Speakers gain celebrity status at conferences.  Attendees enjoy conversing with the speakers for their knowledge and point of view.  A consulting client shared with me a successful approach his firm uses to maximize the client development opportunities for their conference speakers.  As soon as they are informed that they are a speaker they begin planning a well choreographed dinner!  First they make a reservation for 8 to 12 people at one of the top restaurants at the conference city.  Secondly, they invite a few close clients who love them and who they know will highly recommend their work.  Then they invite another speaker or two whose topics are popular in the market but whose work does not compete with theirs.  Next, they invite some non-competing prospects who can be considered peers to their clients, appreciating that clients love to exchange war stories with their peers.  And lastly, they make sure that the number of people from their office is not overwhelming to the rest of the group, four people maximum.  You can imagine with this make up for dinner that all attendees have a great time  - - - especially their prospects who are now impressed.  Perfect! 

As Spring approaches and more promotional materials for upcoming conferences begin arriving in the mail, I’ve heard many clients are assessing if conference attendance is worth the cost - - which today can be significant.  We are a big advocate of preplanning to get the most bang for your buck.  If you are a speaker at the conference you have lots of relationship development opportunities with both clients and prospects that don’t even occur at the conference!   

1. You can call clients or prospects for their advice and input on your presentation topic. 
2. You can invite contacts to be panel members for your presentation.
3. You can personally invite clients and prospects to your presentation, preferably by phone to continue a conversation flow. 
4. You can ask your contacts if there are other individuals in their organization who would benefit from attending your presentation and invite them too. 

These pre-conference conversations can result in the following benefits:   

-  It’s a great reason to call lots of your contacts to touch base and up your visibility in the marketplace.

-  You reinforce your credibility and industry expertise based on the presentation content. 

-  It reminds people of you and your services oftentimes prompting statements such as, “I’m so glad you called. . . we were thinking about  . . .”

-  Contacts are flattered that you seek their advice and feel good about giving it to you. (nurturing a relationship)

-  You can prepare a better presentation for your audience with greater knowledge as to leading industry challenges.

-  The conversation can validate your presentation conclusions leading to increased confidence in your offering.

-  You expand your network by client referrals to invite others within their organization. 

-  You may learn more about your client’s or prospect’s specific corporate challenges by asking the age-old question at the end of your conversation, “So how are things with you?” and listening.   

All of the activities described in this three part series on “A Speaker Who Knows How to Work It” occur outside of the actual conference.  The conference becomes a means to an end, not the end. 

At some professional service firms, order taking is a common way to get business.  The client calls with no advanced warning and says show up tomorrow.  There is no competition and little, if any, fee negotiation.  Most litigation support firms get a significant share of their cases that way.  So do many valuation consultants.  Some kinds of legal services are also bought in this manner.  Firms that deal with emergencies, whether it be a client’s sudden, bad publicity or a need for a rapid environmental cleanup, are additional examples of those who often benefit from order taking.

It sounds like an easy way to get business.   But it isn’t.   In these cases the client feels a high sense of urgency and needs to trust the professional he hires.  This leads to a conservative approach to selecting a professional; the client is likely to go with the firm who did good work for him in the past.  That makes it hard to get new clients, including the new clients needed to replace old ones, who retire or cease to give you business for some other reason.  Firms or practices which get business this way run the risk of having too  much work with too few clients, exposing them to sudden revenue drops, if something happens to a key client.

Just as you would be unlikely to welcome a pitch from a watch repairman, if your watch was working, clients are often reluctant to spend much time with professionals who offer such services, when they don’t have an immediate need.  When they do, they are in a hurry to get help and don’t have time to expend much time researching alternatives.  The problem is compounded when the client’s need is confidential as well as being urgent, such as when a client knows his company is likely to receive some devastating publicity and doesn’t want the bad news to come out any sooner than necessary.

