge, the consultant was able to shift his own priorities away from making an immediate sale.

The way a client spends her time has implications for how she interacts with us.  A client who spends ten percent of her time meeting with service providers to keep abreast of what is going on in the marketplace will respond differently to your calls and requests for meetings from one who rarely does so.  One who spends all his time in internal meetings will want to interact with you quite differently from one who prepares legal documents, crunches numbers, writes reports or creates drawings under deadlines.

Knowing how a client spends leisure time can also be helpful.  An accountant learned that an executive he wanted to do business with teed up at the golf course at the same time every Saturday morning with three friends.  The accountant, a member of the same golf club, took to hanging around the first tee at the right hour on Saturdays.  Sure enough, one Saturday one of the foursome failed to show, and the executive and his friends invited the accountant to join them.  The executive ultimately became a client.

So how do your clients spend their time?  If you don’t know, you had better find out.

Of we have sent your clients introductory letters and emails to get meetings.  We have reminded the clients that you will see them in meeting confirmation letters and e-mails.  Once you have held meeting, someone must send a follow-up letter.  An earlier post described how to prepare follow-up e-mails and letters. Who on your team should send them?

After a team from a professional firm has a sales meeting with a client, someone often asks who should send follow-up e-mails to whom.  Sometimes that follow-up note is the last communication you have with a member of the client team before the company decides whom to hire.  You want that last communication to be powerful.

Of course, every member of the team can send a note to every person on the client team.  But that isn’t always best.  If the teams are large, the client may feel overwhelmed.  Key members of the client team may also pay more attention to one well drafted follow-up note than to a flurry of paper which will inevitably included many redundancies.

There is no answer to that is right for every occasion, but here are some things to consider when assigning follow-up responsibilities:

• Identify relationships you want to build.  Usually, you want the senior person on the client team to feel close to the client partner or other senior person your team.  So, too, with technical experts from both organizations.  If there is an engagement manager on your team, you want the client’s engagement manager to feel that this is someone he wants to work with.  In short, the members of your team should each, at the very least, send a follow-up note their counterparts in the client organization.

• Respond to concerns and questions with authority.  If a member of the client team has expressed concern or raised a question, she should get a response from the person on your team most suited to address that concern.  If it is a technical question, your technical person should follow-up.  If it is a question about the commitment of the firm, the senior person on your team should follow-up.

• Maintain and reinforce personal relationships.  Anyone on your team who has a business or personal relationship that predates the meeting with a member of the client team should send a personal note to that person afterwards.

• Don’t leave anyone out.  Every member of the client team should get a follow-up note from at least one person on yours.

Don’t let a competitor have the last word.  Send those follow-up letters and emails.

Wouldn’t it be nice if I could work on only the most interesting assignments in my profession!
Wouldn’t it be nice if I could do the work at a fat profit!
Wouldn’t it be nice if these assignments were delivered to me without my having to exert any effort!
Wouldn’t it be nice if they were delivered in a steady flow without any work overloads or gaps!
Wouldn’t it be nice if they were given to me in preference to my firm’s most prestigious competitors!
Wouldn’t it be nice if someone in the firm delivered them to me without expecting anything from me other than high quality execution!
Wouldn’t it be nice if I could spend my career that way, steadily advancing in both rank and compensation!
Wouldn’t it be nice if people recognized that delivering the work is what I am good at and didn’t expect me to learn how to sell, which I don’t like and am not good at!
Wouldn’t it be nice if . . .

. . . but I can’t and they aren’t and they don’t and . . . so I work hard at developing business and help win interesting work for myself and others in the firm and, over time, I have learned to like what I must do and take great pride in it.

Professionals often see identifying a target set of clients as a first step to developing business.  It becomes a time consuming analytical process in the quest of increasing the efficiency of their rain making.

I’m not against targeting or increasing efficiency.  I am in favor of a sense of urgency about bringing in business, which dictates that you get out into the market now.  (See the posts Rain Making = Doing and Bah to Brochures for more on this subject.)  The need to find business is too urgent to go on hold while you do weeks or months of market analysis.  Targeting often serves to delay activity, when it needn’t.

You can start calling and meeting with people now, before you develop a target list and do it without much loss of efficiency.  You can do it by lumping, instead of targeting.   That means you take a few moments, or even up to half an hour, to identify those organizations and people who obviously belong in your target market and start with them, now.  You can continue your analyses of less obvious candidates as an ongoing task.  But you don’t need more than a lump of good targets to start making calls and having meetings.

The head of a small regional office of a larger firm did this with his leadership team.  He reported, ”We switched our thinking.  We used to try to figure out who would be best to do business with and then spend a lot of time trying to find a way in.  Now we look for who we have an entre with that we would obviously want to do business with and go after them.  It’s transformed our business development efforts.  We are doing much better.”

Sounds pretty efficient to me.

In an earlier post (Seeing Events Through a Rainmaker’s Eyes, Part 1) I described how rainmakers tend to see things differently from the rest of us. In that post I provided examples of two things that we might see as negative that a rainmaker is likely to see more positively. They also tend to see as positive things that we hardly note at all. Here are three examples of that:

-
An extra person from a client organization turns up for a meeting about our work.

• How we might see it: A need for an extra set of the documents we provided
• How rainmakers see it: Another person in the client organization for me to know and a potential future client, herself

A client calls, asking for a small amount of additional information.

