“I find the business development and sales process a mystery. I don’t have a handle on it. I don’t feel like I can control the outcome.”

These are the words of a human resources consultant whom I will call Charlie. A smart and talented man of about 40 with an MBA, he had successfully changed careers and been selected to help turn a successful regional practice into a national one. This marked him as a candidate for rapid advancement at the firm.

He is well aware that advancement along this fast track will hinge on his ability to bring in business and, at his own expense, has taken a well-reputed sales course that is open to the public. He learned useful things there, but clearly something is missing.

Our firm works with many professionals in similar straits. These are full-time deliverers of their firms’ services, who must learn to sell, often at levels equivalent to or higher than is expected of dedicated salespeople in non-professional firms. It is the making or breaking of many careers.

So what’s missing? If Charlie is to gain control of his professional life, he must first identify the factors that will determine his success at business development. Being clear about his goals will allow him to focus his scarce business development hours on the right things. That is why Harding & Company coaches spend so much time on goal clarity at the beginning of an assignment.

For Charlie, as it is for many others, it comes down to:

• Lead Flow: He needs sufficient leads to win one new project at roughly $250,000 each quarter or between twelve and fifteen quality leads a year. I stress quality, because he has more than enough leads. I suspect that he spends time pursuing leads for business he is unlikely to win.In some cases we go through the simple analysis of determining how many leads a client needs, only to discover that their market is too small to provide such a quantity. Whatever your specialty, this kind of calculation can be enlightening.

• Differentiation: Charlie often goes up against competitors with lower quality services than his and who charge half of what he does. He needs to describe his services in a way that makes clear the value received for his higher fee. This is often a challenge. It is particularly so for Charlie, because he does not have a clear idea of the kinds of clients who need his high-cost service. He is a methodological purist. Rightly proud of the superiority of his offering, he believes everyone should use it in spite of its cost. But there are always people who will buy a generic product of lesser quality to save money.

• Targeting: The preceding two steps should help him better define the kinds of clients he is most likely to succeed with, allowing him to target more effectively.

• Sales Skill: He needs to discuss the client’s problem more at a business level than at a technical one and to describe his services with confidence in the value they provide. This is a matter of practice, lots of practice.

This is a lot to learn, but well within the range of the possible. Now that we have a clear picture of what he needs, we can set about helping him regain a sense of control of his professional destiny. The first step in becoming a rainmaker is a clear diagnosis of what you need to learn.

*******************************

Order your copy of Ford Harding’s new and revised edition of Rain Making, called ”…an essential guide for anyone responsible for business development in the professional services industry…” - Mark Mactas, Chairman and CEO Towers Perrin

I have been reading Shawn Callahan’s blog ever since he commented on one of my early posts, Sadder but Wiser, about the use of an anecdote to show you had really learned something. The Anecdote is a well-known blog, one seen as successful. Among blogs it has a Google page rank of five, something for the rest of us to aspire to. So, I thought it might be useful to see if he has turned up any business through it.

Shawn’s firm, Anecdote, consults on the use of business narrative and collaboration techniques “to redesign and improve the way people learn, share information, retain knowledge and build resolve to make changes in the workplace.” Asked what that means, he gave this example:

One of our clients is a leading financial institution and they have just completed an organizational culture inventory. These survey instruments can be a little dry and difficult to understand so we are helping them collect stories that illustrate the culture and then working with people in the company to design and implement initiatives that will shape their organizational culture.

The firm has served many large corporations and departments of the Australian government.

Shawn has been blogging since 2002, the Pleistocene by blog standards, and The Anecdote blog is his third, so he had two earlier ones to shake the ticks out of his approach. That accounts, in part, for its professional look and content. The Anecdote dates back to November 2004.

Callahan reports that he gets lots of leads traceable to the blog. Because I have not found many blogs that generate a significant number of leads for a professional firm, this becomes an important case. Here are the reasons that I think he has been more successful than so many others.

First, he had the insight to get in early and the persistence to keep at it. Yes, I mean that the blog’s high productivity probably results, in part, from its age, a factor of much importance in a network, as described by Albert-Lázlo Barabási in Linked: The New Science of Networks [Perseus Publishing 2002].

