It happened again! For the third time in so many weeks someone has told me that she is so loaded with work that she is reluctant to call former clients to keep the relationship warm. She fears that they will ask her to take on an assignment that she will have to decline for want of time. This fear is a sure sign of a peak economy.

It wasn’t long ago we were all hoping that someone would ask us for help. Short of work, we swore we would stay in touch with former clients, not letting the relationship go cold again. How quickly the world changes! How quickly we forget!

A glut of anything reduces its value, as any economist will tell you. Leads simply aren’t as precious as they once were, causing us to lose interest in the call and meeting routines and other lead generation efforts.. How quickly we forget that the calls and meetings we have today aren’t so likely to surface immediate requests for our services. Rather, they maintain relationships with those who may seek our services six months or a year from now, or perhaps in the more distant future. And who knows what the economy will be like then?

A downturn will come as surely as the sun sets in the evening. When it does, the clients who still have work to give out will give most of it to the professionals with whom they have a warm relationship. And it’s hard to have a relationship with someone you never talk to.

Rainmakers know this and make their calls and have their meetings in good times and in bad. One rainmaker I know had all the cases his twenty-person practice was working on cancel over the two weeks that followed September 11, 2001. By the first of November, he had his entire staff redeployed on new assignments for these same clients. There aren’t many professionals who could do that. Because he did it, he didn’t have to lay off any staff in the recession that followed. His team sailed through the downturn which put some firms out of business and resulted in layoffs and reduced bonuses at most. With a full team, he could grow faster than competitors during the following recovery and has reaped huge rewards. Without deep client relationships, he couldn’t have pulled this off.

More calls, anyone?

Last week my contact management software reminded me to call Lois. She is the logical point of contact at a firm where I would like to do business. I have known Lois for five years and her boss for six. Over those years I have made 25 calls to one or the other of them, and exactly five have been returned. The last time I spoke with Lois, she informed me that they were working with a competitor. That was almost three years ago. Since then all efforts to contact Lois and her boss by phone have gone into a void. A few e-mails lobbed in for variety have also received no response.

What should I do? What would you do?

The answer, of course, depends on the reason my calls have gone unreturned. A little voice inside me says that Lois and her boss want nothing to do with me. But I have learned through many years of experience that it is the voice of my own insecurities. More probably, they find us too expensive and are uncomfortable saying so. Or they realize that my calls are not urgent and treat them as such. Or they are just busy. Still, three years is a long time. Whatever the reason, I have little enthusiasm for making the call. Another little voice inside me says that this is a waste of time, that nothing will ever come of calling these people. Once again, experience responds, cautioning me that one more call will cost me little, to which the first little voice says that a time comes to give up and refocus one’s energies elsewhere.

My deliberations were interrupted, and I put off deciding what to do.
This is a true story about a client I have been pursuing, except Lois’s name came up on my tickler file a couple of months ago, not last week. I did call and this time Lois called me back to invite me to pitch on some work. There was only one competitor and our chances of winning were good. Today she called to give us the go ahead.

I have many such stories after 30 years of business development. Over the years I have learned that an unreturned phone call means that someone did not return my call and little more. Others reinforce this belief. Christy Williams, a friend of mine, ran into a contact she had been trying to reach for months, leaving many messages. All her calls went unreturned. When she met the man at a conference, he greeted her enthusiastically saying that he had recently referred her to a prospective client. She thanked him and said, “Let’s stay in touch.” “What do you mean?” he responded, “We’ve been in touch.” He equated her unreturned phone calls with their being in touch.

A big part of rain making is persistence. Still, several times a week a name comes up on my tickler system of someone who has not responded to previous calls. And still, after all these years, the little voice inside me says to give up, that it is not worth the effort, that the person doesn’t like me and doesn’t want to talk with me. It is by learning to override that voice that I have become successful.

Actuaries and engineers aren’t known for their sales ability. They are seen as an introverted lot, more comfortable crunching numbers than with the kind of socializing that selling requires. Though there is limited truth to this stereotype, we have found that some actuaries and engineers quickly become effective business developers. This is true of some quite introverted and technical ones. Some outperform professionals one might expect to have greater interpersonal skill and so more of a sales bent, such as strategy consultants or executive recruiters. Some become rainmakers.

Professionals are smart people and run the risk of confusing understanding with mastery. Once they understand something, they want to move quickly to the next challenge. Though understanding may equal mastery in some areas, it’s not true of selling. Selling is a performing art, more like playing the piano. Understanding how a piano works is easy, but mastery requires practice. It requires going back to basics again and again. Engineering and actuarial sciences require a similar discipline. While there is room for creativity, rigorous attention to procedure is also essential if the actuary is to make sure that his numbers add up and the engineer that his bridge won’t fall down. They aren’t above doing routine and repetitive activities.

Selling requires meeting and a call discipline, which is also based on routine and repetitive effort. Some groups, which are perceived to be more dynamic than actuaries and engineers, are put off by such routines or feel compelled to vary and reinvent them. They require constant mental stimulation, if they are to remain engaged. Lacking that, they quickly abandoned their efforts. But the actuary and engineer keep at it, with a routine of calls and meetings, which eventually leads to a sale.

Let’s hear it for old fashioned hard work and those willing to do it to find a new client!