One of the best rainmakers I have met in recent years called me the other day, because clients had stopped hiring him.  Naturally, he found this disturbing.   Who wouldn’t?  He wanted to talk about the cause and what to do about it.

Demand had dropped because of events in his primary market with which he had had nothing to do and which were beyond his control.  Until recently, his practice had been growing at over 20 percent per year for several years.  His efforts in new markets weren’t producing sufficient results yet to stop the dive.  For the first time in his career, he found himself unable to land sufficient new clients.

It is a credit to his awesome rainmaking abilities that this hadn’t happened earlier in his life.   I know from personal experiences and those of many professionals whom I have worked with that the first time this happens, it can bludgeon a person’s self confidence.  This is especially so, if one is emotionally insecure, as many rainmakers are.

If this happens to you, I suggest the following:

• Remind yourself that everyone has streaks and slumps.  This is partially a matter of luck.  If you flip a coin enough times, it will eventually come up tails ten times in a row.  That it does is a function of probabilities and luck rather than of your flipping skill.  You probably haven’t lost your touch; your luck has just turned.  Of course, this also means you weren’t quite as good as you thought you were when the luck was running your way and you had a streak of wins.  That humbling bit of logic is good to keep in mind when you are winning a lot.
• The probabilities of a certain run of wins or loses changes over time with market conditions and other factors.  Just as a field-goal kicker will score less often in a season with lots of gusty crosswinds, so you will win less often when the business crosswinds work against you.
• The probabilities of winning go down, if you have to enter a new or under-developed market, and go down substantially.  This if for factors I have described elsewhere (See my book, Creating Rainmakers, Chapter 2, “What Rainmakers Know or the Mathematics of Selling”).
• Of course, you should review what you have been doing that might have reduced your rainmaking effectiveness.  There is always something that we can do better.  There are always areas where we have become a bit lax with success.  Fix these problems.
• Refocus on the markets where you can get the most traction fast and have at them.

This all leads to my main point:  Beating yourself up over a slump won’t help you.  First, for the reasons I have described, it is probably inappropriate for you to do so.  Slumps occur for even the best rainmakers, and the rainmakers’ errors are usually a relatively small part of the cause.  So, question what you have been doing, but don’t question yourself.  Wallowing in self recriminations or the (false) realization that you have been a fraud, not a rainmaker, all these years, is counterproductive.

If my friend, the rainmaker, was guilty of anything, it was of not diversifying his market rapidly enough.  He had made sincere efforts to do so, but those efforts had been stalled due to the high demand in his core market which consumed his energies and time.  If that is a mistake, it is an honest and understandable one.  Indeed, it is one that most of us would make.  All this doesn’t resolve one’s revenue shortfall, but it does put one in a better mind-frame for doing something about it.

Professionals learning to develop business often struggle with finding a reason for calling clients and other important network contacts, when there is no urgent matter to discuss.  You can have frequent conversations with a network contact, as long as the net value of the sum of those conversations is sufficiently high to meet her hurdle rate. If it doesn’t, she won’t return your calls or will find other means to use her time more productively.  The hurdle rate varies from contact to contact and tends to be higher with the more desirable contacts, such as senior executives.

Note that most contacts will not mind the occasional low-value conversation, as long as the net value of the sum of all exchanges with you is high.  This logic presses us to find ways to provide the needed value.  With some contacts the personal relationship is strong enough that interest in each other provides sufficient value.  For the rest, we must constantly be looking for information and ideas that our contacts would find valuable.  That can be a challenge.

Joe Flom of the law firm, Skadden, is one of the world’s greatest rainmakers of the past half century. I find it revealing that he used to hit upon a conversation topic that he would use with his business contacts for a while, and then come up with another.  His colleagues used to refer to these topics as his flavor of the month.  Over the years I have seen other rainmakers do the same, though they seldom have a name for it.

Not having had the opportunity to observe Flom over time I can’t describe the characteristics of his flavors of the month.  From broader experience, I think a flavor must:

• Be a valuable insight or piece of information tied at least peripherally to your business
• Be topical enough that it is easy to bring into conversation
• Lead easily to a question that gets the other person talking

Recognizing a promising flavor is a knack worth developing.  They come to you more frequently than you might imagine, if you are looking for them.  To build the habit, from time to time ask yourself the following questions:

• Is there a contrarian story to a current trend?
• Do you have an example of an interesting solution to a common problem?
• Do you know how a leader in a field does something that others struggle with?
• Is there an impending change in technology, regulation, competitive environment of other area your contacts need to be advised of?

