I have been reading Shawn Callahan’s blog ever since he commented on one of my early posts, Sadder but Wiser, about the use of an anecdote to show you had really learned something. The Anecdote is a well-known blog, one seen as successful. Among blogs it has a Google page rank of five, something for the rest of us to aspire to. So, I thought it might be useful to see if he has turned up any business through it.

Shawn’s firm, Anecdote, consults on the use of business narrative and collaboration techniques “to redesign and improve the way people learn, share information, retain knowledge and build resolve to make changes in the workplace.” Asked what that means, he gave this example:

One of our clients is a leading financial institution and they have just completed an organizational culture inventory. These survey instruments can be a little dry and difficult to understand so we are helping them collect stories that illustrate the culture and then working with people in the company to design and implement initiatives that will shape their organizational culture.

The firm has served many large corporations and departments of the Australian government.

Shawn has been blogging since 2002, the Pleistocene by blog standards, and The Anecdote blog is his third, so he had two earlier ones to shake the ticks out of his approach. That accounts, in part, for its professional look and content. The Anecdote dates back to November 2004.

Callahan reports that he gets lots of leads traceable to the blog. Because I have not found many blogs that generate a significant number of leads for a professional firm, this becomes an important case. Here are the reasons that I think he has been more successful than so many others.

First, he had the insight to get in early and the persistence to keep at it. Yes, I mean that the blog’s high productivity probably results, in part, from its age, a factor of much importance in a network, as described by Albert-Lázlo Barabási in Linked: The New Science of Networks [Perseus Publishing 2002].

Second, it is also, in Barabási‘s terms fitter, because it has masses of content and lots of links. Type in “knowledge strategy,” “business narrative” or “storytelling training” into Google and you will find Anecdote on the first page.

More importantly type these terms in with a geographic location such as Melbourne, Canberra or Australia and it’s number one. That this may be a more significant differentiator in Australia than it would be in the US or Europe, because the nearest alternative, outside resources are likely to be a ten-hour plane ride away, does not diminish what Shawn and his colleagues have done. We all must adapt what we do to our local conditions for better or for worse. I mention it because each of us must determine what will make our blogs fit in our market places, meaning we cannot expect to succeed in exactly the way he did, using his approach as a recipe. Remember that Callahan had two blogs prior to this one. That experience undoubtedly helped him make this one fitter from the start. We, too, will have to do some experimenting.

The third reason his blog is so successful has to do not so much with the blog, itself, as it does how Shawn takes inquiries he receives on it and turns them into consulting assignments. Turning an inquiry from someone who has first heard about you on the web into new business costing the client a large sum is a big aspiration for a professional and a bigger increase in commitment than most people buying services are willing to make.

Callahan and his colleagues have addressed this problem by inserting a step between the client making a query on the basis of something read on the blog and asking him to sign for a full-blown consulting engagement.

In my book, Cross-Selling Success, I call this a portal service. In Anecdote’s case, it takes the form of courses that the representative of an organization can attend for a modest fee. During the course, the consultants get to show what they can do and what they would be like to work with. They also learn a lot about the client and its issues. After the client and the consultants take this small step together, both have learned a lot about each other and the client is more likely to sign up The Anecdote team to help them run their own business narrative projects.

It took between two and three years for the blog to evolve into an effective lead generator. It proved valuable in other ways earlier. Shawn praises the discipline it creates to get ideas down on paper and finds it a useful place to store and access ideas and information, a consultant’s stock in trade. Says Callaghan, “I often send links to specific blog posts to clients and prospects to keep in contact and show we care about them and their business.”

It’s not all fun. Like other bloggers, he feels the stress of perpetual demand for content (I can identify with Shawn’s concern: I feel that my blog sits at my feet all day, moaning, “Feed me. Feed me.”)

To address this problem, he has developed a set of posting categories: the quick link and short comment; the mini idea (a couple of paragraphs); the foundational idea (4-10 paragraphs). Assigning ideas he has for posting gives him a sense of how much time he must devote to producing the postings. Keeping his posts short, he can distribute ideas over more days When there is nothing substantial to say, he links to other people’s blogs which not only provides content for his readers, it also increases his social network.

In spite of the demands, Shawn is clearly hooked on blogging. He says, “I really love blogging because the more I think about how things connect, the more connections I make. The blog posts become conversation topics and you are rarely lost for something interesting to say while at the same time you become attentive and mindful for new ideas and perspectives.”

