There is a good post by Julie Fleming on working a holiday party. If there is a party in your future you might well find it helpful.

The other day, while I was describing the importance of having a large network, a client interrupted me to say that he didn’t need one, his work coming from about five people. It’s hard to argue with success, so let’s look at the difference between his view of selling professional services and mine.

Big networks tend to bifurcate into primary and secondary networks. Primary networks range between fifteen and thirty people and contain those people with whom the opportunity to give and receive is greatest.  Secondary networks encompass everyone else, with whom ties are weaker.

The theory of the strength of weak ties, first proposed by Mark Granovetter, states that opportunities come disproportionately from secondary networks.  Granovetter studied people looking for jobs through their networks.  They would start by calling on the members of their primary networks.  But as the job search ran on, the value of information from this group diminished, because the primary network members usually knew each other and had access to the same information.

In contrast, the secondary network members gathered information from their primary network members, people the job seeker didn’t know.  So, their information tended to be fresh.  Job seekers usually found jobs through this fresh well of information and introductions.  Primary network contacts helped by introducing the job seekers to their secondary network members.

We don’t want to read more into this study than it warrants. The point is this: As the term implies, referral networks are made up of people who refer their contacts to each other.  Primary contacts in such markets are extra sets of eyes and ears out looking for opportunities for you and you for them.

In contrast, my client has four or five contacts who give him lots of work. As valuable to him as they are, they do not constitute a referral network.  They hire him, rather than refer him.

So what, you might well ask.  Well, work from these sources increases or decreases in volume in ways beyond my client’s control.  One by one, they will eventually leave the market.  If my client wants to expand his business, he must go out and find additional buyers.  As his relationships are currently functioning, they won’t help him do this.  So, he will have to find them through some other means.  And that’s where he’s going to be at a disadvantage relative to someone with a big network.

The power of a network increases geometrically over time, if you maintain and grow it.  A person who has built up a network of 500 people over ten years, most of them secondary network contacts, has a much easier time generating opportunities than one who has built a network of only 20 over the same period.  (There are several reasons why this is true.  See Chapter 2 in my book, Creating Rainmakers, and Chapter 25 in Rain Making-2nd Edition for explanations.)  My client may be able to pursue his approach successfully for his career.  But I’ll put my money on the person with a large network every time.  The numbers work heavily in her favor.

Here is another of the rainmaking problems that I offer as topics for discussion. It’s one that I hate! I hope you will leave a comment with your thoughts on a solution to this problem.

I hate it! I just hate it! But someone always asks how big their network should be. It is a perfectly fair question. But I hate it, because my answer is so lame. It’s lame, because I simply don’t know. My fumbling answers usually start with, “That depends. On the one hand …” and are, at best, unconvincing. The other one I hear, “bigger than yours is now,” stinks of condescension.

It’s not only a fair question, it’s a good one. To be effective, networks need some bulk, because as a network grows, its power grows geometrically. Conceptually, at least, once your network reaches an optimum size, you can shift your focus to increasing its quality.

A few sizing parameters seem reasonable. If you sell a regularly recurring service, like accounting audits, your network needn’t be as big as the one needed if you sell a nonrecurring service. People who sell a lot of small projects need bigger networks than those who sell fewer, larger ones. Factors like these suggest that there isn’t one answer for all situations.

For the purposes of this discussion, a person’s active network will be defined as those business people with whom he or she has had personalized contact within the past six months in meetings, by phone or in writing (mass (e)mailings don’t count unless you have added a personalized note).

It would be interesting to learn any of the following:

• Research done on the effects of referral network sizes on their productivity. (There has probably been some.)

• Guidelines or methodologies for determining optimum network size. (There is a good chance that these don’t exist, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.)

• Your experiences with different sizes of networks. (Were there any tipping points or other indications that something significant had changed. Please note the kind of services you offer.)

I think this request is unusually difficult, so please don’t be shy about impressions, opinions and general comments on the subject. You can’t be doing any worse with this one than I am.

(Got a problem selling professional services? Feel free to email me your problem and it may become a future “Rainmaking Problem.”)

