(This is the first of a series of posts on interesting people I have encountered)

The value of LinkedIn is evolving so rapidly that it’s hard to keep up.  A few heavy users lead the way, discovering new ways to use it, and the rest of us straggle behind them.  Gary Pines, Harding & Company’s strongest advocate for using the network, suggested we interview one of these leaders to gain some insight into its future direction.

Konstantinos Kasekas, a recruiter for Hudson and an author of the blog, www.beyond.jobs, has been a heavy user for three years and has over 8,500 1st contacts (over 16 million total).  Always operating at high energy levels, he becomes so joyous talking about LinkedIn that it sweeps everyone within earshot along.  He kindly agreed to be interviewed:

Q:   You can’t possibly have relationships with 8,500 people.  Why collect so many contacts?

Kasekas:  Because it makes the key decision maker visible to me, making part of my job as a “Lead Generator”, significantly easier.  In the past, the identity of the decision maker was obscure, protected behind a veil of corporate privacy.  Now that paradigm has been obliterated. Due to the site’s depth and breadth, on LinkedIn I can conduct a specialized key word search and identify key decision makers immediately. For example, Lululemon Athletica  is a global clothing manufacturer, with a strict “No Names” policy. If you call into their HR department and ask to speak to a Recruiter, or Director of HR (key decision makers in our line of work), you will immediately be turned down by the Operator and be forwarded to a general mailbox where you can leave a message. However, a quick search in my linkedin network, gives me a short cut around this process. The importance of “Size” is critical here, since a linkedIn search is limited to my “network” of contacts, defined as “my immediate contacts, their contacts, and their contacts’ contacts. So Ford, if you conducted the same search at Lululemon, you would likely get different results than I, simply because my network is larger than yours. Simple economies of scale. The larger my network, the more I get to see.

Q:  Once you identify the person you want to meet, do you ask your mutual contact for an introduction?

Kasekas:  Usually not.   Usually I don’t know that person either, so I go directly after the person I want to meet.  There are a number of tactics to get to them but they don’t involve LinkedIn.

Q:  That’s it?  It’s just a big directory?

Kasekas:  No, but don’t underestimate the directory value.  Identifying key decision makers in a company, a process that used to take several phone calls or varying degrees of research, can now be done in mere seconds.

Q:  How else do you get value from LinkedIn that people with fewer contacts might not?

Kasekas:  Recently, I had the VP of Global Talent Management at a Fortune 500 company contact me from Paris, through LinkedIn even though she, herself, only had ten contacts on LinkedIn.  If my network was smaller, she wouldn’t have found me on the site, and more importantly wouldn’t have found me as attractive. A well connected professional with a large “rolodex” is generally viewed as a key strength in consulting.  This could lead to global relationship.

Increased visibility both ways is what it’s all about.  That’s all that counts.  It’s very difficult to gain trust on the internet, so why bother? Go for maximize visibility and work on trust through other means.

Q:   So, how does one get 8,500 contacts?

Kasekas:  I am a “super-user”. This does not mean I am super, but that I have more than 5,000 1st contacts.  This group of users represents the top 98th percentile of LinkedIn members. Unlike other members, super-users focus on one thing; growing our networks indefinitely.  It is more a mindset than anything else, as all my resources are either dedicated to using LinkedIn, or how to use LinkedIn to enhance my professional goals. There are email addicts, and blackberry addicts; I am a self proclaimed LinkedIn addict. I check my LinkedIn account at least ten times per day to see if I’ve received an invitation to connect.

Like most super-users, I am an open-networker, which means that I accept all invitations. I invite everyone I interview or call on to join my LinkedIn network. My linkedin profile is listed in my signature file of my email. I write about using LinkedIn on my blog, and host multiple LinkedIn-centric discussion groups on and off of LinkedIn.com. While traffic varies, I try to add at least 100 new contacts per week to my account.

Another great tool for access to the greater LinkedIn network, is the use of the “LinkedIn Groups”. LinkedIn allows you to join 50 groups at a time, I am a member of 50 groups at all times. Every few weeks, I remove myself from five-to-ten groups and join new ones, to ensure that I am being exposed to a diversity of interests and backgrounds. I answer questions that are relevant to my industry to raise awareness of my subject matter expertise, and end every answer with an invitation to send me an invitation.  LinkedIn only allows you to send out 3,000 invitations to connect, a ceiling I hit over a year ago, so such creative ways are necessary to maintain my steady network growth on the site.

Q:  What are its principal limitations?

Kasekas: A common misconception is that LinkedIn is the new alternative to networking. The belief is that by sitting in front of your computer all day, you can build a solid network of strong relationships that will replace traditional networking. As a LinkedIn-addict I am the first to yell out that this is not the case. LinkedIn is not, and will never be a replacement to traditional networking. It is a tool to help facilitate networking, but nothing more.

Trust does not come cheap, and building trust via inmails and emails, is extremely difficult. I could do more to build trust over a ten minute telephone conversation, or a fifteen-minute coffee than I can do through months or even years of email correspondence. So, our perception of LinkedIn as an end, versus a means is a key limitation of the site.

Once we overcome this perception, the tool, itself, does have another major limitation.  While it is an excellent tool for identifying key decision makers, the effectiveness of the site is limited to the size of your network. LinkedIn only allows you to “see” the names of the people within your network and their contacts twice removed (your first contacts, their friends/contacts and their contacts’ friends). So, for example, if your 1st contacts, or their friends were not connected to Barack Obama directly, you would not be able to find the name of the President of the United States, via LinkedIn.  So, on LinkedIn size does matter.

A superuser grows his LinkedIn network exponentially as a means of building your total contact list, and then picking and choosing whom connect with, within that larger group later on.

