Among the people I am now coaching are two expecting mothers at different firms. Both are first time mothers. One made partner last year and the other hopes to be put up for partnership within the next couple of years. Both want to know what they can do to minimize the loss of momentum during maternity leave.

Surely, there are readers better qualified to answer this question than I. To be honest, I usually refer these cases to my partner, Mimi Spangler. Mimi suggests that it often helps to think in terms of things you can do in the three stages of maternity leave:

1. Before: How do you prepare your contacts for your absence and prepare yourself to maintain market awareness during your leave.
2. During: What must you do at minimum and what additional might you do.
3. After: How do you speed up your reentry into the market.

You men would do well to read the responses, too, because you may one day be married to or managing someone with this question. You may take a leave of absence, yourself, some day and have a similar concern.

What would you advise these women to do? Feel free to comment on all three of the stages or just on one or two.  In your comment please let us know of the kind of professional firm you work for.

In responding to my recent post, Rainmaking Problem #2: The Next Level of Blogging, Mel Lester raised several questions that reminded me of how I felt in my early blogging days.  (He wasn’t really singing the blues, but I liked the way the title sounded, so I kept it.)  I will give my answers to his questions.  If you disagree or have something to add, please comment below.

Who reads the blogs, especially new ones?  Are they mostly other bloggers, as the comments to early posts seem to suggest?

I don’t know for sure.  I believe that early audiences are made up primarily of people you have notified of the blog and other bloggers.  Bloggers are more interested in blogging and other blogs than are most people, so they are more likely than non-bloggers to come across yours.  Capturing a few of these as regular readers helps grow the blog because they are likely to mention your blog in theirs and to link to it.  This brings in more readers.  Early on, you should be targeting other bloggers for this reason.  More acuratelly, you should always be targeting other bloggers for this reason.  So, for example, you can comment on other blogs on yours with trackbacks to them.

Do buyers of your services read blogs?

Probably not, especially in its early months.  This is even more likely to be true, if your buyers are extremely busy people.  The older they are, the less likely they are to read blogs.

In that case, is blogging an effective means of connecting with them?

Like other marketing tools and techniques, blogging is most effective if integrated into a larger marketing effort.  Your buyers are more likely to see your blog, if you send them an email with a link to a post of interest to them.  If you can get your posts published in on-line newsletters, more people see them and some will be attracted to them.  Assigning posts as required reading in your training programs also reinforces your blog’s importance and its availability as a resource.  Through these techniques, readership grows little by little.  Good content speeds up the process.

Bloggers I talk to cite the value of blogs in making it easy for prospective clients to find their firm when using search engines.  (See The News from India: Blogging to Sell Professional Services and More News from Down Under: How Shawn Callaghan Blogs for Fun & Profit )When I search on Google for “management of AE firms,” for example, the first page includes references to Zweig White, PSMJ, Sullivan Keiss and others.  Your firm is found at the bottom of Page 3, in listing number 40, which isn’t bad.  If I do a blog search, it comes up on Page 1, listing number three, which is great.

None of this demonstrates the superiority of blogging over other routes to market.  Whether your time is better spent on it or some other activity, I don’t know and wonder, myself.

(This is part of my series on Rainmaking Problems. I hope you will leave a comment with your thoughts on a solution to this problem.)

Today I place my own problem before you.  As a person who puts himself forward as knowing something about selling professional services, I have tried to keep abreast of changes in marketing techniques.  I do so by interviewing people who have used a technique, but also by using it myself.  I’m able to talk about how to write an article, because I have written over 100.  I’m able to talk about networking, because I have a large network that feeds me business opportunities year after year.

The Internet is changing the way that professionals market and sell their services.  One of my efforts to keep abreast of these changes was starting this blog.  Having published it for about a year and a half, I feel justified in making some comments about how blogging works.  I may not be an expert, but at least I have a grasp of what I know and of how much I don’t know.

In the first category is my knowledge and that if this blog is to be truly successful I must take it to the next level.  I know what this level looks like, but I don’t how to get there.  Having looked at a good many blogs by now, I believe that successful ones move from the driving force of content to that of community and that this is done through comments.  Let me explain.

The day you start a blog, you have no readers.  You may be able to attract readers once with an advertisement or a mass e-mailing, but to keep them coming back requires content.  And supplying that content can be deliciously fun at first.  I look back on writing some of my early posts, such as He Talks Too Much and Three Ways to Get a Good Seat, with pleasure.  In this way you build your first readership base.  I will call this Level 1.  Business blogs without solid content fade quickly.

While building to Level 1, your posts receive few comments.  A low percentage of those who read blogs ever comment—the figure one percent is commonly thrown about.  You simply don’t have enough readers to spark much comment, let alone dialogues.

But many people surf the net not just to receive information, but to exchange it.  If you want to grow your base of readers to the next level, you must engage them in a dialog.  That is, you must write in such a way to attract comments; not just any comments, but the kind that attracts still others.  If you do this assiduously, those looking to participate in a dialog, plus those interested in reading debate in addition to content will form a community of readers, which I will call Level 2.  It is much larger than achieved at Level 1.  The community comes to your site to read and to be read, to agree and to disagree, and to feel.  They come to feel smart or funny or provocative, but above all else they come to feel connected.

And that’s where I need help.  I believe I have plateaued at Level 1 and want to move ahead to Level 2.  But I don’t know how to do it.  There’s something wrong with either my writing or my format or something.  Or perhaps I’m just not patient enough.  As bloggers and participants in blogging communities, can you advise me how to move from content to community, through making people want to comment to making them feel connected?

Or am I looking at the problem the wrong way altogether?

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

(This is part of my series on Rainmaking Problems. I hope you will leave a comment with your thoughts on a solution to this problem.)

I am coaching a woman whom I will call Sophie.  When I asked for her boss’s assessment of her, he said that she doesn’t put herself forward enough in client meetings and especially in sales meetings.  He cited a recent sales meeting they had gone on together, at which he felt compelled to do the most talking, she seemed so reserved.

Sophie says that her style differs from her boss’s.  She feels it natural to let the client talk, expecting to say something when she can add real value.  That her clients all adore and respect her suggests this is true.  She says that she doesn’t talk much at meetings when her boss is present, because she doesn’t want to fight with him for air space.  Knowing the man, I can believe this is true.

Still, I have never seen either one in a sales meeting.  Her boss has a track record of selling successfully and, so far, Sophie doesn’t.

What would you recommend that Sophie do? Is this HER problem or HIS problem? How should she continue pleasing her clients while gaining the respect of her boss?

Please respond below.

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

I have decided to make a change in this blog, which I hope will benefit readers as much as I think it will me.  I will continue to post on Mondays and Wednesdays, as always.  However, every other Wednesday’s post will have a new format.  It will provide an example of a problem that a client, a reader or I have in selling professionals services or in helping people learn to do so.  These will be problems that I do not feel that I have satisfactory answers for.  I will then ask you readers for suggestions.

The best part of blogging is hearing from readers.  Done right both the blogger and the reader benefit from this exchange.   Recently, Glenn Andrew provided some interesting insights on elevator speeches that gave me some useful ideas.  Ian Brodie taught me about more sophisticated applications of to-do lists than I had realized exist.  I suspect others thought so as well.  By posing more questions, I hope to generate more exchanges of this kind.  What do you think of this idea?

Please see tomorrow’s post to get an idea of what I have in mind.