In a market made up of many thousands of people there would be chaos if every person in the market tried to meet and work with all of the others.  In a market made up of 5,000 people, this would require 12.5 million separate parings.  Imagine each member of the market trying to schedule and meet with 4,999 others.*  

Chaos theory also describes the other extreme in which there is rigidity with no one making any new contacts. In the grey area between these two extremes lies complexity, where some people manage to meet some others and make things happen.  That’s the world we live in.

When mathematicians model complex systems on a computer, they often find attractors, nodes, like magnets, which attract others.  In network markets these attractors are rainmakers.

If you once establish a strong lead flow, you will find yourself much sought after by others who want to feed off of your contacts.  You attract them because you know so many of the right people and are always meeting new ones.  You attract them because the right people seek your advice, which allows you to spin off leads for your own firm and for others.

Several identifiable types are attracted to you, including:

Other Attractors: Attractors seek each other out for obvious reasons.  When two or more come together, they create a lead generating machine.  They also create an in-group or clique.  These cliques create a powerful attraction.  Many are drawn, but few are let in.

Client Minders: These people know their business and deliver excellent service.  Their clients love them, and they are often good reactive sellers.  But with the exception of turning up some add-on work at their current account, they don’t know how to generate leads.  Within a firm the paring of a rainmaker/attractor with a minder can be a powerful combination around which many a practice has been built. Outside the firm, grinders tend to work intensively at a client for a few years.  When work at a client dries up, they spend six months in hell hoping to get some more work and not knowing what to do about it.  They are attracted to rainmakers, because the rainmakers have one thing they haven’t, lead flow. 

Most rainmakers I know like to help out client minders, because they know that any client the minders are referred to will be treated well, and because most minders are decent, hard-working, likeable people.  Still, when a minder comes back for more leads time and again, the rainmaker is likely to wonder why the minder hasn’t taken steps to avoid the dearth of work, yet again.  And rainmakers need help, too.  Must the flow always be one way, they wonder.
For every rainmaker there seem to be three or four minders, all looking for leads.  At any given time, one or more are hoping that the rainmaker will toss something their way.  This gets old for the rainmaker, as much as she values their friendship and likes them as people.

Proto-rainmakers/attractors: These are people who demonstrate a fundamental understanding of networking, but are still learning.  They are seldom a member of a clique yet nor are their networks big.  But they will try to help the rainmaker, not just looking for handouts.  Most rainmakers will try to help proto-rainmakers, because they like to help people come along.  There is also a chance with this type that the rainmaker’s help will be returned.

There are a variety of other people who want access your lead flow. There are those who have started a business but don’t have a clue about how to get find a client and so, probably won’t be in business for long.  Others see great synergy between your practice and theirs, synergy meaning that you feed them leads and they buy you a lunch in return.  Rainmakers will try to help these people, too, but not put much energy into it.

* Many markets have more than 5,000 members and the number of possible parings goes up geometrically as you add people.  So, a network of 10,000 has just shy of 50 million possible paring, almost four times larger than the 5,000 person market does.
 

For more advice like this, please see Ford Hardings’ new book: Rain Making, Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field, 2nd Edition

“Rain Making, in its new edition demonstrates its position as the single most sensible, accessible guide to building a professional practice…”
David Maister, author of Strategy and the Fat Smoker and co-author of The Trusted Advisor (with Charles Green and Robert Galford)

A rainmaker, as we define one, brings in leads and converts them into business at such levels that she leaves her colleagues in awe.  Of the two talents, lead generation and lead conversion, the former is much the rarer.  That is, professionals who can sell, once given a lead outnumber those who can generate leads, but can’t convert them into business.

Yet, lead generation gets little attention relative to its importance. Brian Carroll devotes a successful blog to it, B2B Lead Generation Blog, and has written a good book on the subject, Lead Generation for the Complex Sale. A handful of books, like my own, deal with both lead generation and face-to-face selling.  In comparison, there are dozens of good (and not so good) books on how to conduct a sales meeting.

