We have all had to deal with anti-sponsors, people in a client organization who don’t want you to get work at their companies.  Dealing with them tests a professional’s rainmaking prowess.

One rainmaker I know advises his people to “nuke’em,” by going to their bosses and pointing out that they are obstructing progress.  I have no doubt that this man does just that and does it successfully.  It’s not an approach for all professionals in all situations.

My colleague, Gary Pines, a proven rainmaker, took a different approach with an anti-sponsor, whom I will call Marie, who was blocking our chance to work at an old client.  For some reason, she took a dislike to Gary and Harding & Company.  We are not sure why, but perhaps it was because on our original assignment we were brought in by the Managing Partner of her firm, without Marie’s knowledge or approval.

Whatever the reason, she was trying every tactic she could to make sure we got no more work.  She said that the members of the committee she was working with didn’t want us, though we knew from moles on the committee that this wasn’t true.  She said that we were more suited for a small piece of work, awarding the larger share to a competitor.  Even when the competitor failed to produce results, she continued to resist hiring us.  She threw up barrier after barrier.

Gary, a cheerful, likeable, gentlemanly person, might have been able to nuke this anti-sponsor, because of his relationship with the Managing Partner and several key committee members assigned to selecting consultants.  Instead, he chose to win her over.  Over the next eight months he wore away her resistance.

He remained irrepressibly sunny and helpful to her.  He included her in most of his communications with the firm, demonstrating that he wasn’t trying to go around her.  He was helpful above and beyond what was required, in spite of her sour responses.  During one meeting with her at which she was raising objection after objection, he leveled with her, saying, “Marie, somewhere along the way we got off on the wrong foot with each other.  I don’t know why or how and I don’t care.  From today, as far as I’m concerned, we’re starting fresh.  I want to work with you, I want to help you and I want you to be a success.”

She absorbed the message without comment, but from then on things began to change.  In communications with others at the firm, Gary made a point of mentioning Marie positively, if she provided him even the remotest excuse for doing so.  He stayed in touch with her and continued to be positive, polite and helpful.  And he wore her down.  Today, she is a strong sponsor for Gary and our firm.

Turning around an anti-sponsor is one of the toughest challenges a professional can face.  It takes emotional intelligence and maturity to resist taking personal affront at someone like Marie and to do what Gary did.  It also takes a lot of hard work.  But the return on the effort can be huge.

Transferring a relationship from one professional to another is best done while the client is working with your firm, because the work, itself, provides the professional seeking to pick up the relationship plausible reasons for staying in front of the client.  There are two principal strategies.  The rainmaker can step away from a relationship with a client, while a colleague moves in or the rainmaker can maintain her relationship with the client, providing a colleague the opportunity to develop a relationship with the client’s probable successor. I will call the former The Classic Transition and describe it here and the latter The Generational Transition and deal with it at another time.

The Classic Transition

A rainmaker starts a transition in account leadership by assigning a colleague to manage all other of the firm’s professionals working for the client company.  Once the colleague knows the company’s issues and people, the rainmaker starts bringing him to meetings she has with her senior contact at the client.  She plays the role of the senior representative of the firm at the meeting, letting the colleague do most of the talking with the client.  If the client seems comfortable with the colleague, the rainmaker steps away from the account by:

• Never going to a meeting with the senior client contact without the colleague.
• Deferring to the colleague as much as possible and becoming increasingly quiet at meetings.
• Advising the client that she cannot attend a meeting and recommending that the client and colleague go ahead with the meeting without her.
• Letting the colleague schedule future meetings without her.

As the rainmaker steps away, the colleague must serve the client so well that he accepts the transition.  He must, in the words of one rainmaker, get the client to forget the rainmaker’s phone number.

A couple of years ago, I attended a retreat for all of the new partners at a consulting and accounting firm.  The CEO packed a lot of wisdom about the ways to be a successful partner into a twenty-minute, before-dinner speech. I have been turning one bit of advice over in my mind ever since.  “Some of you know that when you started on one of my accounts, I always told you to make the client forget my phone number. And some of you did service the clients so well, that they did forget all about me.  Now it’s time to encourage the people working on your accounts to make the clients forget your phone number.”

The CEO was addressing one of the perennially difficult aspects of selling professional services and building a practice, the safe transfer of a relationship between a client and a professional to someone else within the professional’s firm.  Firms and their senior professionals need to do this for several reasons:

• Retirement: Most obviously, you can’t take a client with you into retirement—at least not if you truly mean to retire. Helping the firm keep your client will help it earn the money it will need to buy out your share of the ownership.
• Upgrading: You will sometimes develop an account that is not the most strategic use of your attentions.  Turning the account over to someone else allows you to move on to bigger things.
• Specialization: Fewer people are good at developing new accounts than are good at managing and expanding existing ones.  Smart managers of professional firms do all they can to keep the “finders” finding. To have the time for it, finders have to turn over existing accounts to minders.
• Organization Designed for Growth: Some firms build this kind of specialization into their organizational design. Partners mind accounts.  To become senior partners, they must pass on these accounts to new partners and then go out and bring in new clients.