The rest of this interview will be published in a later post.

I am coaching a woman named Lisa, who doesn’t add names to her contact list regularly and hasn’t for years.  She hasn’t pulled all the names of her contacts together into her Outlook program from old client files, old employer directories, the shoebox of business cards she keeps and elsewhere.

This means she doesn’t have phone numbers and email addresses of her contacts handy.  Because she doesn’t have them handy, she misses opportunities to contact the people she knows.  She isn’t developing a rainmaker’s call discipline.

Lacking call discipline, she isn’t rekindling old or developing new relationships.  That results in insufficient lead flow, and, of course, without enough leads, she doesn’t win as much business as she wants to.

If this goes on, she won’t get promoted to partner and will eventually be asked to leave the firm.  And all for the want of a contact list!

A good contact list is the fundamental tool for getting business.  Without one, you will never be a rainmaker.

Many aspiring rainmakers are surprised how easy rain making can be. 

The logic of it, as I have stated many times, is deceptively simple:  If you meet the right people, stay in front of them by being helpful, and remind them from time to time of what you do, you will get new business. 

The challenge of rain making derives from trying to keep many parts moving all at once.  If you have a networking relationship with several hundred people, each at a different stage of development and requiring customized treatment, managing the complexity tests one’s ability.

So, it’s wise to take advantage of easy ways to maintain and advance relationships.  There are, after all, no extra points for doing it the hard way.  A professional grasping that there are many easy, little things she can do to advance relationships signals a major advance along her track to rainmakerhood.

Here are some easy things rainmakers do:

Arrive early - A rainmaker named John, like many others, would arrive at client meetings early, so he could drop by the offices of people he was not scheduled to see that day in order to spend five to ten minutes catching up with them.  These visits kept him top of mind with these people, keeping relationships warm and keeping him up to date with happenings at the client.

Some of what he learned he put to immediate use.  A young professional who went with him on one of these series of brief visits came back in awe. “By the time John got to the third of his drop-in meetings, he was passing on information he hadn’t known half an hour earlier!” 

Listen carefully and share - Wilcox realized that communications are imperfect in all companies. He had learned to listen carefully in all his meetings for bits of information that he could legitimately pass on to others, the winning of a new account, the departure of an employee and other little things.  He would use them to provide something of value to the rest of the people he met that day.  Once he got the hang of it, it was easy.

Introduce yourself - A litigation support consultant went to a bar association meeting.  During the reception, he noticed a man standing alone, so he crossed the room and introduced himself.  Six weeks later this man, a litigator, introduced the consultant to a client who hired him to help on a case. “I really didn’t do anything.  I just went over and talked to him.”  But, crossing over the room and talking to the man was doing something, something that no one else had done. The win wouldn’t have been any more important, if he had had to do something hard to get it.

Keep an eye out for news you can forward - One of the most successful rainmakers in Europe clips articles from the newspaper that mentioned a company or industry and uses them as the reason to call or send a note to his clients.  A young professional, whom he was encouraging to do the same, said, “What’s the point?  This is so easy.  Anybody can do it.”  The rainmaker responded, “Yes, but no one does.”

Young professionals are always concerned about the time needed to plan and execute large business development efforts.  Rainmakers do many small, easy things, sometimes in preference to the larger effort.  They know that though many others could easily do the same, few, in fact, do.  They know that there are no extra points for doing something hard.

(What are some easy things you do to help manage your relationships?)

Yesterday I was reminded of a client I worked with some ten years ago, who needed to bring in more business.  I will call him Benchly, because the name just came to me and I like it. 

Benchly’s business was off, and the younger members of his practice weren’t fully utilized.  Unassigned talent creates a serious cash drain on a firm, so he was in a hurry to find a client.  In his late 50’s, Benchly had practiced his profession for a quarter century.  He had met a lot of people over those twenty plus years. But, he believed many of them were now retired. Like most of us, he had let many of the relationships lapse. 

Still, not all of them could be retired. Rekindling those old relationships was likely to be a faster route to finding business than starting with new ones, so I suggested he start there.

“What could I possibly have to say to someone I haven’t spoken with for ten years?” he asked.  We talked about how to approach these old contacts, and over the next few weeks, he called them.  Only one of them resulted in any new business.  Benchly billed $16 million to that client’s company over the next twelve months.

I was reminded of Benchly because I was recommending a similar effort to another client, in this case a recruiter.  Much younger than Benchly, he nevertheless had let relationships with some potentially valuable contacts go cold.

“What could I possibly have to say to someone I haven’t spoken to in so many years?” he asked.  We talked, and he went off to make some calls.  Half an hour later he was back, having scheduled a meeting with a former boss he hadn’t talked to for nine years.  He had spent the half hour on the phone catching up with the former boss, who wanted to talk to him about a search.

So, what can you possibly have to say to someone you haven’t talked to in so many years?  This is what I recommend:

• Write each cold contact’s name on a piece of paper.  Finding a reason to call them will be much less daunting in the concrete than in the abstract.
• Review the following reasons for calling and see if you can adapt one of them to each person:
  o        Something reminded me of you.
  o        I need your advice.
  o        There is something you should know.
  o        How are the results of our past work for you?
• Focus on them, not on you and definitely not on your need for business.  If you aren’t sincerely interested in them, you shouldn’t call in the first place.  This should be a case of networking making you a better friend (a subject for another day), rather than an indirect means of putting the touch on someone.
• Have a concise, clear elevator speech prepared so you can respond to the inevitable question about what you are doing now.
• Don’t rush things.  You have to earn the right to talk about more business and that may take months.  Of course, if the contact asks you for help, you can respond immediately.

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

Version #1

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

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

Version #2

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * * * * *

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

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.