Second, it is also, in Barabási‘s terms fitter, because it has masses of content and lots of links. Type in “knowledge strategy,” “business narrative” or “storytelling training” into Google and you will find Anecdote on the first page.

More importantly type these terms in with a geographic location such as Melbourne, Canberra or Australia and it’s number one. That this may be a more significant differentiator in Australia than it would be in the US or Europe, because the nearest alternative, outside resources are likely to be a ten-hour plane ride away, does not diminish what Shawn and his colleagues have done. We all must adapt what we do to our local conditions for better or for worse. I mention it because each of us must determine what will make our blogs fit in our market places, meaning we cannot expect to succeed in exactly the way he did, using his approach as a recipe. Remember that Callahan had two blogs prior to this one. That experience undoubtedly helped him make this one fitter from the start. We, too, will have to do some experimenting.

The third reason his blog is so successful has to do not so much with the blog, itself, as it does how Shawn takes inquiries he receives on it and turns them into consulting assignments. Turning an inquiry from someone who has first heard about you on the web into new business costing the client a large sum is a big aspiration for a professional and a bigger increase in commitment than most people buying services are willing to make.

Callahan and his colleagues have addressed this problem by inserting a step between the client making a query on the basis of something read on the blog and asking him to sign for a full-blown consulting engagement.

In my book, Cross-Selling Success, I call this a portal service. In Anecdote’s case, it takes the form of courses that the representative of an organization can attend for a modest fee. During the course, the consultants get to show what they can do and what they would be like to work with. They also learn a lot about the client and its issues. After the client and the consultants take this small step together, both have learned a lot about each other and the client is more likely to sign up The Anecdote team to help them run their own business narrative projects.

It took between two and three years for the blog to evolve into an effective lead generator. It proved valuable in other ways earlier. Shawn praises the discipline it creates to get ideas down on paper and finds it a useful place to store and access ideas and information, a consultant’s stock in trade. Says Callaghan, “I often send links to specific blog posts to clients and prospects to keep in contact and show we care about them and their business.”

It’s not all fun. Like other bloggers, he feels the stress of perpetual demand for content (I can identify with Shawn’s concern: I feel that my blog sits at my feet all day, moaning, “Feed me. Feed me.”)

To address this problem, he has developed a set of posting categories: the quick link and short comment; the mini idea (a couple of paragraphs); the foundational idea (4-10 paragraphs). Assigning ideas he has for posting gives him a sense of how much time he must devote to producing the postings. Keeping his posts short, he can distribute ideas over more days When there is nothing substantial to say, he links to other people’s blogs which not only provides content for his readers, it also increases his social network.

In spite of the demands, Shawn is clearly hooked on blogging. He says, “I really love blogging because the more I think about how things connect, the more connections I make. The blog posts become conversation topics and you are rarely lost for something interesting to say while at the same time you become attentive and mindful for new ideas and perspectives.”

Here are some valuable takeaways from Shawn:

1. A blog is a major commitment, in which a professional will have to invest up to two years before you start seeing a return in the form of new business. I hope that some of my readers can prove me wrong on this, but I doubt it.
2. In addition to time, your blog’s success as a lead generator will depend on its fitness. What constitutes fitness will vary from market to market, but at the very least it means good content frequently posted—and probably the right links to other blogs and sites, as well.
3. Rather than trying to convert a lead generated by the blog into a full-blown client, it is probably better to have a small sample of what you do that clients can try first. A blog, like any other marketing technique, can’t just be glued onto the side of your practice. To be successful, it must be integrated with other things you do.
4. Blogs have many small uses as places to store information and to refer clients and prospective clients who are looking for a bit of information.
5. Blogging is fun and can be addictive.

And, now that I’ve had my jag for the day, I can stop writing. 