In an earlier post I listed seven things to remember when dealing with executives’ secretaries. Here are some things you can do to put that knowledge to use:

• Keep your goal aligned with hers and remind her that this is the case by saying things like, “I want to make sure that I use [your boss’s] time well.”

• Let her help you achieve this shared goal by seeking her advice. “I sense from talking to some of my contacts in the company that x is an issue in several parts of the organization. Do you know if he feels that way? Do you think he might be open to talking about it?”

• Keep your goal aligned with hers and remind her that this is the case by saying things like, “I want to make sure that I use [your boss’s] time well.”Let her help you achieve this shared goal by seeking her advice. “I sense from talking to some of my contacts in the company that x is an issue in several parts of the organization. Do you know if he feels that way? Do you think he might be open to talking about it?”

• Also, seek her judgment. “If you wouldn’t mind, I will send the email to you first, and if you don’t think it would interest him, please don’t forward it to him. I don’t want to waste his time.” “I am planning to bring our tax specialist with me, unless you sense that [your boss] would rather meet one-on-one. What do you think?”

• Show gratitude and interest. Verbal thank-yous, thank you notes, notes to a administrative assistant’s boss commending her, and flowers are all ways to show your appreciation for help. Praise will mean more if specific rather than general. (“Your advice on x saved hours of work, helping us meet the tight schedule.”) Equally important are showing interest in her children and spouse, and in her health and well-being as you would any other business friend.

Assistants to executives want to help their bosses use time productively and efficiently. They can help you do the same if you give them a chance.

One way to advance a relationship with a contact is to help him, and few kinds of help are more appreciated than help to the contact’s child who is looking for a job.  It may be a summer job or a first full-time job.  But it’s urgent for the job seeker and a source of concern for the parent, whose advice isn’t always welcome at this stage in the child’s life.

Helping out can be fun for you, too, if you like to help young people come along in the world.  Here are five ways you can help a child.  Five more will published in a later post.

1. Provide a tour of your firm.  Learning how a business works fascinates most of us and more so, the young and inexperienced.  Of course, an architect’s office, with its models and drawings is easier to show off than is an actuary’s office.  But, properly explained, most businesses are interesting.

2. Provide them with information on your profession.  Most people just entering the workforce know little about a profession. The internet doesn’t provide a basic mapping of the major players in the profession, the kinds of specialties a person can pursue, typical career paths and much else.  A session during which you go over such things can speed up their job search.

3. Help them set realistic expectations.  Most young people go into their job searches with little idea about how to interpret what then happens.  They are hurt, angered and discouraged by unreturned phone calls, expect—briefly—every resume they send to get a response and have dozens of other misconceptions that can slow down their search.  One young man came to me devastated after learning that the first company he had interviewed with had hired someone else.  “That’s a good thing,” I pointed out.  “If you aren’t being told no from time to time, it means you aren’t out talking to enough people.”  A month later I overheard him with a friend, joking, “I got turned down twice this week, so I feel twice as good as I did then.”  They were laughing rather than moaning.  By helping them interpret what is happening during their job search, you teach them a lesson valuable for a lifetime.

4. Edit a resume.  Most young people are inexperienced at writing resumes.  A little help from an experienced professional can greatly enhance most resumes that they write.

5. Provide an introduction.  Introduce them to people you know who might be hiring or who might provide them with additional introductions or information on the profession.

(Blogger Bizze Guye has tagged me to comment on warming up cold calls as one participant in a meme. For other contributors go to his site.

Cold calls, sales meetings at your request with someone you have never met, are universally loathed in the professions. But they can be effective, especially because they offer direct access to a prospective client of your choice. No other technique I know of does that. When in hot pursuit of an opportunity that will go to someone else, unless you move quickly, a cold call may be your best shot.

Of course, you would be crazy not to warm it up, if you can.

1. Market Like Crazy: A major goal of your firm’s marketing effort is to build its brand, a market awareness of what you do well. Developing a brand takes time, so start now and cold calling will be easier a year or two from now. I still remember the first cold call I made on a person who had one of my books and had heard of me from two people. I was so much easier than any I had made before.

2. Ask for an Introduction: If someone introduces you to the prospective client, the temperature of the meeting starts about ten degrees warmer than if you go it alone. People with large networks can almost always identify some who knows who will provide an introduction. The ability to do so frequently is a hallmark of rainmakers.