Here are some valuable takeaways from Shawn:

1. A blog is a major commitment, in which a professional will have to invest up to two years before you start seeing a return in the form of new business. I hope that some of my readers can prove me wrong on this, but I doubt it.
2. In addition to time, your blog’s success as a lead generator will depend on its fitness. What constitutes fitness will vary from market to market, but at the very least it means good content frequently posted—and probably the right links to other blogs and sites, as well.
3. Rather than trying to convert a lead generated by the blog into a full-blown client, it is probably better to have a small sample of what you do that clients can try first. A blog, like any other marketing technique, can’t just be glued onto the side of your practice. To be successful, it must be integrated with other things you do.
4. Blogs have many small uses as places to store information and to refer clients and prospective clients who are looking for a bit of information.
5. Blogging is fun and can be addictive.

And, now that I’ve had my jag for the day, I can stop writing. 

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Order your copy of Ford Harding’s new and revised edition of Rain Making, called ”…an essential guide for anyone responsible for business development in the professional services industry…” - Mark Mactas, Chairman and CEO Towers Perrin

A rainmaker has a large network that helps him generate leads and win more business. The value of a network of contacts grows geometrically with the size of the network. This is known as Metcalfe’s Law and is described in more detail in my book, Creating Rainmakers. Though it may interest you to understand the underlying logic and the mathematics (which are quite simple), you really need to know what it means on the ground during your ongoing efforts to sell your services. Though they happened in the air, two encounters I had in plane rides make the point nicely.

When I started my current firm, it was in a new field for me and I had to build a network of contacts almost from scratch. I had been in this business for maybe a year, when I was bumped up to first class on a flight from New York to California. My seat mate was a dignified looking gentleman in a fine grey, pinstriped suit that even my inexperienced eyes could tell didn’t come off the rack at Target.

We exchanged the normal civilities as we divvied up the space between us for our pre-flight drinks. We then both settled in to our individual affairs. I wanted to meet this man, but knew from experience not to move too quickly. Some time during the flight, we began a small conversation. I asked him where he worked and he named a huge media company. I asked what he did there, and he said, “I’m the president.” My mouth opened to say something, but nothing came out. I tried again and sill nothing came out. The conversation ended there. I had nothing to say to the man. I didn’t know anything about his company. I didn’t know much about the media business. A sudden shift of subjects into sports or politics would have seemed odd, and I know almost as little about sports as I do about the media business. I opened my mouth one more time, and once again nothing came out. Some people would have found a way, but I am shy and introverted and I had nothing more to say.

Fast-forward about eleven years, after I had been in this business of showing others how to sell professional services long enough to build a large network. Again I was bumped up to first class on another flight from New York to California. As I sat down, my seat mate was reading USA Today opened full width so that the left page stretched over a bit over the arm rest and into my space. The main article announced the departure of a celebrity CEO from her company. I observed this news by saying, “Oh, she’s out,” to which my seatmate responded, “Yes, and I have nothing to say on the subject.”

Now, that was an advertisement. The man meant that though the world would like to hear his views of the subject, given who he is, he was not prepared to share them. A conversation with this man was easy to start. And here is where the magic of having a large network began. The man was the president for North America of a large biotech firm, so I began to ask about professionals serving that industry. Within ten minutes we had identified four people we knew in common that his firm used and who had been my clients. I had spent the morning with one of them. Another he thought so highly of that he wished she would call more often. Another had a project with his firm that was in trouble, and he said he would be reluctant to hire them again. We talked briefly about the book he was reading and then went back to our individual affairs, talking again only briefly during landing.

The information he had given me provided reasons to call all four people, strengthening my relationship with each one. I was also able to send a book to this man on a topic of interest to him, so strengthening that tenuous relationship. I could do none of this eleven years earlier; my network wasn’t large enough.

And that is why a person with a big network does better at finding new clients, than does someone with a small one. So, how many people will you meet this month and where will you meet them?

Some professionals have thinking habits that make it hard for them to succeed as rainmakers. These habits result in logical errors that reflect the professionals’ inexperience. I will address specific kinds of thinking habits from time to time in this blog. The first is what I call the Build-It-And-They-Will-Come Fallacy. People making this error assume that if they make one highly visible effort, business will come. They feel surprised and almost cheated when it doesn’t.

