According to Gary Pines, a Principal at Harding & Co., we are in the Era of Rainmaking. Effective sales skills are an essential component of an executive’s business toolkit as well as a key determinant of career advancement. Gary speaks with Life, Optimized about how you can become a better sales professional.

Gary’s interview provides specific steps for evaluating your sales pipeline, building relationships and transforming relationships into economic value. The interview also provides viewers with tips on engaging with prospective clients, prioritizing listening and learning about a client’s needs over pitching them a service, and the importance of asking for the business. Rainmaking is no longer just the province of sales professionals, and Gary’s interview reminds us that all executives can be successful at selling. Watch the interview on Life, Optimized to learn more.

Life, Optimized is brought to you by Dignitas, a multi-family office. The site is a compilation of the latest trends and issues affecting the personal lives and careers of successful executives and entrepreneurs. If you have a great idea for our next interview, let us know by signing up at www.lifeoptimized.me/contact.

Here is the link to the interview:

http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=290a1f1e6be3d91a582b217f9&id=61fb94343c

You don’t have to pay your staff tons to market!  While it has to be fair, it doesn’t drive all behavior.  We have found the same.  Hay Group’s recent study on “Three incentives that actually work” captures this point to some degree.  The article will make you step back and reflect – - are we doing that?  Follow this link for the study:  http://www.bizfilings.com/blog/index.php/2011/02/01/three-incentives-that-actually-work/

Technical professionals chose college majors that are highly analytical and shied away from more customer-facing fields such as business or marketing oftentimes because they never wanted to sell anything.  In life, being perverse, these professionals are then confronted with their greatest fear as they approach their peak earning years.  They are told by firm leaders that they must sell to advance to the ranks of Partner.  The thought of selling gives many seasoned professionals significant angst.  This angst is a result of their association with sales being opportunistic, pushy and deceptive.  Reframing this association with selling to be more synonymous with helping is the first step towards building acceptance of the tasks required to be effective at business development.  The earlier in a professionals development that you can reframe a negative sales perception, the sooner the professional will begin exhibiting effective business development behaviors.  In the next two blog posts we will share some ways to do this but also wanted to solicit our readers to share their experiences with this too.

In numerous earlier posts (such as Seeing Events Through a Rainmaker’s Eyes, Part 1 and Part 2), I have observed that rainmakers are positive thinkers.  Things we see as bad, such as being stood up for a meeting, they see as neutral or even positive.  (When someone stands you up, it often creates a small chit that you can collect later.)  Things we see as neutral, such as an extra attendee at a client meeting, they may see as positive.  Positive thinking gives them a resilience that allows them to get up and try again and yet again until they win.

This all may sound Pollyanna-ish, but it’s not.  When interviewing people who have observed rainmakers, they often note the rainmakers’ optimism, sometimes mentioning in a tone of mild surprise that the rainmakers’ optimism often proved to be well-founded.  The rainmakers’ positive outlook is shaped and reinforced through experience.  They know not to take an unreturned phone call too seriously, because they’ve had to deal with so many of them.

When rainmakers apply their optimism foolishly, they are as likely to get hurt as anyone else.  Our data base of rainmakers includes several who went bankrupt through misplaced optimism, often in the form of a real estate deal.  Confident that they would sell boatloads of new work, they signed leases for space to accommodate all of the employees they would have to hire to do it.  When the work didn’t appear, they were stuck with the real estate costs.

I make this point for two reasons.  First, it is a caution to rainmakers and those who work with them to question the rainmakers’ optimism, if they seem to be applying it to areas beyond their expertise or to be brushing off the risk of catastrophic consequences, if they prove to be wrong.

My second reason for making this point is to deter anyone inclined to use a colleague’s negative thinking as a brickbat to beat them with.  I’ve had this done to me earlier in my career and seen it done to others.  Branding someone has a negative thinker and berating them for it is a loathsome and ineffective form of bullying.  There is a place for negative thinking in an organization, and when appropriately applied, should be encouraged and rewarded.  When misapplied, the reaction should be education, not derision.  For those interested in this subject, I recommend Martin Seligman’s excellent book, Learned Optimism.  (I have no financial interest in the sale of this book.  I do have a financial interest in the sale of my book, Creating Rainmakers, which also addresses the subject, but decline to recommend it out of modesty and fear of being hauled into court by the blog police.)

A participant at an Association of Management Consulting Firms (AMCF) workshop asked if it is possible to create rainmakers.  This is a frequent enough question that I decided to address it here.  As the author of a book entitled Creating Rainmakers and as a person who makes his living by helping professionals learn how to bring in business, I have an obvious bias.  Still, my colleagues at Harding & Company and I, have as much experience in this area as anyone, and so ought to have something to say on the subject.

