This article is by Mimi Spangler, a partner at Harding & Company.  Some of the material in this posting appears in  the second edition of Ford Harding’s book, Rain Making, which will be published in February and contains about 40 percent new content. 

This is the fourth in a series of eight blog posts on networking for women. These entries originally appeared as an article in Management Consulting News. 4. Plan Gatherings that YOU Enjoy

This article is by Mimi Spangler, a partner at Harding & Company.  Some of the material in this posting appears in  the second edition of Ford Harding’s book, Rain Making, which will be published in February and contains about 40 percent new content. 

This is the third in a series of eight blog posts on networking for women. These entries originally appeared as an article in Management Consulting News.

3. Start Building Your Contacts Early 

Young professionals are often intimidated by the idea of developing new business, and initially relate the task to cold calling senior decision-makers. What they don’t realize is that their existing contacts are the best place for them to start, even if the contacts are not in a position to give them work.

A partner at a large firm told us about an informal neighborhood gathering that catapulted her career. When she had just started working at her firm, she attended a cocktail party hosted by a neighbor, who was a college trustee.

At the party, she talked with the President of the college who commented on an administrative issue he was facing. She said, “When I got back to the office, I researched the issue, sent him a summary and asked him if he would like to meet a senior partner with our firm. The three of us had lunch and he liked the senior partner. After that he hired us and five years later appointed me one of his key advisors. At the time the firm created no pressure to bring in business, but I thought here was an opportunity and went after it. It opened up doors later.”

In addition to personal contacts and school alumni networks, many of the women listed trade associations as their first focus for meeting clients. Younger professionals join trade or industry associations, but many don’t recognize the opportunities for client development.

The CEO of a New England consulting firm related how she built her business from her industry association network. Fresh out of school, she joined a group and became active on a committee. The committee leader took her under his wing and made a point of introducing her to everyone and explaining who they were and why they were important. She became chair of a committee and learned that “if you do volunteer work in an organization with people you want as clients and you do a good job, they will know that you will do a good job if they hire you.”

Another woman rainmaker explained how her network has evolved from industry associations to more senior executives. “Early on I spent a significant amount of time giving speeches to groups of people I hoped would know and remember me. I would ask clients if they were members of an association that would like to have me speak and some would call me to ask if I would. That’s where my first clients came from.

Now I get my clients primarily through referral sources from clients. My target market is senior executives of corporations. It is harder to find opportunities to contact these people and they attend fewer outside meetings, so they are harder to reach with speeches. I try to get invited to meetings at which these people are present, and the firm has meetings to which it invites these people.”
 Mimi Spangler is a partner at Harding & Company, which helps professionals learn to develop business. She has worked with consultants at many firms, both large and small. For more information, visit the company’s web site at http://www.hardingco.com/ and blog at www.hardingco.com/blog. Spangler can be reached at mspangler@hardingco.com.
 

This article is by Mimi Spangler, a partner at Harding & Company. Some of the material in this posting appears in the second edition of Ford Harding’s book, Rain Making, which will be published in February and contains about 40 percent new content.

This is the second in a series of eight blog posts on networking for women. These entries originally appeared as an article in Management Consulting News.

2. Be Yourself All of the women rainmakers emphasized that success depends on not trying to be someone you’re not. Doing what comes naturally as the path of least resistance resonates in both networking and client development approaches.

Maureen Tarantello, who is in charge of account management at Watson Wyatt Worldwide in Chicago, said that she advises women at her firm to continually expand their contacts but to do so in ways that they are comfortable with. She tells them if they enjoy talking to people, do it. If the informality of this approach is painful for them, she suggests that they write articles and find other ways that play to their individual strengths.

Several of the women interviewed said that “being yourself” often translates negatively as being less direct and aggressive than men, and they encourage junior women to project more confidence and directness. Other female personality stereotypes such as being more collaborative, supportive, and helpful were viewed as positive attributes in understanding client issues and proposing the best solution.

Sometimes women rainmakers have approached things in personal ways that help them stand out from the crowd. One woman talked about a male-dominated client outing that she attended. “A group of movers and shakers in the transportation industry were on a yearly casino bus trip. The first year I was invited because of my senior client contacts, I brought margaritas. I had no problem making quick connections with many of the senior decision makers on the trip.”

Mimi Spangler is a partner at Harding & Company, which helps professionals learn to develop business. She has worked with consultants at many firms, both large and small. For more information, visit the company’s web site at http://www.hardingco.com/ and blog at www.hardingco.com/blog. Spangler can be reached at mspangler@hardingco.com.