The Brochure and Website Fallacies are, perhaps, the most common versions of this fallacy. They are especially common when professionals start a firm or a new practice. In many such cases professionals rush to create a brochure or a website and then wait for the business to come in. It doesn’t.
Here are a two more examples of such thinking:

• Attorneys from a major law firm made a presentation to the several members of a private equity firm to introduce their services, knowing that deals these people worked on produced millions of dollars in legal fees each year. When no work resulted from the pitch within three months, the head of the Corporate Practice at the law firm declared the effort a failure. Actually, the attorneys had made a good impression on the people they presented to, about all that could be expected from one meeting.
• Several partners at a management consulting firm said that giving speeches didn’t work for their firm. Over the years, they have given many speeches and never turned up any new business from it. They had done little, if any, follow-up work after the speeches, apparently waiting at the phone for calls from prospective clients, who would say, “I heard what you said last week and thought it so wonderful that I was hoping, just hoping, you could come to our company and . . .” When they had an opportunity to speak, these partners often arrived at the events shortly before they were scheduled to speak and rushed back to their clients as soon at their speech was over. When they began to treat speeches as simply one element out of many needed to build relationships with prospective clients, they began to win business.

The illogic of these people may seem laughably obvious, as I describe it here. I assure you that it wasn’t obvious to them at the time, and I see examples of smart, hard-working professionals committing the Build-It-and-They-Will-Come Fallacy all the time. Remember, there are many steps to getting a client to hire you. One event is unlikely to generate business, and if it does, recognize that this is unusual and lucky, rather than the norm. You need persistence to get new clients. 

Oh, I almost forgot to mention; building a stadium in a cornfield in Iowa is unlikely to bring legendary baseball players back from their graves and rest homes to play one last game together. I hope I haven’t broken too may hearts by passing this along.

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.

I have been reviewing several books on selling.  Most advise us to ask clients for referrals, but that’s a thing more easily said than done.  There’s a lot more meaning packed into the word, “referral,” than its brevity suggests.  In most areas in the professions it means we are asking our clients to rember what we do well enough that they recognize opportunities for us when they are out in the market place, refer prospective clients to us, endorse us, and inform us of things that give us an edge over competitors.  That’s asking a lot of anyone. 
 

A few people will do these things without our asking.  But spontaneous giving of this type is rare.  Most of the time, we do have to ask.  And there’s the rub.
 

Asking favors of this kind makes us uncomfortable.  It’s asking a lot.  Our clients are busy people.  They have problems of their own and are paying us for the work we do, and so owe us nothing.  We don’t want to burden then with our problems.  Nor do we want to seem mercenary about our relationships with them. 

Succeeding at this delicate task requires good timing and technique. 
 

Let’s start with when.
 

An accountant, who is one of the biggest rainmakers in his firm, was the first to explain to me the best time to ask for a referral.  He advised me that whenever someone is happy with you, you are in a position to ask a favor.  Yes, you are being paid for the work you are doing, but clients who are really pleased with what you have done like to do something that will help you personally, too.
 

A recruiter was saying the same thing, when he told me that just after a search is completed, when everyone is happy with the candidate and your contribution is fresh in their minds, is the time to ask for a referral.
 

Now, let’s move to how.
 

The key to getting referrals from clients is to make the request clear, specific and easy to do.  Compare these vague and general requests to the clear and specific ones that follow.  Which would be the easiest for you to comply with, if someone were to ask you for referrals?
 

Group #1:  Vague and General
 

¨      “On the basis of the work we have done, would you be willing to refer us to some other people who might need our services?”
 

¨      “Do you know anyone who might be looking for the kinds of services we offer?”
 

Group #2:  Clear and Specific
 

¨      “I have always wanted to meet your counterparts in the Consumer and Health Care Divisions.  Would you be willing to introduce me?”
 

¨      “Here are the names of three firms in this area that we would like to do business with.  Do you know anyone in any of them whom you would be willing to introduce me to?”
 

¨      “I know you are active in the XYZ Association.  Would you be willing to bring me with you to a meeting, so I could spend a couple of hours with you meeting the people you know there?”
 

Pick a moment when they are happy with the work you’ve done, and make the request for a referral clear, specific and easy to do, and the chances of the client giving you that referral are pretty good!