So, my answer is yes, but one’s success at creating rainmakers will depend on the following:

• The desire of the professional to learn.  This desire, of course, must come from the individual professional, but there are things a firm can do to influence that desire.  For example, it is harder to create rainmakers at a firm where all of the heroes are technical experts, creatives or other deliverers of the firm’s services, than it is at one where business origination skill is highly respected.  It is easier to create rainmakers at firms which celebrate, even in small ways, the winning of a new assignment than at those where it is treated as a non-event.
• The earlier in the professional’s career that she is made aware that business origination is expected of every senior person in firm.  Those who, after years of working for a firm, find out to their shock that professional firms, like any other business, must sell have a harder time learning how to do it than those advised from the earliest days in their careers that they will have to sell to advance to partner.
• The ability of the professional to learn by winning small assignments before having to win big, more complex ones.  The professional who must bring in $30 million assignments from day one has a harder time than one who can start small.  At many of today’s big firms, partners learned to bring in business years ago when the firms were smaller and willing to take smaller assignments from much smaller clients than they work with now.  The young professionals coming up underneath them must go straight into major league play, a tougher requirement.
• The flexibility of a professional’s personality.  I would much rather work with an introvert who can flex his behavior to act like an extrovert when needed or an extrovert who can act like an introvert than with either an inflexible introvert or extrovert.

There are also some things that don’t make much difference.  The profession in question is one.  Yes, you may have a chance of creating more rainmakers from a randomly selected group of executive recruiters than from a randomly selected group of actuaries, but the distinction has little relevance in fact, because actuarial firms don’t compete with recruiting firms, they compete with other actuarial firms, so the playing field is even within a profession.

In short, firms which integrate the development of business origination skill and behavior into their organizational fabric are more successful at creating rainmakers than those which don’t.  That is hardly surprising.  The surprising truth is how few do so.

At those which don’t, partners often assume that rainmakers must be born, not made, and then set up barriers to learning that ensure their experiences confirm their expectations.

(This post is another in our series of Rainmaking Problems.  We invote your comments on this problem and would also welcome any problems you would like to submit to get comments from other readers.)

In my last post, I noted that curing bad habits is easier if you know what to do, rather than just what not to do. Instead of saying I, say we. Increase your eye contact and you will say uhm less often.

Over the years, the people in our firm have developed lots of prescriptions to deal with common bad sales habits. But I haven’t found satisfactory solutions to others. For example, what would you advise people to do to:

1> Stop talking so fast? I have never found a satisfactory cure to this common malady.
2> Stop selling after a client has agreed to a point? We all know do this, but failure rates remain high. What advice will reduce them?

Are there bad sales habits that you would like other readers’ advice on curing?

Senior professionals often tell their juniors to stop doing things that detract from meetings with prospective clients.

Don’t say I.
Don’t stand with your hands clasped in front of you (sometimes called the fig-leaf position).
Don’t interrupt the client.
Don’t talk so much.
Don’t say uhm so much.
Don’t sound so academic.
Try not to sound so presumptuous.
Don’t talk so fast.

The pressure on younger professionals goes up as such instructions get repeated overtime with, at the least, the implication that lack of improvement could limit their careers.

These instructions are often hard to follow. It is relatively easy to stop saying I by replacing it with we, but many of the other examples are hard to comply with. A person who sounds academic doesn’t do so intentionally. From long personal experience, I know how hard it is to stop talking fast.

They are hard to comply with, because they don’t tell you what you are supposed to do. And your ability to modify your behavior depends more on what you do than what you don’t do. So, when given instructions like these, try to translate them into something you can do, instead.

That’s why it’s easy to stop saying I so much; the we-alternative is obvious. The alternatives to some of the others are relatively easy to identify. So, for example, instead of holding your hands in the fig-leaf position, you can fill one of them with a prop (a pad of paper, your glasses, or even a pen) or place one on the back of a chair. Though harder, you can practice letting your hands hang naturally at your side, between gestures.

The person who sounds academic can try reformulating what she has to say, as if she were explaining it to a twelve-year-old. The person who sounds presumptuous can broaden client-specific advice (you should, you need to) with observations from firm experience (we have seen that many companies faced with your situation have found it helpful to . . .). For some alternatives to talking too much, see the post, He Talks Too Much.

Sometimes, the do instead of the don’t isn’t easily deduced. Sally Goodman taught me that for most people increasing eye contact reduces uhms. Otherwise, I never would have known.

But if you can translate don’t do that into do this, your chances of changing your behavior go up.