3. Identify Someone You Know in Common: During the small talk which precedes the meeting, see if you can identify someone whom both the client and you know. Say a few nice words about someone you both admire and you can almost feel the warming up of most relationships. Rainmakers, with their big networks, are good at this.

4. Use the Client’s Time Well: The client is a busy person and probably feels she is doing you a favor by meeting with you. Do your homework so that you focus discussions on something of interest to her. If you can, call someone who works for her or some higher in the organization, who knows you well enough to tell you about the client and her interests.

5. Keep up the Relationship: Find reasons to stay in front of the client from time to time, so that the relationship continues to build and so each call you make is warmer than the last.

For more on this subject, including a description of how to get and conduct a cold call meeting, see Chapter 7, “Eliminating the Dread of Cold Calls,” in my book, Rain Making-2nd Edition—Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field.

(Now I am tagging John Caddell of Caddell Insight Group and Ian Brodie of Lighthouse Consulting to write a post about warming up cold calls.)

Sometimes we want to ask a favor, but feel awkward doing so.  Perhaps we don’t know the person well or they’ve already done a lot for us, so asking for more might seem greedy.  Whatever the reason, you don’t want to put the other person on the spot with a direct request.

Sometimes you can resolve the problem by asking indirectly.  Words you can use for this purpose include:

Can I ask you for some advice?
Could I ask you for a little mentoring?

To be asked for advice or mentoring is a compliment, the person asked being attributed superior knowledge, judgment or experience.  Also the person asked has great latitude in choosing a response.  She can spend ten minutes or an hour with you.  She can simply give you a few words to the wise or open her contact list to you.

Sometimes a contact will help beyond the expectations of the person making the request. Gabriela, an executive recruiter, ran into a former client at a conference and asked him for some mentoring on business development.  He immediately began introducing her to other people he knew at the conference, describing her work as a recruiter in ways that would have sounded immodest coming from her.

Caution!  Do not use this approach indiscriminately. If it is seen as simply a ruse to get introductions, the contact will feel you are being manipulative as opposed to tactful.  Only use these words with someone whose advice or mentoring you would legitimately value.  That way you won’t come across as false.  If all you come away with from the conversation is some good advice, you should be thankful.  After all, that is all you asked for.

“These are the times that try men’s souls,” wrote Thomas Paine at a low point in this nation’s fight for independence.  That famous sentence might be translated for use in the current revenue crisis that many professional practices will face over the next year as “In this time of crisis for our clients and their companies, our character as friends and our grit as rainmakers are determined.”

Rainmakers build referral networks made up of clients and other influential people.  By the implicit contract of networking, you and your network of contacts do what you can for each other, looking out for each other’s well being, helping each other advance careers or sell work.  In short, you are friends, even if it is a strictly business friendship.

Some, perhaps many, of these contacts now face a career crisis.  Will you be there for them in this time of need?  Or will you be so wrapped in your own crisis that you lose track of theirs?  Even if you can’t steer them to someone who can hire them, you can still give moral support by calling and showing interest in them when, perhaps, few others do.  You don’t want to be what Thomas Paine would have called a summer soldier or consultant Michael Shays calls a teabag friend (one who only calls when in hot water.)

Your rainmaking grit will also be tested, because you will have to work twice as hard to win less work than you sold before.  You have to get out in front of more people, pursue more false leads and find more dead ends to win enough work to keep your people busy.  These are the times that rainmakers try their soles, as it were, because they use up more shoe leather going from meeting to meeting.

You will read advice in this blog and in other places about where to look for business in hard times.  As good as this advice may be, work will be scarce and winning it will be hard.  In a recession, rainmaking is composed of 80% grit, 15% empathy and 5% for everything else.

Does LinkedIn offer any value when it comes to selling professional services? In his blog Contrarian Consulting Million Dollar Consulting author Alan Weiss writes “This is a mild diversion with limited utility for serious entrepreneurs and consultants in a world where time is a non-renewable resource. Worse, it has created a cultish behavior among many of its adherents who see the leaf and not the tree or the forest.”

As you can imagine, it’s been a controversial post, generating lots of comments.