Lindsy, a valuation consultant I am coaching, just generated a lead for new business, the first one she has ever turned up outside of the clients she is consulting to. It’s not for anything big, but it’s an important event for Lindsay. Without a lead, there can be no sale. Having a good lead flow gives you added control of your destiny at professional service firms.

Meet the right people. Stay in front of them by being helpful. Remind them of what you do in appropriate ways. And leads will follow. This is the simple logic that underlies what rainmakers do.

But is there a way, aspiring rainmakers like Lindsay always ask, to make those leads come along a little more quickly? It’s a fair question. We don’t find it so terrible to be asked to help people, especially when it’s people we like. We don’t expect an immediate return on our giving and realize that we will often give without ever getting something back. That’s okay. But we need to get something back some of the time from some of the people we help, if our firm is to make a profit and we are to move our careers along. That’s not being mercenary; it’s just being practical.

There are techniques for generating leads more quickly, and we will address them from time to time in this blog. Here is the one Lindsay used, which is perhaps the simplest of all:

To become a rainmaker you must develop relationships with clients, prospective clients and connectors, the term we use for people in other organizations who sell to the same people we do. Call discipline, the regular outreach by phone (and by emails, too, of course, but that’s a subject for another day), to our clients and connectors is a required part of the rainmaking process. These calls should largely be about the other person. How are you doing? What are you working on? What would help you? At some point in the conversation, the good ones, the ones you want to work with, will ask how things are going with you. This may be the only point in the conversation when you have an opportunity to talk about yourself and your firm. You had best spend this coin wisely.

It’s best to assume that in asking this question the contact really wants to know how you are doing. . . but not too much. And we will give her what she wants. Clearly, it shouldn’t be a blatant advertisement or a heavy sales pitch. That would be distasteful and unproductive. But answers like “Great,” or “We just put an addition on the house” won’t buy you much, either.

Instead, before you make the call mentally prepare a short statement describing something about the work you are doing that might stimulate the client’s thinking about how she or someone she knows might use you. “For the past year I’ve been working mostly on acquisitions. They’re fast paced and a lot of fun.” Keep it short. “We are putting some new ideas about vertical transportation in place, and it’s exciting to see them working so well.” “For several clients we are finding ways to manage healthcare costs while still providing the employees with reasonable coverage. Everybody; management, the employees and the providers; needs to do their part to make these approaches work. I’ve been brokering the different constituents and it’s very rewarding.”

Lindsay said, “I’m spending all my time placing a value on a pharmanceutical company’s unused patents. It’s like a treasure hunt, so I’m having a blast!” The former client she was talking to referred her to a friend who was selling his business and needed help valueing his patents.

Way to go, Lindsay!

These are good times for professionals, many having more work than they can handle.  This glut of client opportunities gives firms a rare chance to upgrade the size and quality of their clientele.  To do so they will need to raise rates and turn away small clients and low margin work.  Many find that hard to do.  Why?
 

A client and friend who is a PhD, economist and a rainmaker at a litigation support firm argues that if you aren’t losing two out of three competitive pitches, your fees are too low.  You may not agree with his ratio, but his logic is impeccable.  It’s both good and essential to lose to competitorson price—sometimes. 
 

Operationally, that is a hard message to grasp, because it goes against all of our prior training.  What sport did you ever play where you sought to lose two thirds of the time?  When were you encouraged to go for D’s or F’s in school?  Was being passed over for promotion ever a good thing?  Whenever someone says, I’m glad I lost, it sounds like sour grapes.  Maybe a PhD economist can feel good about losing, but the rest of us don’t.
 

So, we go on competing intensely to win work only to find that we have set ourselves up to lose an opportunity to win a bigger, more strategically important client, because we can’t start soon enough or because we sent the B team to the sales presentation, or because taking the work from the small client created an insurmountable conflict.
 

Firms that overcome this problem usually do so by setting minimums in the size of assignment they take on.  One firm I know of doubled its average project size after enforcing a controversial minimum-sized-project policy.  Revenues ballooned the following year.

I know of another firm that raised its rates 20 percent in one year and didn’t reduce its conversion rate on proposals by even one percent.  But it took guts to hold to such a big price increase.

I think I’ll try a different approach.  The next time someone in the firm loses a pitch on price, I’m going to throw a wine and cheese party for the office in celebration.