In a previous post I described professionals who wanted to hire business developers instead of doing the hard work of getting business, themselves. These people don’t think like partners, because they want to abrogate the single most critical responsibility of an owner in hard times, making sure there is a flow of work to maintain the staff and pay the rent. *

Contrast these people to Cleo. A year or two away from being put up for partner, she already thinks like an owner. She established herself as a high potential employee when the economy was hot by doing excellent work in large quantities and mentoring junior professionals. She also built a small, but productive network that feeds her new business. A staff member at one name corporation goes out of her way to find Cleo opportunities at the company.

Last fall, as the cold hand of recession gripped her firm, Cleo asked to have much of her client work reassigned to others who were under-utilized, so that she could devote more time to finding new business. She has found it tougher going than she had expected and hasn’t generated as much revenue as she had hoped. Even so, she has increased her already substantial respect among some key partners. She thinks like one of them.

* Note: Business developers can be hugely valuable to a firm. Here I refer to a partner’s recommendation to hire one as a way to avoid revenue responsibility, himself.

Many professional service firms have up-or-out policies, meaning that any professional who is passed over for promotion twice is asked to leave the firm.  The firms exercise this policy most strictly on promotions to partner, where the stakes are the highest for the young professional.  By that time she has invested heavily in the firm in unpaid overtime, lost time with family and friends, and a more general loss of balance in her life.  If she gets promoted, she reaps the status and financial rewards of partnership.  If not, she’s out of a job.

Though a few professionals might make partner purely on the basis of their technical competence, the overwhelming majority must demonstrate commercial success to get the nod.  In short, they must show that they can bring in work to get and keep the title of partner. The financial logic of the firms dictates this requirement.

Other firms state explicitly that they do not have an up-or-out policy.  At these firms a professional may opt to stay at a less-than-partner level for a career, if they are willing to forgo the benefits of partnership. In a boom economy, this lack of up-or-out mentality allows a firm to keep talent sorely need to get the work out the door.

But when the economy turns, there isn’t enough work to go around.  The company must then decide whom to let go. The professional who will never make partner and who, due to longevity, is near the top of her pay grade, may not be the first to be laid off.  Come the second round of cutbacks, she is a ripe target.  In other words, firms that do not have an up-or-out policy exhibit up-or-out behavior when times get tough.

This is just a long way of saying that anyone seeking a career at a professional services firm should take statements that her potential employer isn’t an up-or-out firm with a large grain of salt.  Management means it when they say it.  They simply find it impossible to hold to it in the face of financial stress.

If you want control over your own destiny, stay in touch with your former clients, build your network and bring in business. If you can do that, you will have a do well at your current firm and have more to offer another fimr, if you choose to move on.

At the stage in a career when professionals are expected to start developing business, they usually have anywhere from three to eight years of experience and, in many ways, are the backbones of their firms.

Partners toss them client work as it comes in, knowing that they will catch it and get it done right. They help with the recruitment and training of junior professionals and with an array of administrative duties.

Some of these tasks can be alluring. A senior partner at a firm informed me that one promising young professional we are coaching was spending a lot of time on the firm’s knowledge management effort. “In the short run, he’ll get a lot of thanks for all he’s doing in that area, but it won’t count for much when he comes up for partner,” the man cautioned. “To make partner he will have to have demonstrated that he can bring in business.”

But what is a young professional to do when the head of his practice asks him to work on knowledge management or some other worthy effort? Promising young professionals have advanced quickly in their firms by saying yes when asked to do things. It goes against their instincts to say no.

I believe that at this point in their careers professionals need to say no, selectively. Doing so is a step in their progression from working for partners to being one. If you have to develop business like a partner to become one, then, logically, you have to behave like a partner in your dedication to business development, and successful partners don’t let administrative duties stand in the way of their rainmaking. Nor can you.

Here is the real question as I see it: When partners don’t yet see you as a peer and still treat you like an associate, how can you get them to allow you the freedom you will need to develop more work for the firm? Note that this is a how question, not a should-I question.

The one thing that will make a “no” to a partner’s request for your time acceptable is a prior commitment to something more important for the firm. Few things are more important than developing an account or market. A positive effort to do one of these things will often trump the partner’s request. But only if the following conditions apply:

1. You have a clear idea of what you are trying to do and it makes sense to someone senior in the firm.
2. You have a plan. It doesn’t have to be elaborate, but it must show a sensible approach to the effort and make it clear that execution will require time.
3. You demonstrate that you really will do something by taking initial actions, preferably ones that require you to be out in the market. If, for example, you have delivered a speech and visited two clients to talk about a subject, your claim to need time for rainmaking will be far more credible than if you have done nothing.
4. On the basis of the plan and your actions you get at least an informal approval from someone senior to devote time to the effort. This person becomes what a Chicagoan calls your “clout.”

In short, make it clear that you are really doing something positive and important for the firm and you may find that you earn the right to say “no.”