I responded to Alan that the biggest problem with social networks is that trust, necessary for a good relationship, doesn’t travel well over the Ethernet. A number of my clients have found LinkedIn quite helpful by overcoming this limitation under certain conditions.

Many have found signing people up a good way to rekindle old relationships. By agreeing to link the contact implies openness to a networking relationship. Here trust was established before any linkage through LinkedIn.

Some, who have local markets, use LinkedIn to identify people they want to know and then seek introductions through a mutual contact identified by the system. These people then meet the new contact for breakfast or lunch, broken bread being a superior medium for developing trust.

These are but two examples. In all cases, those who get a lot out of LinkedIn put a lot into it. No surprise there.

I do believe that “there is a pony in there somewhere,” if you know the old joke. If enough people work at it, some will find ways to make use of what is a phenomenal data base of relationships. But it’s not for everyone.

Alan didn’t agree.

How about you, has LinkedIn helped you network? Do you put much time or effort into it?

(Read Alan’s post Weak Link and all its comments here.)

Guest Blogger:  Gary Pines

We attend events: association meetings, conferences, seminars, and charity dinners.  We go for many reasons, and high among them is to meet more people whom we can add to our network be they prospective clients or influencers

Too often, after leaving the event, we realize we have failed to come away with quality new contacts or reasons to follow up with those we did meet.  Why does this happen? Often because we don’t prepare sufficiently.  At other times, it’s because we simply go with the flow of the meeting instead of actively seeking out those we want to meet.  Like any other performing art, working a room requires practicing the basics, again and again.  Basics, in this context, aren’t just for beginners.  Professional performers review them, too.

I have coached groups of professionals on how to try to get the most out of an event they are about to attend.  One group was determined to get a return for time and money they would expend on an evening event.  They arrived early, met the staff and even helped set up.  They met the other early attendees who had no one else to speak with.  As they moved on from attendee to attendee, they worked it like professionals, especially compared to their competitors who were standing around talking to each other.  And it all paid off.  By the end of the event, each professional had:
 
·  three to five quality people to follow-up with,
·  gained a lot of confidence and comfort with the process, and
·  had fun doing it.

So what should you do to get this kind of result:

1. Arrive early. Meet the staff and ask if you can help them.  You may want to follow-up with them. Plus, they can introduce you to people you want to meet and brief you on logistics of the evening.  Often, name tags are arrayed on a table, so you can see who else is attending.

2. Start working the room early. Meet the first attendees. They will have no one else to talk to, so that you have a better chance to get to know them than you will those who come late.

3. Break into conversations in a professional manner. 

a)       Look for these opportunities:

1)       The Lone Ranger:  Anyone standing by himself is usually delighted when someone approaches to talk.

2)       The V Stance:   When two people are talking and have opened a path by forming a “V” with their bodies, they are asking for you to come and join them.

b)       Try these techniques:

1)       Make Eye Contact:  Look people in the eye as you walk by.  If they respond with eye contact even briefly, it means you can begin a conversation.

2)       Get in Line: Find a line, almost any line, and get in it.  Whether it’s the sign-in line, the line to the bar or to the buffet, the people immediately in front and in back of you will gladly talk.

3)       Stand Near the Entrance:  Stand by the entrance where everyone comes in, have a smile on your face and many people will talk with you.

4)       Break Bread:  Once seated, talk with the people on either side of you, and try to get the whole table into a conversation.  If it is a buffet, you can of then move to a different table for each course.  (Also, see posting, Three Ways to Get a Good Seat.)

3)       Ask questions:  Start a conversation with a question, or with a short statement immediately followed by a question: “What brings you to this great event.”  or  “I’m John Smith and have come by to meet you.  I was hoping you could tell me a little about . . .” or “Do you know much about the guest speaker?”  Continue to ask question with an eye to learning about the other people.  Learn about them! 

4)       Determine follow-ups:  While talking with people, determine whom you would want to follow-up with. Listen intently to these people, listening especially for some excuse to follow up with them.  Then exchange cards and comment on continuing the conversation at another time.
So … prepare and be proactive. 

You invest a lot of your time to attend at event, so work it hard to get a decent return on that investment.