I was reminded of this subject recently when I found myself discussing flavors of the month with several contacts over two weeks.  The subject of flavors of the month had become my flavor of the month.

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.

The managing partner of a firm once told me about a dinner that he and his boss had with a client in Chicago long ago. The boss, whose name is Bob, was the founder of the firm and a prodigious rainmaker. Much of his prowess was based on a detailed knowledge of certain aspects of the insurance industry. That knowledge allowed the firm to compete with larger firms with stronger reputations and deeper pockets.

Like Bob, the client had spent all his career in insurance, so all through the dinner they regaled each other with stories about people they knew in the business. The client, like Bob, could trace people then prominent in the industry back three or four jobs and describe how they had made their careers. They matched each other, story for story, from the appetizer through dessert.

After leaving the client, as Bob and future managing partner were walking back to their hotel, Bob said, “Didn’t we learn a lot!” His young colleague was baffled by his enthusiasm.

Three weeks later the two men were attending an association meeting where they were introduced to someone who had been the subject of one of the client’s stories during the dinner. “Oh, your so-and-so! I’ve heard so much about you,” said Bob. “Didn’t you . . .” and he proceeded to tell the man he had just met about one of the man’s early successes. “I’d love to get together with you some time,” Bob concluded. “Sure,” said the man, without hesitation. “Give my secretary a call and we’ll set something up.” He handed Bob his card.

If someone whom you had never met told you something about your past in detail, wouldn’t you be curious? Wouldn’t you be inclined to give the person a meeting?

In other posts, I have written about the benefits of specialization. One such benefit is the affinity it creates in your network. As in this example, the knowledge you get from one network member has interest to others that isn’t the case in low affinity networks. You do better work and you get better work because of this knowledge.

Larry Bodine has written a superb portrait of a rainmaker., lawyer Peter Klee, for lawjobs.com Career Center.

Andrew Dietz has devised an interesting way to type rainmakers.  He describes three primary typess; solvers, drivers and connectors.  Rainmakers with mixes of attributes of these major types fall into a number of subsidiary types.  His post is worth a scan.

I met with Andy today.  Barely hidden beneath his usual cheeriness, stress crackled like static electricity.  A lateral hire at the partner level, he got his job on the expectation that he would bring in enough work to revive a failing practice.  He has been at it a year and has yet to deliver … anything. 

The rainmaker at one firm who can’t even raise a dust devil at another is seen fairly often in the professions.  Why?  When a client buys a professional service, she is buying the ability of a team to solve a serious problem.  She bases her perception of that ability on the reputation of the seller’s firm, on any past experience she has with the firm and on the trust she has in the word of the rainmaker. 

When the rainmaker moves to a new firm, a lot changes.  If not better or worse than the old firm’s, the reputation of the new one is at least different.  The rainmaker may praise the abilities of his new one, but the client knows he was singing a different melody just yesterday, and, rightly is skeptical.  Many will prefer to wait and see, before taking a chance on the new arrangement.

Rainmakers tend to be optimists who overrate their own importance in the buyers’ weighting of factors in their hiring decisions.   The inability to sell to their old clients comes as a devastating surprise.  When that occurs, the rainmaker often loses focus and seeks to sell a broader array of services or recommends the latest miracle marketing service that will get him better meetings or jumps to another firm in hopes that it will go better there.

I don’t want Andy to fall into any of these traps.  In his case I think he should stay the course.  That’s because the input measures are favorable. He is having more meetings with the right people on the right subjects.  Selling is a numbers game. Get the inputs right and the probability that someone will buy grows.  I think he is near a breaking point on several pursuits.  I feel his success coming in my aging bones, as sure as spring follows winter.

It will take courage for Andy to stay the course.  I hope he does.  And I hope I am right and that luck starts to run his way.

A rainmaker has a large network that helps him generate leads and win more business. The value of a network of contacts grows geometrically with the size of the network. This is known as Metcalfe’s Law and is described in more detail in my book, Creating Rainmakers. Though it may interest you to understand the underlying logic and the mathematics (which are quite simple), you really need to know what it means on the ground during your ongoing efforts to sell your services. Though they happened in the air, two encounters I had in plane rides make the point nicely.

When I started my current firm, it was in a new field for me and I had to build a network of contacts almost from scratch. I had been in this business for maybe a year, when I was bumped up to first class on a flight from New York to California. My seat mate was a dignified looking gentleman in a fine grey, pinstriped suit that even my inexperienced eyes could tell didn’t come off the rack at Target.