The process is commonly referred to as “handing off of a relationship,” a description so inaccurate, it can do harm.  A relationship exists between two people and is the product of time spent together, of sharing thoughts and experiences.  I cannot give my relationship with a client to you, even if the client were willing, because you weren’t there when the client and I shared those thoughts and experiences.   The best that I can do is introduce you to the client and get out of the way while you and she share thoughts and experiences, so building your own relationship.  Because “handing off” suggests something simple that I can do for you, it may lead you to sit around and wait for something to be given to you.  It will never happen.

The words used by the CEO are much more accurate.  I can set you up to meet my client one or more times, but then it is your responsibility to service her so well that she forgets my phone number.  Rather than handing you something, it’s then my job to get out of the way, to disappear while you develop your own relationship with the person.  How strong that relationship becomes has nothing to do with me, as long as I don’t interfere.  It’s up to you and the client.

In a subsequent posting, I will provide some suggestions for doing this.

I recently received a query from an old friend who is faced with a problem I have seen before.  In both cases, a firm has a service that will benefit clients tremendously by taking advantage of some relatively unknown features of the tax code.  In both cases, the firms find that prospective clients tend to vet the service with their auditors, before going ahead.   The auditors argue against hiring the firm, often on grounds counter to the facts of the tax code.  But also, they are probably embarrassed that someone outside their firms is bringing the fresh idea to their clients.  Though the firms with the new services can demonstrate that the auditors are misinformed about the objections they pose, the auditors’ resistance often kills client interest in going ahead.  Often, the auditors’ strong relationships with their clients and easy access to them weigh more than the logic of the firms trying sell over auditor resistance.

What would you recommend these firms do?

Professionals who have developed skill at selling work in their areas of expertise, often find it hard to sell a broad solution to a problem that extends into areas about which they know relatively little.  Yet, rainmakers do this all of the time.  In an earlier post, I described a change in mindset needed to become an adviser on broad sets of issues.  Clearly, a change in mindset is not sufficient.  The professional must learn to conduct a discussion about a broad business issue.  Used to having command of a subject, they often say that they don’t know what to say and ask about issues where they have limited expertise.  It is a legitimate concern.

When talking with a client in their areas of specialty, professionals ask relatively narrow questions.  Borrowing from Chomskian linguistics, I will call these surface questions.  The surface questions used to learn about a client’s desire to redesign her company’s pension program differ greatly from those required to learn about her need for a new headquarters or her need to make a merger or for any other specific problem.

However, regardless of the issue, surface questions in all specialties gather information in the same categories, such as information about the nature of the client’s issue, its source, its size, its complexity, its urgency, its risks and opportunities, and so forth.  With that understanding, it is relatively easy to construct questions, which I will refer to as deep questions, that are more generic in nature and that will allow a professional to converse with the client in areas that go beyond the professional’s area of detailed knowledge.

Here is a comparison of some surface questions with some deep ones.  For the surface questions I will assume that a location consultant is interviewing a client about moving its corporate headquarters.  The deep questions, of course, can handle a much broader set of issues.  Note that these are just sample questions, not a definitive list.  Also, keep in mind that the same question can be worded many ways.  For example, Why would that be a problem for you?  is essentially the same question as I can think of several reason why that would be a problem.  Which ones stand out to you?  I have chosen brief versions of most questions to make a point.  If you don’t like the specific words shown, see if you can reword the questions to make them more palatable.

To determine the nature of the problem:

• Surface Questions:  Why are you thinking of moving your corporate headquarters?  What kinds of talent are difficult to recruit at this location?  Why is being in a peripheral location problematic?
• Deep Questions:  What is it that you wanted to talk about?  What seems to be the issue?

To establish cause:

• Surface Question:  Why are you thinking of moving now?
• Deep Question:  How did the problem arise/develop?

To establish urgency:

• Surface Questions:  How soon does your lease expire?  If you continue to fall short in the number of researchers you recruit, how soon do you end up in competitive difficulties?
• Deep Questions:  What kind of time pressure are you under?  Why the rush?

To establish goals:

• Surface Question:  What do you want to accomplish from a move?
• Deep Question:  What does success look like?

Top establish size:

• Surface Questions:  How many people are based at the headquarters?  How do they break down by job type?  How many would you expect to move?  How many square feet do you occupy?  Do you expect space requirements to go up or down?
• Deep Questions:  How big is this issue?  How many people does it affect?

