A few rainmakers break selling rules and still get hired more times than not.  They talk too much and too much about themselves.   They stress features rather than benefits.  They arrive late for meetings.  And they get away with it! One management consultant I know will tell his client that something is red.  No, the client says, it’s green.  Yes, I agree with you, replies the consultant, it is red.  And he gets away with it!  Another professional whom I observed many times would threaten prospective clients of the immediate failure of their business, if they didn’t hire him and march to his orders.  And he got away with it!

The reasons for these aberrations, I think, are specific to each case.  The red-is-green consultant is one of the most charming people I have ever met.  People want to agree with him.  The do-as-I-say professional sold effectively only to those clients which were paramilitary in style.  His talent was finding them—so many of them.

But most of us don’t have boundless charm and don’t feel comfortable ordering our clients about, or a reputation that puts us beyond questioning.  We must listen to what they say.  We must not be arrogant or imperious.  We have to follow the rules.

Has anyone else a good example of a rainmaker who broke basic rules of selling?

Writing and publishing articles helps differentiate you from competitors and colleagues. It helps you sharpen your own thinking on a subject, making you more articulate when speaking with clients. Publishing can transform a career. I know it has transformed mine. You could say the same thing about many more prominent rainmakers, including accountant and management consultant, James O. McKinsey; management consultant, Peter Drucker; architect Phillip Johnson; engineer, Frederick Winslow Taylor and many others.

While not a required activity—there are many rainmakers who have never published—publishing articles offers enough benefits that it warrants all professionals’ consideration. Those with an urge to publish find time to do so. Those who don’t are put off by the perceived time required to get something written.

This posting will show that by using a specific formula, it is relatively easy to write a short article suitable for an opinions column. The articles for such columns are almost always written by outside contributors, like you, and appear towards the back many periodicals. The columns bear such regrettable titles as As I See It, or The Last Word or My Point of View. (As a significant service to the language, political correctness has forced the abandonment of one of the worst of the column titles, One Man’s Meat.)

Many of the entries in these columns express contrarian views on some trend or happening. For example, at the height corporate scandals kicked off by the implosion of Enron, The Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled “Cross-Selling Will Outlast Enron and Anderson (August 13, 2002: Page B2). The title captures its message. Let’s look at format for this piece.

The first paragraph links the article to a current event. This was essential for WSJ, a newspaper, but not required for a magazine. The event in this case, the sale of Pricewaterhouse Cooper’s consulting business to IBM, resulted from all the bad press accounting firms with large management consulting practices were getting for cross selling. This bad press reversed a trend for big service firms like PwC to add more and more services to feed to their clients. This old, bulking-up trend and its demise were described in a couple of paragraphs, including a paragraph about how the trend was sweeping not just accounting firms, but also law firms, and human resources consulting firms.

Six short paragraphs followed which agued for cross selling as essential and, in many cases, desirable for the client as well as the service provider. One paragraph shows how innocuous a lot of cross selling is. And a final paragraph summarizes the argument and states that cross selling is here to stay.

It can be outlined as follows:

1. Introduce issue and argument
2. Link to current event and its relevance to readers.
3. Introduce counter argument
4. Discuss aspects of counter argument
   Aspect #1
   Aspect #2
   Aspect #3
   Aspect #4
5. Summary
6. Conclusion

Knowing the subject, the author found this article easy to write. Pick a subject you know well of a trend going too far and see if you can make up a similar outline.
Let’s say, for example, that were predictions of the demise of mid-sized firms in your profession, and that you felt that this concern was exaggerated. Your opinion piece would be structure as follows.

1. Introduce Issue: Predictions of disappearance of mid-sized firms are both common and exaggerated. Such firms will be around for a long time.
2. Link to event: The sale of Firm X reinforced the claims that mid-sized firm can’t possibly compete with large ones.
3. Counter Argument: These predications are made periodically by people who don’t understand the profession. Reasons to feel that mid-sized firms will survive include:
   - Argument #1, Low Barriers to Entry
   - Argument #2, Room for Niche Players Where Big Firms Can’t Compete
   - Argument #3, Mid-sized Firms Often Sold as Exit Strategy of Founding Partners, but Historically a Few Firms Succeed at Growing into Large Ones
4. Summary: Predictions of demise of mid-sized firms are exaggerated
5. Conclusion: Clients, job seekers and suppliers to midsized firm need not be concerned about their long-term viability.

Now try to do the same with a claim that you disagree with. If you want to send a draft of your article for me to review and send back with annotations, please feel free to send me a copy. Please include the words “Article for Review” in the title of what you send me. I will be happy to review and return it to you.

Remember to keep it short. Opinions pieces typically run between 750 words (about the length of this posting) and 1,000 words.