(This post is adapted from the second edition of Ford Harding’s book Rain Making: Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field, due for publication later this month. It will contain forty percent new content.)

This is how one aspiring rainmaker learned a lesson the hard way.  To understand it, you have to know a little bit about the built environment industry.

On every corporate move from one building to another, and especially to a new site on which the company constructs a new building, a gaggle of firms make their money.  There are building and real estate owners, lawyers, real estate brokers, and flocks of architects; civil, structural, electrical and mechanical engineers; interior designers, endless construction prime and subcontractors, furniture dealers, building material suppliers, and telephone systems suppliers. 

Almost every project requires at least one of each of these categories.  Many moves also require smaller, specialty firms, such as archeologists, moving and elevator and acoustics specialists, and many others.  Not wanting all of this gaggling flock to show up, honking and hissing on their doorstep every day, the company’s real estate managers keep the plans to move a secret for as long as they can.

With so much money at stake, so many kinds of firm and so many firms within each kind, and with so many secrets to figure out, one would expect that there would be well established networks sharing information and introductions.  And there are.

One aspiring rainmaker, working for an engineering firm and trying to develop new business, got wind of a firm planning to move a 50,000 square foot office between suburbs.  This knowledge gave him a chit to offer to a small number people in his market.  He chose to give it to the most successful architect in the region, who achieved this status through his rainmaking prowess.

That architect, whom I will refer to as Thomas, thanked him and took him to lunch at his club, and asked him about his business and the projects the engineer had worked on.  Thomas, an old pro and a charmer, knew all the right questions to ask.  The engineer felt that Thomas would include his firm on one of its pursuit teams in the near future.  He believed he was moving up into big-time business development, and it felt good.

When he learned two weeks later that Thomas had included his competitor on a team pursuing a 100,000 square foot office project, he felt betrayed.  He felt that Thomas had used him to get the 50,000 square foot project and was now dumping him for another engineering firm.

But, that belief was misinformed.  Thomas realized that he owed the engineer and planned to return the help given when the timing was right.  He put the other engineer on the 100,000 square foot project, because his debt to that person was great and went back many years. 

Thomas is what we at Harding & Company refer to as the full-up contact.  Full-up contacts are almost always old hands at networking.  They have huge networks and both give and receive many leads.  It’s hard for a newcomer to break into the full-up contact’s clique for giving and receiving referrals, because to do so, he has to push out an entrench competitor.

The answer is to focus your attentions on other people who are coming up the learning curve as you are.  Catch enough rising stars early in their careers and pretty soon you will be the full-up contact making tough choices about where to dole out your favors.

Does that seem like a long, slow process?  It may be, but to win at networking you have to pay your dues.

This article is by Mimi Spangler, a partner at Harding & Company.  Some of the material in this posting appears in  the second edition of Ford Harding’s book, Rain Making, which will be published in February and contains about 40 percent new content.  

This is the first in a series of eight blog posts on networking for women. These entries originally appeared as an article in Management Consulting News.

Becoming a rainmaker gives a consultant three coveted advantages: respect from one’s peers, high earnings, and job control. To find out how women rainmakers optimize networking to support their business development endeavors, we interviewed women who have risen to the executive management ranks in leading consulting firms such as Deloitte Consulting, Watson Wyatt Worldwide, Oliver Wyman, Navigant Consulting, RHR International, and others.

Our findings are summarized in this series of blog posts with the top eight ways women rainmakers network.

1. Create a Peer Group

Most women rainmakers reported that they don’t target women who have connections. Their closest and strongest networks include friendships built on a common framework, which often started from personal rather than business interests.

Jocelyn Cunningham, Securities Leader for Deloitte Consulting, said that one of her closest networks is an intimate group of senior-level women focused on Wall Street. She said, “I initially was intimidated to network with men. I didn’t want to golf and I found myself waiting for the invite to events versus inviting myself. I was comfortable with this group of women. We had things in common like work/life balance, childcare, and glass ceiling issues. Our group has formed strong personal and business relationships which have grown by sharing common challenges and professional interests.”

Christina Williams was Managing Director for an international human resource consulting firm and now has her own firm, Atiara Group. She explained that her primary network of contacts evolved from her feeling isolated as a woman and working mom in a male-dominated leadership group.