We exchanged the normal civilities as we divvied up the space between us for our pre-flight drinks. We then both settled in to our individual affairs. I wanted to meet this man, but knew from experience not to move too quickly. Some time during the flight, we began a small conversation. I asked him where he worked and he named a huge media company. I asked what he did there, and he said, “I’m the president.” My mouth opened to say something, but nothing came out. I tried again and sill nothing came out. The conversation ended there. I had nothing to say to the man. I didn’t know anything about his company. I didn’t know much about the media business. A sudden shift of subjects into sports or politics would have seemed odd, and I know almost as little about sports as I do about the media business. I opened my mouth one more time, and once again nothing came out. Some people would have found a way, but I am shy and introverted and I had nothing more to say.

Fast-forward about eleven years, after I had been in this business of showing others how to sell professional services long enough to build a large network. Again I was bumped up to first class on another flight from New York to California. As I sat down, my seat mate was reading USA Today opened full width so that the left page stretched over a bit over the arm rest and into my space. The main article announced the departure of a celebrity CEO from her company. I observed this news by saying, “Oh, she’s out,” to which my seatmate responded, “Yes, and I have nothing to say on the subject.”

Now, that was an advertisement. The man meant that though the world would like to hear his views of the subject, given who he is, he was not prepared to share them. A conversation with this man was easy to start. And here is where the magic of having a large network began. The man was the president for North America of a large biotech firm, so I began to ask about professionals serving that industry. Within ten minutes we had identified four people we knew in common that his firm used and who had been my clients. I had spent the morning with one of them. Another he thought so highly of that he wished she would call more often. Another had a project with his firm that was in trouble, and he said he would be reluctant to hire them again. We talked briefly about the book he was reading and then went back to our individual affairs, talking again only briefly during landing.

The information he had given me provided reasons to call all four people, strengthening my relationship with each one. I was also able to send a book to this man on a topic of interest to him, so strengthening that tenuous relationship. I could do none of this eleven years earlier; my network wasn’t large enough.

And that is why a person with a big network does better at finding new clients, than does someone with a small one. So, how many people will you meet this month and where will you meet them?

I recently gave a speech to a group of architects during which I referred to a structural engineer, whom many of us knew. One of the architects corrected me, saying, “He’s not really an engineer, though. He’s a salesman.” “Yes,” I agreed, “he certainly is a big rainmaker for his firm. But why do you say he’s not an engineer?” “Because he’s not practicing his profession,” said the architect. To which I responded curtly, “Yes, he is . . . at the highest level.” We looked each other in the eye and then decided not to have that argument and went on to other subjects. Pity. If we had argued, we might have learned something.

So, instead of debating with the architect, I have done so with myself, as I often do. After winning and losing the argument from both sides several times, I called the engineer (or former engineer) in question and asked him what he thought. He was extremely busy and, I sensed, thought me either mad or with far too much time on my hands to be bothered by such an angels-on-pinhead issue. And he stunned me with his answer. He wasn’t sure, but leaned towards the view that he wasn’t a real engineer any more.

Instead of a definitive answer, I came away with a second question, is it important whether an engineer or actuary or architect or accountant or lawyer or consultant is practicing her profession when selling? I find it best to deal with these questions simultaneously.

The first question comes down to what practicing your profession means. The simplest definition is using one’s specialized education and training in a specific area to solve a problem. 

The answer to the second question—is it important whether or not selling is practicing your profession—depends, of course on your point of view. Here is mine:

One of the pernicious aspects of the professions is the pecking order among specialists. This is, arguably, most egregious among architects, where designers look down on project architects, who look down on construction administrators, who look down on specifiers. Name a famous architect and it will be a designer.

Pecking orders exist in other professions, too. Strategy consultants outrank all other types of management consultant, for example. Trial lawyers outrank other litigators, who are effective at negotiating settlements. Structural engineers outrank their more common brethren, the civil engineers.

In some professions, like architecture, the rankings remain rigid over time. In others, the rankings have changed. Over the past twenty years, the prestige of mergers and acquisitions attorneys has risen from the dregs of the profession to one of the most acclaimed specialties. The status of the general counsels, working inside a corporation, has also risen over the years, as the corporations have given them more power.

There are two strong arguments I can make for saying that a professional who sells her firm’s services is practicing her profession. First, she uses that education and the knowledge she has gained from experience to understand the client’s business issue, translate into a set of technical needs, assemble a team that has the right set of technical abilities to address those needs, and then with the team, develops an affordable solution to the business problem. She may not work at a drawing table or CAD machine, she may not write briefs or argue a case in front of a judge, or do many of the other tasks which she studied in school to earn a professional degree. To say that doing this is not practicing a profession is like telling a pianist that he is not really a musician, because he composes music.