Yesterday I saw George and Ira Gershwin’s musical, My One and Only, in Stratford, Ontario. The show must have collected every professional tap dancer in Canada. The twenty-person cast tapped its way through three delightful hours.

Tap dancing may be alive and well in Stratford this summer, but it’s on the decline elsewhere. For many of us, the last tap dancer we have seen was Gregory Hines, and there is a whole generation which has never heard of the man. Today, we use the term, “tap dancing,” metaphorically far more often than we use it to describe a real dance. And that lead me to wonder, why do we use the term “tap dancing?”

The metaphors we choose tell a lot about our view of whatever it is we use them to describe. “Tap dancing” is a good example. We use it to describe the deft handling of a risky and difficult inquiry. We might say, for example, ”You really had to tap dance your way out of that one.” In this sense it connotes survival of a near disaster. When used this way, it often draws a laugh, usually a laugh of relief and the pleasure of having gotten away with something. That’s because it may also suggest a less than full disclosure of the facts or at least walking a fine line between truth and misrepresentation.

Usually, it is used as a complement, though it can have a negative slant when used to describe how a person maneuvered himself out of a mess he had needlessly gotten himself into.

The term interests me because it is used so frequently to describe what happens in a difficult sales meeting. It might be used to describe the answers to such difficult questions as:

1. Isn’t it true that XYZ Corporation replaced you midstream on their project?
2. Why should we buy the same solution from you that you have already given to our competitors?
3. Do you mean that you have never done a project like this one before?

The ability to address questions like these, especially when unexpected, is highly valued by professionals. What does the choice of “tap dancing” tell us about that talent? I believe that is tells us the following:

1. It requires skill. This is true of both the dance, itself, and the verbal ability. Many may aspire but few can do it.
2. It is done under pressure before an audience. Unlike some forms of dancing, tap dancing is used almost exclusively as performing art. You do it under a spotlight before an audience. A critical audience is essential to metaphorical tap dancing, too.
3. It is hard work. Other dances may disguise hard work behind smoothness and grace, but tap dancing is obviously physically difficult. A difficult conversation with a prospective client at a sales meeting is also exhausting;
4. There is a competitive aspect to it. Unlike other forms of dancing, competition is almost always present when tap dancing. The competition between the lead and another actor-dancer that I saw so recently in My One and Only is repeated in form again and again when tap dancing is featured. A challenge and a response is essential to the application of the term to a conversation between two people, as well. While the client tries to catch him, the professional dances furiously to respond acceptably to each question.

There is a school of thought that tap dancing at a sales meeting isn’t necessary, because a professional is always open with clients. I lean in that direction, too. But I have tap danced through a sales meeting or two in my years as a professional and in doing so, have won some work that helped the client achieve her objectives and helped the firm I was with avoid a layoff. And I have enjoyed the admiration that others in the firm expressed afterwards.

Yes, we should always be honest with our clients. But we also should put our firms before them in the best fair light. That sometimes requires tap dancing. I would wager heavily that those who learn to tap dance make partner more often than those who only know how to waltz.

All of which leads me to conclude that when a rainmaker dances to make rain, it is sometimes a tap dance.

A former client called me to discuss the loss to a competitor of an assignment she had set her heart on winning. She had been told that the competitor was seen as a better fit with the company’s collaborative culture. “It’s not true! I know those people,” she said. The presentation had seemed to go well and she had sensed that the selection committee had been favorably impressed.
There was one awkward moment. She had been asked how updates on progress would be handled. “I told them how we do it, and one of the committee members started pushing for more frequent updates. I said we could do that, though I wasn’t sure too many more were warranted, given the amount of information that we were likely to have to pass on.” She wasn’t sure who the man was.

There are several possible missteps in this description, but what I expect hurt her most was trying to answer a boomerang question. Beware of the boomerang questions. They can cost you the sale.

A boomerang question is one the speaker asks you, hoping that you will ask the same question of him. For example, imagine you are in a sales meeting with senior people from the client organization. One of them comes from the staff of that part of the organization you work with most closely, be that the finance, human resources, information technology, legal or some other department. This person is ten years older than you and will have day-to-day responsibility for the matter you hope to help with. We will call her the engagement manager. You are describing your team, when she asks, “Typically, what is the role of the engagement manager when you work on this kind of issue?”

Answer this question at your peril! A rainmaker will immidiately bass the question back to th client. The chances are high that the prospective client doesn’t want you to answer. Instead she wants to be heard on the subject. Give the wrong answer and you will find yourself in an argument or worse have created a silent enemy who will kill your chances of winning once you are out of the room. An appropriate response is, “That depends a lot on the engagement manager. Do you have any thoughts on the subject?”