In part, that’s because of the diverse nature of leads in the professions, and, as a result, in the way they are obtained.  A lead, by our definition, is an opportunity to meet face-to-face with a prospective client to talk about a problem that she has that you might be able to solve for a fee. Leads all end up with a professional sitting across a table with a client, but there are many paths to the room.  Which path the professional takes depends on the nature of the clients and the needs he works with and on his personal preference.

For example, there are needs that are secret, like the impending default on a loan, and those that are public, like the need for an auditor.  In the former case, just finding out that a company has a need gives you an advantage, but not in the latter case.  Some needs are ongoing, like need to monitor emissions and discharges; some are frequent, like a fast food chain’s need to negotiate leases; and some are infrequent like the need for a company to pick a location for a new headquarters. 

Some may have a devastating effect, if the need isn’t met effectively, such as the recruitment of a new CEO, while others can result in an ongoing annoyance if resolved poorly, like the retention of a graphic artist to place, word and design signage for a college campus. 

Some, like the outsourcing of a company’s data center operations, evolve and develop over a long time.  With others the formal hiring takes place when the client calls up and, in effect, places an order.  M&A attorneys often hire valuation consultants this way.  The informal sale was made at some previous and usually unspecified time, when the attorney decided to give the valuation firm a try the next time he had a need.

The challenge for the aspiring rainmaker is to identify a process or processes for generating leads and then to work at that process intensely.  In the early years, the challenge is often meeting enough people with the right kinds of needs.  Here are a couple of quotes of young lawyers who did this and succeeded:

“I spent a significant amount of time giving speeches to groups of people I hoped would remember me. I spoke at chambers of commerce, hospital associations and many other groups.  Once one is on the circuit and has topics of interest, you get requests to speak.  I would ask clients if they were members of an association that would like to have me speak.  There were years when I was doing 25 speeches a year and it was very, very fruitful.  It is where I got my early business, and the people I met giving speeches form the corps of my network today.”  (The late Carol Berlin Manzoni, who in addition to being a fine attorney was a lovely person.)

“When I was 32, I started going to every business meeting I could.  I went to Chamber of Commerce Meetings, Institute of Packaging Professionals meetings, Business & Industry Association meetings—you name it and I was there. I wanted to meet everybody.  I did in every meeting and largely at my own expense.  I realized soon that I wouldn’t meet end users at these events, but I could hook people up with each other and build up chits.  I made a point of coming back from every meeting with several business cards.  Those that seemed at all promising I had a breakfast or lunch with. After about a year, I started getting some good cases.” (Attorney Eugene Killian)

Once the machines they had built began to punch out leads, neither of these people had to continue at such a feverish pitch.  Over the years the processes evolve as a rainmaker’s needs change.

The challenge is to identify a process that will work for you. Here are some simple guidelines for doing so:

1. Try what’s worked before. There are no extra points for originality in this game.  If it worked for your boss or the big rainmaker in the firm, see if you can make it work for you.  Ask the person who is already effective how she got started, what false starts she had, what she has changed over time and how long it took before she began to see solid results.  Use what you learn to adapt the technique to your circumstances.

If these people don’t make rain in a way that suits your style, explore what worked before for others in your profession.  What worked before includes what worked for competitors.  It’s amazing what you can learn about a competitor’s techniques, if you focus on finding out.  You can watch them in action at conferences, debrief their former employees and colleagues, and read what they have published.  Ask them and chances are they will tell you more than you expect.  Ask a client who knows you well how other professionals approach him to get his business.
My book, Rain Making-2^nd Edition-Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field, describes many methods for generating leads that have worked for other professionals.

2. Experiment and adapt.  Some trial and error learning is inevitable as you try to master lead generation. You are entitled to have some false starts and make mistakes along the way.  If you think of a way to get close to prospective clients to generate leads that you haven’t seen succeed, try it.  Whatever technique you choose, you will need to adapt it to your time and place and personality.