*******************************

Order your copy of Ford Harding’s new and revised edition of Rain Making, called ”…an essential guide for anyone responsible for business development in the professional services industry…” - Mark Mactas, Chairman and CEO Towers Perrin

Rereading the notes from one of our several hundred interviews with rainmakers, I came across this story about Edwin Heft, an accountant and partner at Touche before it began its long series of mergers with other firms: 

A senior partner, Edwin Heft, decided that there had to be a way to get the more junior members of the firm out in the market learning how to develop business.  He decided that this should be done by establishing a practice development committee composed of senior managers, managers and staff accountants.  A senior manager was to be chair and Heft served as an advisor. 

The committee was given a small budget to allocate as it wished on business development. Heft understood that in the early stages it was important to reward efforts rather than results.  You can sell professional services by a shot gun or rifle approach.  With a shot gun approach, you make many contacts and get the message out to all, but the net you throw is wide and it may not pay off for a long time.  He realized that if you want to encourage young professionals to get out in the market place, you must reward the effort, because the young person otherwise is doing it strictly on faith, and that faith is sorely tested.

Becoming a rainmaker is ego-deflating.  There is a lot of rejection, or what looks like rejection to the inexperienced.  To boost morale, committee members were rewarded with a small bonus.  They set goals, but didn’t evaluate themselves; Heft did that. 

It was a small effort for four or five years, and it worked.  Heft had been savvy about who he picked for the program and insightful about how to make it go.  The experiment was highly successful.  Three of the four senior managers became great business-getters.  One later became chairman of Touche.

Edwin Heft was one of the rare rainmakers who knew how to help others learn to sell.  Almost fifty years later, we at Harding & Company had to reinvent through hard practice what he got so right the first time he tried.  I just wish I knew more about this singular effort to create rainmakers.

*******************************

Order your copy of Ford Harding’s new and revised edition of Rain Making, called ”…an essential guide for anyone responsible for business development in the professional services industry…” - Mark Mactas, Chairman and CEO Towers Perrin

The following publications and bloggers recently posted reviews on the new edition of Rain Making.

Clique, a publication of Business Forums International. Download their April 2008 issue with the review.

A/E RainMaker, a publication of PSMJ Resources, Inc. Download their May 2008 issue with the review.

Chui’s Counterpoint blog also posted a comprehensive review, which also appears on Amazon.

CRM Industry newsletter this week named Rain Making “required reading.”

Many thanks.

In earlier postings (Build It and They Will Come, All or Nothing Thinking and Dealing With Unreturned Phone Calls) I described thinking habits that undercut your will to create rain.  Another is False Clairvoyance. 

False Clairvoyance occurs when a professional feels that some, usually negative, outcome is certain and acts accordingly.  Someone who realizes there are other possible outcomes acts differently and so sometimes secures an advantage.

For example, a professional goes to an association meeting, which a colleague has recommended as a good place to get leads.  After a couple of awkward conversations with other attendees, he says to himself, “This will never work.”  Acting as if this were true, he gives up and goes home, without questioning the validity of the thought.  A competitor goes to four of the associations monthly meetings, and, at the last one picks up a lead.

“Never” is a long time.  Any statement including words like “never,” “always,” “inevitable,” or “definite,” warrants reconsideration before acting on it.  Rainmakers are likely to consider the possibility of a positive outcome. As one rainmaker put it to me, “When you’re talking with clients, good things tend to happen.”

False clairvoyance is an especially seductive thinking habit, because, if we define our objectives narrowly enough, the prediction is perilously close to the truth.
Let us say, for example, that facing a revenue shortage, the management of the firm asks all of its fifty professionals to call five current and former clients. Believing, accurately, that the probability of any one call turning up a lead rounds to zero, several of the professionals don’t make the effort.  But the probability of at least one of the fifty professionals obtaining a lead this way may be quite high.  If we broaden the goal, the probability of something beneficial coming out of the calls is almost a certainty.

So, when you feel discouraged and are thinking of giving up on an effort to make rain, ask yourself if false clairvoyance is undermining your resolve.

*******************************

Order your copy of Ford Harding’s new and revised edition of Rain Making, called ”…an essential guide for anyone responsible for business development in the professional services industry…” - Mark Mactas, Chairman and CEO Towers Perrin

Steve Shu, who writes a well established and thoughtful blog on management consulting, describes what it takes to be a good facilitator. He could equally be describing a rainmaker. Two takeaways:

1. If you are a good or aspiring facilitator, try applying those skills to drumming up business.
2. If you are looking for potential rainmakers in your organization, consider those who are good at facilitation.