• How we might see it: A need to provide a small additional service within the scope of our work or another to-do list item
• How rainmakers see it: A possible reason to go see the client and for a conversation that can cover other things I want to hear about, too

A break is called at a meeting attended by many members of the client organization.

• How we might see it: A chance to check email and voicemail
• How rainmakers see it: A chance to meet and advance relationships

As before, it is not that the rainmakers are right and the rest of us are wrong. All of the interpretations listed are reasonable. But rainmakers see opportunities for small advances in developing relationships that may lead to more business. By taking advantage of many such small opportunities, they sometimes get an assignment. We can, too. If we work at it, we can teach ourselves to see these opportunities, too.

For most of our clients, business is hard to come by these days.  When coaching in this environment, we first look for the quickest and easiest sources of new business.  To this end, we ask a series of simple questions:

•    Where did your last five assignments come from?  Your last ten?
•    Where did your first new client from?
•    What worked before that you haven’t done for a long time?
•    What worked once that you have never tried again?

We have learned to ask this last question through years of experience.  When I first started coaching, I was surprised when I learned of a tactic that worked well once and had never been tried since.  Not any more.  It has happened too often, and I have even caught myself letting a good tactic get forgotten this way.

People get busy.  They get distracted by other things in their lives.  A tactic which can’t be repeated immediately for some practical reason gets replaced by others.

Well, it’s time to dust off those old tactics.

One consultant I know put together what he calls a road show, a short educational session on his specialty, and took it on a trip to large clients located off the beaten path.  Underserved by others, they welcomed the attention.  Ten visits resulted in three new clients (though not immediately).  That was three years ago, and, until now, he has been too busy to repeat the effort.

Guess what.  He’s on the road again.

(This post is another in our series of Rainmaking Problems. We invite your comments on this problem and would also welcome any problems you would like to submit to get comments from other readers.)

Over the past twenty years a handful of companies have prospered by running what I call lead junkets. A class of corporate manager; human resources managers, facilities managers, financial managers or some other group; are invited on an expenses-paid trip to a resort or on a cruise ship for an event with some educational content. In return they agree to participate in a set number of short meetings with people who would like to sell to them. The sellers pay a fee to attend and also get a set number of meetings with the buyers with additional opportunities to rub elbows with all attending buyers at receptions, meals and the like.

These can be pricey events, costing a seller over $10,000 plus travel expenses.  In return they are promised twenty uninterrupted minutes to pitch their wares to each of the twelve buyers. Though some sorting and matching of buyers and sellers may be done by the organizers, the sellers do not get to pick whom they meet with. Also the organizers restrict attendance by sellers who compete with each other.

The appeal of the lead junket is having prospective clients delivered to you with little effort on your part. It all seems so painless, compared to cold calling, attending association meetings, giving speeches and all of the harder ways to generate leads.

I acknowledge that I have never attended a lead junket and my skeptical view of them is reflected in the term I use to describe them. In my experience, those who want their firms to send them on these jaunts are usually those most uncomfortable with other kinds of lead generation. They are looking for fixes with a minimal feeling of rejection.

I get asked about lead junkets four or five times a year.
My question is, when, if ever, are lead junkets worth the cost? In your response, please note whether or not you have ever attended one. If you have had good or bad outcomes, I would like to hear them.  Please do not name the operator of the event in your comment.  Also, if you work for or are an investor in a firm running this kind of event, please state that in your response.

(Two earlier posts, Networking Up, Part 1 and Part 2, described how rainmakers network with executives, who are their seniors in age, authority and income.  Here is another on the subject.)

Few of us can shanty up to a senior executive’s office and just pop our heads in to say hello.  These are busy people and they have little time for casual visits.   Gatekeepers bar entrance to those who might fritter away the executives’ time.  So, even if you meet a senior executive during the course of your work, maintaining contact is hard.  To do so requires knowing more things of substance to share with her than most of us do.  And, if you don’t maintain contact, you will lose the relationship.

Carl whose slow, easy-going manner masked a fast, hard-charging mind, was easy to talk to and even easier to underestimate.  He built relationships with senior execs and so a successful practice, also cross selling many of his firm’s other services.  The execs learned that he was an astute observer of their organizations and so, worth talking to.  He was well briefed on matters that were just beginning to filter up to the executive suite.  His way of coming up with insights into client organizations, like many successful rainmaking techniques, was simple:  He drank a lot of coffee and listened to gossip.

“People want to target the big guys in an organization and not waste time on people in lower levels. They forget that you can’t just buy a senior executive a cup of coffee and have a chat, but you can with someone lower in the organization.  Those people will tell you what is going on and what you need to know to talk with someone higher up,” Carl explained.  “Talk with enough of them and you can learn about anything you want to know.”

Of course, Carl isn’t the first to discoverer of this technique.  In modified ways, it has been used by professionals for a long time.  In some current cases, LinkedIn replaces coffee as the medium through which information is passed.  But the underlying method is the same and forever being rediscovered, because it works so well.

Two years ago I was coaching a young German strategy consultant.  When I asked him to make some calls, he refused, arguing that later in the week he had a meeting with the general manager of a major business unit of his biggest account.  “I need to spend my time figuring out what I am going to say,” he protested.  I asked if he knew people working in the business unit with whom he could gossip a bit.  He did and agreed to call and talk with them.  Half an hour later, he came back beaming; one of the people he had talked to had laid out an agenda for his meeting with the boss.

Coffee and gossip, that’s not a bad way to spend some time each day!