The second argument for including rainmakers among those who practice their profession is based on an analogy. If a general counsel or in-house architect is still considered to be practicing her professions, then logic dictates that professionals who sell their firms’ services are, too. One is the buyer and one is the seller. Both buyer and seller use their technical knowledge to structure and negotiate the transaction. Why should the person on one side of the deal be considered to be practicing her profession and the other not? The general counsel doesn’t plead cases before a judge or write contracts and the in-house architect doesn’t design buildings any more than the professionals who sell do. But they do use the specialized knowledge in other ways.

To say that a professional is no longer practicing her profession, because she makes her contribution to the firm by selling, is not only inaccurate, it is harmful. It is pernicious, because the person who says that selling isn’t practicing a profession is attributing a professional inferiority to sellers and is most likely justifying his own sales ineffectiveness on the grounds of professional purity. He is saying, “I studied to be an architect and want to remain one, so, of course I can’t sell anything.” This form of elitism is not good for the speaker nor for the one who has supposedly given up his profession. Because I like a good rant from time to time and because I feel a passion about this subject, I want to say, :”Stop being such an ineffectual dweeb and be a real architect (or actuary, accountant, engineer …) and sell something.”

Maybe it’s just as well that the architect and I didn’t have that argument after all.

There is a lot of good information about trusted advisor relationships, including the excellent book, entitled Trusted Advisor by David Maister, Charlie Geen and Rob Galford.  Another good book, Clients for Life, by Jagdish Seth and Andrew Sobel, deals with the subject without using that term.  Blogs, such as www.trustedadvisor.com  and www.davidmaister.com/blog/ are devoted to the subject or deal with it frequently and other blogs and ezines mention it sporadically.  It’s a worthwhile subject.
 
All of these sources provide commentary and advice, most of which can be reduced to one sentence, If you want to be a trusted advisor, act in a trustworthy way and know your stuff.  Living our lives by this simple dictum isn’t easy.  It is no wonder that whole books can be written on the subject and should be.  I will call this the behavior model and I don’t reduce all this material to a mere sentence with any desire to disparage it.  Rather, I want to contrast it with another approach to becoming a trusted advisor which doesn’t fall within the broad cover of this sentence.

I am referring to the age model.  The one-sentence reduction of this approach is: If you know your stuff and stay in touch with clients who are clearly rising stars and who are five to ten years younger than you, you have a good chance to become their trusted advisor in five, ten or more years.  I don’t have proof to support this, but I do have lots of anecdotal evidence.  For the past few years I have asked the rainmakers I interviewed their ages and the ages of those who treat them as trusted advisors.  In the greater number of these relationships the advisor is older than the advisee.

There are a number of reasons for this to be the case. It is obvious if you ask a 65 year old rainmaker about the trusted advisor relationships he has today, he will cite more people younger than he is.  But, I don’t believe the bias toward older advisors is solely based on an age ceiling for advisees.

Several other beliefs I have support the age model.  For example, I believe that most people find it easier to accept advice from someone older than they are.  The five to ten year spread between advisor and advisee seems about right for the advisor to be able to understand the advisee’s world.

This is all supposition.  But there is also the nature of networks.  Most networks form a power curve.  To understand what that means, think of the distribution of income in any country.  A few people have wealth beyond imagination, a few more are very rich and a few more are just rich.  Then come the broad middle class and the poor.  The difference in income between the wealthy beyond imagination and the very rich is immense compared spread of income between the middle class and the poor.  A few get most the goodies in a power curve.

There a two ways to end up on have-it-all end of the curve.  The first is to be in the network longer than others.  Our old rainmakers meet that criterion.  The second is to be fitter at the job, meaning know your stuff.  The comfort of confiding in older mentors and other explanations are, then, just the behavior mechanism that creates the power curve.

None of this takes anything away from the behavior model and all the good work that Maister and Green and others have done.  It does provide another path for research that I hope someone follows.

For the professional seeking to develop more business it is an explanation of why rain making gets easier every year you do it.  Older rainmakers know this, but younger professionals either don’t know or don’t quite believe it.  I spend a lot of energy trying convince young professionals that it is true.  In any event, you can’t win if you don’t play.  So, get out there and learn your stuff and build your network, focusing a part of your attention on the up-and-comers in the client companies.

Oh, and one other thing . . . while you’re at it, grow old! 

Do you think you can handle this last part?   If you can, you may well end up a trusted advisor to some important clients.