Effective selling of these kinds of professional services requires far more than answering the phone.  Rainmakers for these kinds of services typically select from three options:

• Public Relations:  They can seek publicity in order to increase the likelihood that prospective clients will stumble across their name when an event drives a need for their services.  This, of course, works best when the service meets two criteria:  First, it can’t be so confidential that the profession can never reveal work done and  client names and, second, it must have enough sex appeal to be worth of media attention.  For many years, I worked as a location consultant, helping companies pick locations for new factories, offices and research labs.  That service met both of these criteria, and we worked the publicity channel hard.
• Networks:  They can develop relationships with other professionals, who have early access to information about a client’s need for help.  So, for example, many turn around executives work hard to develop relationships with the workout specialists at bank and with bankruptcy attorneys.
• Developing Client Relationships: They find ways to develop relationships with clients in anticipation of the need, in effect making the sale before the need arises.  This works best when the client is likely to have intermittent need, such as a litigator’s periodic need for a jury selection consultant.  It is a hard route, given busy clients’ unwillingness to expend a lot of time learning about services they don’t have a need for now.  In such cases, the professional must link relationship-building to a client’s more immediate needs, for example, by providing training that will meet a client’s need for continuing education credits or providing friendship on the golf course.

When the phone rings and a professional selling such a service gets an order from a new client, it usually results from a lot of hard work.  Order taking isn’t so easy.

By Ford Harding and Mimi Spangler

Schmoozing is to networking what carbonation is to beer; you can do without it, but it’s bound to be flat if you do.  The definitions we have seen of the term are unsatisfactory.  It clearly is a way of conversing, though hardly casual, as one dictionary describes it, even if it may seem so.  It does have a purpose, though not solely to gain advantage, as another dictionary says, because often there is a give element, too.

We define it as low-key conversing on business and personal issues to give and gain advantage.  It is the conversational part of networking.  Done right, it is engaging, light, personal, caring, helpful and purposeful.  And it has undoubtedly been around since the dawn of commerce.  They schmoozed in the Hanseatic League, they schmoozed along the Silk Road, and they schmoozed before that in the prehistoric and early historic towns of the Fertile Crescent.

Schmoozing has had to adapt to technological change in the past. Today, much schmoozing is done by phone, though at some time in the past doing so must have seemed an oddity.  Tele-schmoozing became more frequent as the technology improved, phones became more common, and as telephone costs came down.

The rise of the internet has brought a new technological challenge to schmoozers.  To schmooze, you must converse, and conversing over what has in its early days been a largely asynchronous medium is hard.  And if you can’t schmooze over the internet, can you network over it?  Not effectively, we would argue.

The lack of easy synchronous communication still limits schmoozing on some social networking platforms, like LinkedIn, points out Elizabeth Sosnow, Managing Director and Social Media Lead at BlissPR.  But the ease of synchronous communications is developing rapidly.  Sosnow finds Twitter the preferred vehicle.  Starting from scratch eighteen months ago, she now has 4,500 followers on Twitter.  And she is generating leads from that source.

With advances in the technology, like Twitter and texting, that remove barriers to conversing, e-schmooze has arrived.  This is how it is done today:

• Information easily found on the internet serves as an enabler for e-schmooze.  Schmoozing is purposeful and it is easier to develop a purpose when you have greater access to information about your contacts.  For example, knowing in advance through Linked-In that Persons A, B and C are linked to Person D makes it easier and more efficient to have a conversation about D.
• Tweeting or texting contacts with bits of helpful news, congratulations and requests for information or advice provide starters for electronic conversations, just as they do when schmoozing face-to-face or by phone.  The advantage of the e-schmooze is the potential to start this conversation with many people at once, far more than can be done with the traditional schmooze, which requires calling contacts one at a time, or, at best, meeting with a small group.   This allows to e-schmoozer to out-network competitors.
• E-schmoozers then follow up with groups or individuals, depending on responses to a conversation-starter.
• As the e-schmoozer gets to know individual contacts through such exchanges, his conversations can become more personal and focused.
• E-schmoozing sometimes involves rapid exchanges that cover both personal and business issues.  These exchanges are more effective, if they sometimes meander between business and personal issues, just as voice conversations do, and if they involve humor and sincere interest in the other person.
• E-schmoozing works best if it is but a part of a wider range of communications, including voice and faces-to-face conversations.  Tweets and other electronic communications may first put you in touch with a contact and help you advance the relationship; the relationship will be stronger if you also eventually meet and talk by phone.

This is not rocket science, but are you doing it?  If not, the muscle the internet provides will allow others, more youthful and technologically sophisticated, to out-schmooze you.

Twice in recent weeks I have been told that no one makes phone calls anymore.  One person, who I will call Lenore, put it this way:

No one uses the phone just to stay in touch with old clients and maintain relationships anymore.  The phone is too intrusive, and clients prefer emails, which are more convenient for them.  They’re too busy to take calls.  Today, the phone is just for when you have something specific and important to talk about.