To establish scope:

• Surface Questions:  Is the current location under consideration or are you definitely going to move?  Would you consider a long distance or only a local move?  Are there certain other locations that must be considered?
• Deep Questions: What are its parameters?  What areas will be affected?  How broad a set of solutions are you willing to consider?

To establish risks:

• Surface Question:  What happens if word of the move leaks out prematurely?  What if insufficient members of the research team choose to transfer to the new location?  Are you subject to political pressures in making this choice?
• Deep Questions:  What are the risks?   What could go wrong?

To establish opportunities:

• Surface Questions:  If you move to a new location and your recruiting problem goes away, what difference will it make?  How would easier access to your customers help the business?
• Deep Questions:  What are the benefits of making the change?  How much would you gain from the change.

To establish barriers:

• Surface Questions:  Why are you considering staying put?  Why not explore alternatives directly with economic development authorities instead of working through a consultant?
• Deep Questions: What stands in your way?  Why are you considering doing this with external resources, rather than in house?

I could go on, but suspect the point is made.  Professionals who are used to showing off expertise in the questions they ask, sometimes fear deep questions are too general and so highlight their lack of content knowledge.  But clients almost always answer deep questions without hesitation.  When they are focused on talking about their problem, information that draws attention to the professional can be a distraction, even if that information is posed as a question.

Many professional service firms have learned how quickly good times can turn to bad over the past year.   They are learning or relearning that developing business is something that must be done in good times, if you want to delay and minimize bad times like these.  Less often they realize that one source of their revenue implosion has been the failure of a single channel to market.  To reduce that risk in the future requires not just increased business activity, but a diversification of the channels through which business comes to them.  Now that a recovery is underway, it is a good time to do that.

Examples of channel failure include:

• The loss of a rainmaker who provides a disproportional share of a firm’s or practice’s new business.  This is the simplest and most common source of channel failure.
• The loss of a referral source who provides a disproportional share of the firm’s or practice’s new business.  A cost reduction consultant received all of his work from a turnaround manager.  When that person was forced into retirement, his sole source of business disappeared.
• The failure of education programs as a channel for new business.  Several consulting firms ran seminars on specific methods for dealing with corporate problems.  After the seminars some attendees would hire them for large engagements.  At first these seminars attracted high-level participants, but after time, more and more junior people entered the mix.  When senior people stopped coming to the seminars, lead flow declined and when even the junior people stopped coming to the seminars, there were no more leads.
• The failure of an internal referral channel.  There are many examples of this. The engineering studio of an architectural and engineering firm got all of its business from projects that originated with the firm’s architectural studios.  When architectural projects dried up, so did the engineering studios lead flow.  In later years the management of the studio developed personal relationships with client facilities managers, which gave them a second, less cyclical, direct-to-market channel.  Also, at the large accounting firms, the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act reduced leads from audit partners to forensic accountant practices specializing in litigation support to zero overnight.  The litigation support consultants, who had relied entirely on audit partners for a steady flow of new cases, had to scramble to develop new channels.

Channel failure is surprisingly common and can be devastating, all the more so, because the single channel usually looks as if it will never cease to provide new business.  It almost all cases, its failure comes as a big surprise.

The best way to avoid the problem is to have multiple channels to market.   Any professional who relies on a single channel and who doesn’t know how to go out and generate business through multiple sources exposes himself to grave career risk.  But, I don’t really expect many people to recognize and act on this knowledge.  History shows that it is all too easy to become complacent and to ignore channel risk.  You do so at your peril.

In my last post I described how small firms can win against big ones by gaining special access to a client.  They can also win by delivering a compelling message.  To be compelling, it must represent something that clearly differentiates you from your large competitors.  Among the messages used this way are:

We do a better job, because this is the only thing that we do: A big competitor may be better known than you and have a stronger brand, but their brand is usually more diffused than yours, because it must encompass more services.  All big firms also have practices that don’t fit neatly within the brand they promote, and others that are clearly secondary in importance to the firms’ businesses.  This gives you the opportunity to differentiate your firm on the basis of your specialty.  This argument will only succeed, if specialization really makes a difference in your area of work.  You argue that because you don’t do anything else, you recruit, train, promote, reward and organize around just this kind of work.  This results in a more effective organization and better work producing better results for the client.  If you can back this argument up with specialized data bases, research, publications or other demonstrable differentiators, so much the better.