Boomerang questions are a subset of a larger group, called recognition questions, used by speakers when they want to state an opinion. Other kinds of recognition questions are much easier to identify. Often they are statements introduced with a short phrase like, “Isn’t it true that . . .” Boomerang questions are a special case, because they are so much harder to recognize.

Here are two more examples:

1. During a discussion of how you will do the required work, someone says, “Have you ever tried . . .?” Look at the prospective client. Does his facial expression suggest that this is an inquiry or does it suggest he has something he wants to say?
2. After meeting the president and CFO of the prospective client, the young staff members who first called and screened you by telephone, asks, “How do you think the meeting went?” You have sensed all along that he wants you to win. Does he really want your opinions about how the meeting went or does he have something to tell you and is simply being polite by starting the discussion this way.

Boomerang questions are common. You probably use them, yourself. (Honey, do you have any plans for Friday evening?) But don’t . . . don’t ever . . . confuse them with a request for information.

Helping other professionals learn to sell gives me the opportunity to hear good ideas for developing business. Most of these ideas are simple adaptations of well-known techniques. Simplicity is a good thing for busy professionals, and there are no extra points for creativity. Any technique that is ethical and that works and that is affordable is worth considering.

I heard of one such idea today from an accountant and rainmaker who works for a litigation support firm. I call it the Post-Event Event, and he said I could share it with you. It is a way to increase the benefits of attending a professional association meeting. These events are good places to meet many potential clients and other worthwhile contacts rapidly, without having to get past a gatekeeper. But working the room to meet people will be wasted unless you follow up with them later and so initiate a relationship. There’s the rub; it isn’t always easy to come up with a plausible reason for maintaining contact. That’s where the Post-Event Event comes in.

Say, for example, that you are from Chicago attending an annual meeting of a professional association being held in San Antonio. Reviewing the list of expected attendees, you identify 14 people from the Chicago area that you want to meet. You plan a dinner in Chicago with some educational content for roughly one month after the association meeting. When you meet with one of your targets and the conversation goes well, you invite him or her to the dinner, saying that a written invitation will follow. If the initial conversation is cooler and you feel that an immediate invitation would be too forward, you send it in writing after the association meeting.

If you see someone two or three times in a few months at an association meeting and then break bread with him for several hours a month later, your relationship is well underway. Of course, the Post-Event Event could be a golf outing or seats at a baseball game.

Cool idea. Simple and effective.

Rainmakers aren’t born, they are made. All of our research and experience shows that. And usually there is an event when someone suddenly gets it. They get an insight into selling that allows them to embrace it.

Some people have that experience early in their lives. Rainmaker and civil engineer, Steve Rush, got it one night as a ten-year old selling newspaper subscriptions door to door in Ohio. To win a contest, he had to get fifteen new customers to sign up and he was three short. For three hours he went house to house, but no one was interested. He was ready to quit, but his mother said, “Let’s try just one more.” The next three houses in a row signed up. Steve learned perseverance and the numbers game aspects of business development.

Most people get it later in their lives: Rainmaker and architect, Guy Geier, got it one day on the golf course with a client from a Japanese company. He had had little success at selling his firm’s services until that day. And he suddenly knew why. That day he realized that having the creative and technical skills and track record on similar projects weren’t enough to win. Those things might get you in front of a client or even short-listed for a project. But, in the end, prospective clients go with the firm they feel most comfortable with and that usually means they have a relationship with someone there. He realized he needed those relationships, himself, and could not delegate that part of the effort to a business developer.

A management consultant in her late thirties, whom I will call Naomi for no particular reason, was going through the motions of trying to sell without much success. Following a suggestion, she asked for a meeting with one of her clients, an executive with a Fortune 100 company based in a southern city. She began her meeting by saying, “I’m looking for some advice. I’m at the point in my career when I need to start selling business, and I want to do it the right way. You’ve seen a lot of professionals in your day, and, I’m sure, some of them have sold to you in ways you found appropriate and others didn’t. I want to know what I should be doing.”

The client reflected for a moment and said, “You should ask me more often. I know most of the leading business people in this city, and I would be happy to introduce you, now that I know it would help you. But I’m busy, so it would help if you reminded me from time to time.” And that’s when Naomi got it. Most clients aren’t offended by being asked for business, as long as it’s done appropriately. And many are glad to help, if they know you want the help. Networks are made up of people trying to help each other. But you have to ask.

Attorney Eric Bergner got it over a lunch he had arranged between two friends, one with a major cable TV company and the other a screen playwright peddling a script. Says Bergner, “The two hit it off immediately and it was obvious they would do business together and they were so appreciative. A lot has come back to me from that simple act, which I enjoyed doing. It changed my whole orientation about selling, from looking for things for me to looking for things for other people.”