Williams started her network with one outside consultant who shared similar life and professional issues. They invited other colleagues to join their informal breakfast meetings. The group initially met four times per year. Now it has over 150 consultants and clients and meets every six weeks. About 30 people show up for the two-hour meetings.

While being senior management women forged their initial bond, the result of their network has been peer camaraderie, referrals, and work for their firms. The women in this and similar groups all share a common goal to help and support each other.

Surprisingly though, a significant number of the women interviewed said that they don’t use their closest networks for direct business development. The value of those networks is primarily peer friendships, with work referrals ranking significantly behind that.

Many of the large consulting firms have recognized this need for women’s peer support, and are giving more attention to establishing internal women’s networking groups that foster relationships built on common interests and challenges.
 Mimi Spangler is a partner at Harding & Company, which helps professionals learn to develop business. She has worked with consultants at many firms, both large and small. For more information, visit the company’s web site at http://www.hardingco.com/ and blog at www.hardingco.com/blog. Spangler can be reached at mspangler@hardingco.com.

Publishing articles is one way to build your reputation as an expert. In an earlier posting (Hey! That’s Going Too Far), I described a formula for producing an article efficiently. Here is another.

Anecdotes attach to professionals the way that burs do to dogs. Each project a professional works on gets reduced to one or more anecdotes used to show prospective clients the depths of her experience, teach a lesson, or entertain a colleague. You can put your anecdotes to one more use as the material around which you write an article. I call this the Four-Stories Formula (unless there are only three stories, in which case I call it the . . . Can you guess?).

Many years ago, a colleague and I wrote an article entitled “Secrecy in Site Searches, Is It Necessary?” using such a formula. The article explored the need for secrecy when a company sought a location for a new plant or office.

The first paragraph questioned the need. Four anecdotes followed, each describing a problem that resulted from discovery of a company’s plans. Each anecdote described the kind of operation being located, the way the company’s identity and plans were discovered and the consequences. Each case illustrated a different consequence; escalating real estate prices, political pressure to select a suboptimal location, labor problems and . . . I no longer remember the fourth outcome. A final paragraph concluded that, yes, secrecy is necessary. A sidebar listed things the site seeker had to do to ensure his identity remained unknown.

It was a simple piece for a trade magazine, but we knew it was spreading our reputation as experts when, before we could give it to them, clients showed up for site visits with us with the checklist from the sidebar in hand.

The formula can be adapted to almost any area of professional practice. For example, an article could be built around people’s changing circumstances and how they resulted in the need to revise their wills. Another could show how different building conditions result in different ways to reduce energy consumption.

For additional examples of short pieces using this formula see the postings Two Tales from Toronto, Opportunistic Rainmaking and Getting It.

Watch out for competitors when you‘re networking with executives and other decision-makers. They may try to lure you into the “restaurant gambit” (similar to the hotel and vacation gambit) in an attempt to show what an unsophisticated bumpkin you are.

The restaurant gambit is a way to determine people’s status, financial and cultural, by their knowledge of expensive and trendy restaurants. It can be used offensively to embarrass anyone who isn’t a sophisticated foodie. It goes something like this:

Competitor: We went to Fruit Cocktail last night. Have either of you been? (The faux British construction ending the sentence with been, instead of the American, been there, wins the competitor one point. A second point goes for knowing of about Fruit Cocktail. You, of course, don’t even know it’s a restaurant and are about to say that the last thing you saw was The Lion King, when, mercifully, the executive speaks before you can embarrass yourself. This keeps you from being routed in the opening round. You do sense that you are being dragged into something involving high stakes, but you can’t put your finger on what it is, yet.)

Executive: We went the first time about three months ago. What did you think of it? (The executive shows his skill at the gambit by scoring three quick points with a single short sentence, one each for knowing of the restaurant first, for knowing it before it became trendy and for having been there more than once. Someone skilled at the gambit might also observe that he is laying a snare for the competitor. You aren’t consequential enough for him to worry about.)

Competitor: Oh, it was marvelous! And the wine list! We had a bottle of Resueou Garage for only $175! (Two points, one for the seemingly faultless pronunciation of the name and the other for showing that he’ll drop $175 on a bottle of wine. But he has also stepped squarely into the trap, which the executive now springs.)