Is Lenore right in saying that the phone shall nevermore be used for staying in touch, schmoozing and developing relationships when selling professional services?  Or is this  just the latest in an endless list of excuses to mask call avoidance?

At any networking event we risk getting stuck talking to one individual who would keep us there all night, if we allow it.  I will call this person Lizzie Boredom.  If you spend too much time with her, you lose the benefits of having come to event in the first place.  We need to move away from her as quickly as can be done politely.  At all costs, we must get away before we are trapped into sitting next to her through the entire dinner that follows.   Here are some ways to escape her:

The Old Standby

Lizzie Boredom:  Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah . . .

You:  Excuse me, Lizzie.  I need to refresh my drink.

The Socially Connected

Lizzie Boredom:  Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah . . .

You:  Excuse me, Lizzie.  I see someone who I have been trying to reach for a week and I must go talk to her.

The Desperate

Lizzie Boredom:  Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah . . .

You:  Excuse me, Lizzie.  Before dinner starts, I simply must find a restroom.

The Devious

Lizzie Boredom:  Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah . . .

You:  Oh, John, come over here for a second.  You should meet Lizzie Boredom.  Lizzie, this is John.

John:   It’s nice to meet you, Lizzie.

Lizzie Boredom:  Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah . . .

You:  Excuse me, you two.  I see someone I must talk to.

The Deceptive

Lizzie Boredom:  Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah . . .

You (after subtly punching the speed-dial number for your own cell-phone):  Excuse me, Lizzie, but that’s a call I simply must take.

The Direct

Lizzie Boredom:  Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah . . .

You:  Well, Lizzie, I’ve enjoyed talking with you, but must circulate to see some other people before the evening is out.  I look forward to seeing you again at the next of these gatherings.

Slippage refers to the difference in price for a stock between what the investors estimates he will pay and what he actually does pay, due to changes in price that occur during the process of buying. Efficient buying reduces slippage.  It is a concept that applies to selling professional services, too.

There are times when a client or prospective client or network contact is more than usually predisposed to help you.  This can be, for example:

• When you have just finished an excellent piece of work for the client.
• When the prospective client becomes excited about your potential to help him.
• When you have just had a conversation at a conference with a network contact that shows the potential you have for helping each other.

The value of such opportunities fades as time passes.  The client’s desire to help you in return for the excellent work you did ebbs as she gets absorbed by other urgent matters.  The prospective client loses some of the enthusiasm generated at your meeting.  The network contact also forgets the conversation you had as the days go by.

This is one of the reasons that rainmakers feel a sense of urgency about following up.  No matter how busy they are, they find time to follow up on such opportunities, recognizing that all their hard work to produce them loses value as time slips by.

I don’t want to overwork this metaphor.  Following up too eagerly can be construed as desperation or as being mercenary.   But, in my experience, among professionals far more is lost from slippage than from pushing too fast and too hard.  And, of course, I am not suggesting that you give up on an opportunity if a week or three has slipped by before you act.  Better late than never.

Still, as a New Year’s resolution, you could do worse than committing to reduce rainmaking slippage by following up on opportunities while the glow you have created burns brightest.

About a year ago, I ran a post asking how big a business referral network should be.  Steve Shue, always helpful, posted a comment with links to discussions about Dunbar Numbers.  Anthropologist Robin Dunbar hypothesized that a person could maintain around 150 stable relationships.  Other estimates from other studies generally fall in this order of magnitude, though electronic communications may increase the number.

I have thought about Dunbar Numbers ever since and have some observations about them.  First, definitions of “stable” may vary in different circumstances.  For example, an auditor may only count client relationships that last many years as stable, but a professional who does many small projects, say a competitive intelligence consultant, may describe some relationships that last less than five years with the same word.

Second, not all relationships in a network are stable.  We need to sort through several unstable relationships to find each one that becomes stable.  Because the competitive intelligence consultant has a higher turnover rate in his core, stable network, he needs a larger pool of total relationships than the auditor does, in order to winnow through enough unstable relationships to keep sufficient stable ones.  In my experience professionals with evergreen services generally don’t have networks as large as those who sell project work.

Third, when a person first deliberately starts to build a network, she must winnow through a large number of unstable relationships to do so.   Also, in my experience, people building a practice must actively work larger networks than those who are well established.