A Canadian actuary made a call on a prospective client. During the meeting, the client mentioned that the agent at an insurance company, who had been assigned to her company, wasn’t returning phone calls. Knowing the company, the actuary offered to call in her behalf. The next day, when he, too, had not received a return call, he called the switchboard and learned that the man in question had quit. His voicemail had accidentally remained connected. The actuary spoke to the replacement, who promised to call the client. The actuary then called the client, himself, to explain what had happened. She said, “Gee, I mentioned the problem to the actuary we use, and he didn’t offer to help.” At that moment, the actuary got it.

Of course, some never get it. But, it’s a memorable moment when you do.

I was recently asked by a promising young professional if he should accept his firm’s offer to head up a team taking a new service to market.  To do so he would have to give up an important, but not leading position in one of the firm’s most profitable, traditional services.  He was being offered the chance to become a professional firm’s equivalent of a product champion.  A product champion at a company like Proctor & Gamble or Diageo is responsible for making her product a commercial success, be it a shampoo or a champagne.  My young friend was concerned he might be moving off the mainline of his career onto a siding.

 After asking a few question about the new service and its importance to his firm, I told him to take the offer without delay.  In giving this advice I was influenced by my experiences in a similar position early in my career. 

Service champion is a wonderful job.  If offered one, by all means accept it.  You are given your own little business, with a budget and a mandate.  Because the service is new to the firm, few of your colleagues know enough about it to meddle.  It’s all yours to make of what you can.  It creates a solid platform for more senior management positions and rainmaker status later in your career.
I am a great believer in service champions.  I guess that makes me a champion of champions.
 

Some professionals have thinking habits that make it hard for them to succeed as rainmakers. These habits result in logical errors that reflect the professionals’ inexperience. I will address specific kinds of thinking habits from time to time in this blog. The first is what I call the Build-It-And-They-Will-Come Fallacy. People making this error assume that if they make one highly visible effort, business will come. They feel surprised and almost cheated when it doesn’t.

The Brochure and Website Fallacies are, perhaps, the most common versions of this fallacy. They are especially common when professionals start a firm or a new practice. In many such cases professionals rush to create a brochure or a website and then wait for the business to come in. It doesn’t.
Here are a two more examples of such thinking:

• Attorneys from a major law firm made a presentation to the several members of a private equity firm to introduce their services, knowing that deals these people worked on produced millions of dollars in legal fees each year. When no work resulted from the pitch within three months, the head of the Corporate Practice at the law firm declared the effort a failure. Actually, the attorneys had made a good impression on the people they presented to, about all that could be expected from one meeting.
• Several partners at a management consulting firm said that giving speeches didn’t work for their firm. Over the years, they have given many speeches and never turned up any new business from it. They had done little, if any, follow-up work after the speeches, apparently waiting at the phone for calls from prospective clients, who would say, “I heard what you said last week and thought it so wonderful that I was hoping, just hoping, you could come to our company and . . .” When they had an opportunity to speak, these partners often arrived at the events shortly before they were scheduled to speak and rushed back to their clients as soon at their speech was over. When they began to treat speeches as simply one element out of many needed to build relationships with prospective clients, they began to win business.

The illogic of these people may seem laughably obvious, as I describe it here. I assure you that it wasn’t obvious to them at the time, and I see examples of smart, hard-working professionals committing the Build-It-and-They-Will-Come Fallacy all the time. Remember, there are many steps to getting a client to hire you. One event is unlikely to generate business, and if it does, recognize that this is unusual and lucky, rather than the norm. You need persistence to get new clients. 

Oh, I almost forgot to mention; building a stadium in a cornfield in Iowa is unlikely to bring legendary baseball players back from their graves and rest homes to play one last game together. I hope I haven’t broken too may hearts by passing this along.

I am an introvert.  If I spend a couple of hours with a crowd, I want to go to the closet at the back of my room, close the door behind me, push through the clothing to as far back as I can go, and sit there alone, in the dark and the quiet for a long time.  Being there is like drinking cool water on a summer day.

You extroverts probably think I am joking.  How little you understand the introvert!

Introversion creates challenges for the aspiring rainmaker, but don’t be dismayed.  Our research shows that many rainmakers are introverts and are as good at working a room an extrovert.

Networking, with its intense social contact, takes a toll on the introvert.  It’s not that we don’t like other people—we do!  It’s just that being with too many of them drains us.  If only we could watch the rest of you talking and mixing and having fun from a quiet place in the shadows, that would be plenty for us!  But we can’t.  There’s work to be done amongst the crowd.

Here are a few suggestions for making participation in large gatherings easier:

• Prepare a few conversation starters:  On the way to an event think of three questions to ask people to start conversations.  They can be about the event or facility (Did you have the trouble I did finding this place? Can you tell me a little about this organization?) or news of the day (Did you see the debate last night?  Did you hear how the game came out?). (more…)