Executive: We were a little disappointed. We had heard so much about the possum l’orange, but found it a bit gamey. (A point scored for daring to try the possum. Knowing the restaurant better, the exec’s opinion counts more than the competitor’s. The competitor loses a point for liking the restaurant more than he should. With the first two rounds complete, the exec and has a one-point lead over the competitor, while you are still stumbling around to understand what is going on. Whatever it is, it doesn’t feel good be so lost in the exec’s presence.)

Competitor: And it certainly doesn’t compare with the old Toto’s House, as they say it does. (Having just lost a point for saying that he liked a restaurant that the executive doesn’t, he suddenly realizes how crafty and skilled the executive is. He recovers quickly by showing his awareness of old Toto’s House. Seeking to displace his embarrassment at coming in second onto someone else and sensing that you are defenseless, he turns to you.) Which restaurants do you enjoy?

You: With two small children, we don’t get out much. China Joe’s has a great takeout menu. (You hope this will get a laugh, and the executive seems amused. Even so, you know you have had a thrashing and flee as soon as good manners allow.)

Does this sound familiar to you? If you were ever caught in a restaurant gambit, how did you handle it?

Salesopedia is featuring my article “Networking Tips for Introverts” on their home page and newsletter this week. The direct link to the article is here.

Tracking down and talking to people you went to school with or worked with earlier in your life can be great fun and generate leads for lots of new business.

This is even more true of old clients. One person I know had consulted to a financial services mega corporation for years, when a sudden change in the CEO put most of his contacts at the company on the street looking for work. He stayed in touch with about ten of the most senior ones who quickly found jobs in other organizations. Three of these brought his firm in with them.

Three years later he took a look at a list of other people he had known at the mega corporation who were no longer there and with whom he had lost touch. He tracked down fifteen more. One of them bought $1,000,000 worth of services this year. The ballot is out on many of the others.

Finding old contacts is easier that it has ever been, because of the power of the Internet. Lifehacker.com has just posted an article entitled, How to Track Down Anyone on Line. This is a valuable source for finding people whom you have misplaced over the years.

But, before we give in and do it the easy way, let’s be sure it is the best way. In the old days (just yesterday, if you are my age), finding a lost contact often meant calling mutual friends who might know where she had gone. You might have to contact three people before finding someone who knew where the contact could be found.

Not as efficient as a Google search, it provided a wonderful excuse to call other people with whom you wanted to reconnect. You can call up someone you haven’t talked with for years and say, “Remember me. I know it’s been too long since we last talked. I was trying to track down Bev Binder and thought you might know how to reach her. But first, how have things been going for you since we last talked?”

In a recent posting, Reasons for Calling, I mentioned that having an adequate reason for calling is a challenge for most professionals just starting out to develop new business. Here is a readymade reason for calling lots of dormant contacts. Don’t let new technology seduce you away from taking advantage of it.

Rainmakers in their prime advise the most powerful people in the corporate world: the CEOs, Presidents, CFOs and other c-suite executives. These people can authorize projects with little more than the flick of the wrist to sign a contract. If they like you, they can dispense with competition with a wave and they can refer you to their friends working in c-suites in other companies.

We would all like to get people of that caliber into our networks, but the task is daunting. Ask an executive about his children, and you learn that the kids are ten years older than you are. Ask about his vacation and you learn that he was flown by private helicopter into the furthest reaches of Kamtchatka, or whatever the latest prestige holiday destination is. You will dread the inevitable question that follows, “where did you take yours?” to which you must answer, “the Jersey Shore.”

Still, there are ways to network with c-suite executives that can spare you embarrassment, and rainmakers have discovered them. Here are three for networking with executives you know from your client work.

Invite the executive and spouse to a charity, civic or cultural event. This will be neutral ground where the difference in your age, power and means are not relevant. To increase the chances of the executive accepting, pick a big event where she will be able to meet some of her peers. Even if the executive declines, you can hardly be faulted for making this kind of invitation. (See Jane’s Lunch, or A Lesson in Dominos Networking.)

Provide volunteer support for an organization she is active in. A little research will tell you what organizations the executive devotes her time to. If you have interest in the cause, volunteer and help her further her goals there. You must avoid seeming commercial during your volunteer hours, so this approach requires patience and diligence.

Ask for mentoring. Instead of trying to work around the differences in age, experience, and wealth between yourself and the executive, use them to your advantage. Ask for some career advice. Many older people like the mentor role. Follow up the mentoring meeting with a thank you note, which specifies the value you took from it.

Of course, time is the long term solution to building your network of senior executives. Bringing a few into your network early by using these techniques will hasten the process.