Business Network International (BNI) published a review of Rain Making in their April issue of SuccessNet.

Read the BNI review here. 

(Don’t miss the Example Introductory Letter Free Book Offer at the end of this post.)

Hoping to obtain a meeting with a senior executive, you have drafted a letter of introduction and rewritten it a dozen times, whittled and honed it down to three terse paragraphs. Without wasting a syllable it states who you are, what you want, and why the client will want to give it to you.

At the end of the first paragraph, which describes your firm, you have written,
”I have attached __________________.” Uncertain what to include, you have not completed the sentence, but the letter must go out today, and so you must decide.

If you send the letter electronically, the choices are:

• A link to your website, which includes a client list, partner bios, descriptions of work done by the firm, a list of services and other information
• A link to an electronic reprint of a an article you wrote
• A link to the firm’s newsletter
• A one page description of a case or project the firm worked on, also available on the website.

If you send a paper letter of introduction, your choices are:

• A twelve-page glossy brochure
• A client list
• A one page description of a case or project the firm worked on
• A list of firm publications available on request
• Your bio and those of others in the firm

What would you send? Here are some guidelines:

1. Less is more. The less you send with a document, the more it looks like executive-to-executive correspondence. More attachments make it look more like a pitch or a mass mailing. Don’t send the brochure. DON’T send the brochure.
2. more senior the executive, the more that less is more, if you follow my drift. Just in case you don’t, let me repeat that in other words. Very top executives don’t read a lot of marketing collateral; they don’t have time for reading through mass-mailed documents or anything that looks like one. So with letters to senior execs, you really want to reduce enclosures to a minimum. Consider sending your letter without any attachments.
3. If the receiver has never heard of you or your firm, it sometimes helps to send some form of external validation, such as an article about you or your firm or a reprint of an article you have published in a journal he would recognize. But keep it small, because less is more. An exception might be a copy of a book you or a colleague from your firm has written, because, by its nature it appears substantive rather than salesy.
4. If your objective is something other than getting a meeting, you might want to attach a little more. A letter sent primarily to remind an executive of who you are and what you do may benefit from a short attachment, like a reprint of an article that mentions you, a reprint of an article you wrote of relevance to the person you are writing to. But skip the brochure.
5. You have more flexibility if you send an email, because you can create links to your website that are subtle because they look like a standard link appearing in all your documents.

And when should you use the brochures, you might ask? Many find that they are really good for toasting marshmallows.

My Example Introductory Letter Free Book Offer:
I am looking for examples of good emails and letters of introduction used by professionals. After changing or blocking out any names of people or firms that you wish to keep private, please send your best samples by April 21, 2008 to I am looking for examples of good emails and letters of introduction used by professionals. After changing or blocking out any names of people or firms that you wish to keep private, please send your best samples by April 21, 2008 to fharding@HardingCo.com.

I will send copies of one of my books, Rain Making-2^nd Edition-Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field or Creating Rainmakers to the two people who, in my opinion, provide the best introductory letter examples. Be sure to include your name, mailing address and phone number with your submission.

*******************************

Order your copy of Ford Harding’s new and revised edition of Rain Making, called “…an essential guide for anyone responsible for business development in the professional services industry…” - Mark Mactas, Chairman and CEO Towers Perrin

Management Consulting News just published an interview with me. We discussed the new edition of Rain Making, how the Internet has changed the way people sell, “call discipline,” and more.

See Ford Harding on Rainmaking for Consultants to read the whole interview.

*******************************

Order your copy of Ford Harding’s new and revised edition of Rain Making, called ”…an essential guide for anyone responsible for business development in the professional services industry…” - Mark Mactas, Chairman and CEO Towers Perrin

Suzanne Lowe just posted a review of Rain Making on her professional services blog The Expertise Marketplace.

See Rainmaker, Rainmaker, Make me Some Rain.