3. Don’t let up.  A few mistakes may set you back, but giving up is certain failure.  Try to do at least one thing every day, even if it is something small, that will help you get into a conversation with a prospective client.

For more advice like this, please see Ford Hardings’ new book: Rain Making, Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field, 2nd Edition

“Rain Making, in its new edition demonstrates its position as the single most sensible, accessible guide to building a professional practice…”
David Maister, author of Strategy and the Fat Smoker and co-author of The Trusted Advisor (with Charles Green and Robert Galford)
 

You have just delivered a speech on the effect of the new tax law on employment expenses that packed the emotional wallop of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I Had a Dream speech. 

The association audience rose to clap, whistle and cheer, calling you back for an encore.  You gave them some quick insights into increasing deductions for charitable donations, which was followed by over five minutes of heartfelt applause, forcing you to the podium three times to wave and bow. 

Later, after the high from presenting had worn off, you asked one of the conference organizers for a list of people who had attended your session.  She told you that the organization didn’t keep track of attendance at the smaller breakout sessions.  During the following week you hoped for calls from members of the audience, but they never came.

You never knew it, but three of the attendees intended to call you, but didn’t get around to it.  Six months later, a fourth thought of calling after arguing with her tax advisor, but couldn’t remember your name.  The other sixteen people who attended the breakout session never thought of you again. 

Though the audience was smaller than you remembered it, had you actually talked with the four people who thought about calling you, you would have achieved an impressive twenty percent follow-up rate.

After giving a speech, if you don’t follow up with attendees, your chances of converting any of them into clients drops to low single digits.  But, you can’t follow up with them unless you know who they are.  That means you have to get their names and contact information and often, as in our example, the organizers of the event can’t tell you who was there.

Withhold Slides – Not Always a Good Idea

Speakers have developed a number of ways to get the information they need. Many withhold copies of their slides before and at the event and then offer to send them to anyone in the audience who provides a business card.  

Though easy and obvious, this approach has several drawbacks.  First, it frustrates those attendees who want to take notes on hard copy of your materials.  This clearly runs counter to your goals, and, lest you forget, the goals of the conference organizers who have given you this opportunity.  It will also be ineffective, if you allow the sponsoring organization to post your slides on its website, providing the attendees an alternative access.  Denying your hosts the use of your materials will frustrate them a second time.

Offer Additional Materials

You can avoid these problems by providing copies of your slides at the event and then offering additional materials, such as a whitepaper, to anyone who leaves a business card.  Of course, someone will have to develop the whitepaper—a big increase in the work required to prepare.  Most firms post such documents on their websites for all to see, anyway.

Pass out an Attendance Sheet

More artful speakers prepare an attendance sheet, with columns for each attendee’s name, company, email address and phone number.  A few minutes before the session is scheduled to start, the speaker or her colleague gives the sheet on a clipboard to someone in the front row and asks him to sign in and pass it on.  At the end of the session, she collects the sheet from wherever it has been left in the back of the room.  If you ask, the sponsors of the event may discourage this tactic.  It doesn’t work well for large audiences.

Pass out a Survey

During my days as a location consultant; helping companies select places for factories, offices, and research labs; I gave a presentation to a group of human resource officers on labor markets.  It was at the peak of an economic boom with labor shortages in many areas.  At the beginning of the presentation, I passed out a ten question survey of how companies were dealing with tight labor markets.  There was a place at the bottom for participants to provide contact information to which I could send the survey results.  That information was what I was after.

Better still, Question #3 asked how the respondents’ companies would address the labor shortage.  They were asked to mark all the things they would do from a list that included raising wages, lowering hiring standards, advertising more heavily and other tactics.  Among the tactics was move operations to a new location.  Everyone who indicated that her firm was planning to use that tactic was a potential user of our services.  I still feel a bit smug about that one.

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 remember 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.

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!