Fourth, we do not look for stability in every relationship.  It is quite possible to network with a person for a few months or years and then find that mutual benefit from doing so declines.  Networks are full of special cases for special purposes, such as the person an architect networks with to pursue work in a specific distant location once or twice in a career.

All of this is a long way of making the point that to have a good referral network, you probably need to know more people than you think you do.

Being introverted, over the years I have tried a number of tactics to minimize the pain of large networking events.  I have:

• Arrived late to shorten the event.  This proved counterproductive, because mixing is easier if you arrive early and have a small number people talk with than if you arrive late, with the event in full swing and everyone already deeply engaged with each other.
• Stood in a corner waiting for someone to talk with me.  A few did, but the pain between these infrequent chats was unbearable.
• Strode purposefully from place to place, though I really had nowhere to go.  One can only do this for so long, before feeling foolish.
• Latched onto a friend or colleague for the whole event.  This was more comfortable, but defeated the purpose of going in the first-place.
• Wandered around looking for a men’s room other than the one closest to the meeting room.  Knowing where all of the conveniences are in a building that I never enter again has not proved particularly useful.

So eventually, I broke down and learned how to start conversations and mingle with the crowd.  It’s not so hard if you ask questions that keep other people talking.  Most people enjoy being the center of attention and will happily talk away, relieving you of the need to say much or to reveal much about yourself.  Here are some things you can ask about:

• The event, itself. These questions put the other person in the position of being an authority, which most people like.  Examples:  Have you been coming to these meetings for long time?  Do you find them useful?  What is the mix of attendees usually like?
• A shared experience related to the event.  Relationships are based, among other things, on shared experiences, so it doesn’t hurt to start with one.  Examples:  Did you have as much trouble finding this place as I did?  How delayed was your flight getting in last night?  Have you found a way to get within 50 feet of the bar?
• A subject cued up by something the other person is wearing.  These cues often indicate a passion the person will be delighted to talk about.  Examples:  Do those anchors on your tie mean that you are a sailor?  What is the significance of that lapel pin?
• Their companies, as shown on their name tags.  Eventually, you will want to talk about their companies, anyway, so why not start there?  Examples:  How is Trigestis Pharmaceuticals weathering the current storm?  Do you know Duncan Freely or Diana Tucker in your human resources department?  Is Trigestis having as much of a struggle as other pharmaceutical companies coming up with new drugs?
• Sports.  This is a reliable source of conversation for those who share the interest. (I choke on sports conversations.)  Examples:  How about them Bears?  Did you see the game last night?
• An opinion or insights about a subject already under discussion.  If you enter a small-group and find one person dominating conversation, you can draw others in with a question.  They will appreciate someone giving them a chance to break in.  Examples:  Is that true at your company, too, Martin?  Gina, how does it work at your company?  Bill, did you attend that workshop, too?

Questions like these can greatly eased attending networking events.  Asking questions not only makes the event productive for you.  It helps others have a better time, too.

A friend of mine brought me the following problem.  What would you recommend that she do?

I’ve known Mooch (name changed) for many years.  He has implied that he helped meget work at two clients.  In both cases I have strong evidence that others helped me get in, but no direct evidence of Mooch’s help.  Because he is not clearly stated that he helped, I tend to discount the possibility.

I like this man.  He is smart and cheerful.  He also has unusual family obligations which must create great pressure for him.

As a networker, I have stayed in touch with him over the years, checking up on how he is doing, without any sales motive in mind.  Several times he has been out of work and called me for help.  Those are the only times I remember him ever calling me.  He is good at what he does, and I have recommended him to several people who interviewed him.  When I have not been in a position to help, he wheedles, asking me for more introductions repeatedly, if indirectly.

I once said to him that I, too, would like some introductions to potential clients from among the many people he knows.  Nothing was forthcoming, until the last time he came to me for help, when he offered to give me an introduction to a client that I did not think was likely to hire my firm, it was so small.  Then he asked for help finding a job.  I explained to him there was no quid pro quo for my help, just to keep in mind when he was talking with people might benefit from my services.  I then tried to introduce him to someone, who declined for reasons unrelated to Mooch.  He didn’t seem to understand my explanation.

I did not hear back from Mooch for several months.  He left me a message yesterday.  I know he is still looking for work and I know what he wants.  What should I do?

(This is another of a series of Rainmaking Problems.  If you have one that you would like other readers to comment, please send it to me at fharding@HardingCo.com.)