We do a better job, because we have fewer conflicts of interest.  The more services a firm has and the bigger it gets, the more likely it is to have potential conflicts of interest when serving a client.  Sometimes they are so severe that they are subject to regulation.  That happened to the big accounting firms which are now proscribed from serving as outsourced providers of an audit client’s internal accounting and bookkeeping functions, as a result of the Sarbanes Oxley Act.   Sometimes these potential conflicts draw sufficient heat that clients avoid them, even when not prohibited from doing so.  In recent times this has kept many companies from buying executive compensation services from the firms which do their pension and benefits work.  This provides opportunities for small, focused firms to replace them.  As another example, if a law firm that works for insurance companies also does insurance recovery work, it raises a fair question about potential conflicts of interest.  A firm specializing in insurance recovery and which doesn’t work for insurance companies can win business on that basis.

You will get better service because your business will be more important to us than it will be to a big firm.  A company that is a middling or small client to a big firm is likely to be a major account for yours.  This means it will get more of attention from your firm.  Your A Team will work the account, where a large competitor might assign a B or even a C team.  The client can get easy access to the head of the firm, if it wants to for any reason.  I know one small MEP (Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing) consulting engineering firm, which specializes in small repair and renovation projects for large clients with big processing operations.  They are set up to complete these projects efficiently and profitably, whereas, for large competitors, the projects are often seen as a nuisance.  That they gladly take on small projects that others will do only begrudgingly wins work.

You will get a richer mix of talent from us, because we are less leveraged than big firms are, meaning fewer rookies working on your important assignment.  You aren’t expecting the client to pay for the education and development of junior team members, because the firm tends to hire experienced people.

We cost less, because we have less overhead.  Many small firms don’t compete on price.  But many others do and there is nothing shameful about doing so.  This works best if you are avoid giving the perception that you pay less, and so may attract less qualified people.  One consulting firm has grown rapidly by focusing on selling work within an easy commute from its offices.  Because travel costs for its consulting teams end up being much lower than for big firms which move huge teams from across the country to do an assignment, the total cost of their services is lower.

Winning against a big firm is challenging, but it sure feels good when you do

In a recent post, I mentioned that a debrief after a loss taught me that my small firm could compete against a big one and set me on the path to winning work that transformed my firm.  A reader, whose small firm competes frequently against big ones, asked me to elaborate on that subject.

A big firm has many advantages, when competing against a small one.  It spends more on marketing and does so many more engagements with so many more clients that it usually has a stronger brand.  The marketing team can help put together stunning proposals and presentations.  Big firms can devote more hours to a pursuit.  They have greater depth and breadth in their professional teams.  Offering multiple services, the big firm is more likely to have an established relationship with someone at the targeted account.  Professionals at big firms can point out that one-stop-shopping for an array of services lessens project management cost and complexity for the client, and that there are less likely to be gaps between services, a common frustration for clients who parcel out a project in pieces to multiple firms.  The list goes on.

Yet small firms do win against big ones and do it frequently.  Sometimes they win on access to key people in the client company.  I will review some of the special forms of access that they can benefit from in this post, and describe other ways they compete with big firms in the next.

If you can learn about a client’s need early, and get in front of the buyers quickly, before competitors do, at the very least you have the advantage of more time to learn about what the client wants and the potential to make your case more frequently.  At best, you can shut out competitors before they even realize the client has a need.  Here are some tips for gaining early access:

Tip #1: Seek to develop a referral relationship with people who sell to the same people you do.  Focus especially on those who compete with big firms in one area, but don’t compete with you.  If a client has a need for your services, such people are unlikely to refer a mutual competitor.  If they know and trust you, they will be happy to recommend you—and, of course, you should do the same for them.  I belong to a formal networking group made up of representatives mostly of small firms, will sell to professional service firms.  There are many such formal and informal networks.

You can also develop a relationship with competitors and their colleagues at large firms which may be conflicted out of the opportunity to work for a client, who would rather see the work go to a small firm, like yours, rather than to a firm which competes with them on many fronts.  Working with such people provides you with extra eyes and ears in the marketplace, identifying opportunities for you.

Tip #2: Figure out who wants you to win and see if they might have opportunities to introduce you to decision makers.  You can also get special access through former employers, colleagues, employees, because they want you to win.  Many small firms get started when the founder leaves a job at a company, but continues to work for it as an independent advisor.

Tip #3: Figure out what can you do that will give you special access.  It had best be something you like to do, because it will absorb large amounts of your time and energies.  Sometimes you can do something difficult for a large competitor to imitate that gets you access.  The founder of a small consulting firm I know is getting many meetings with senior executives.  They meet with him because his recently published book which captures their interest and because his professional meeting-getter knows how to use that interest to obtain meetings.  I have seen others gain access through organizations they found and promote, from a golf tournament to a full-fledged professional association.  These channels take a lot of work, but can deliver huge payoffs.   Most small firms that have grown to midsize have done so by investing heavily in some such vehicle.

(This is another of our posts from one of our readers seeking advice.  Please feel free to submit questions that you would like help with.)

Ian Brodie, a smart man and rainmaking expert, sent in the following question:

I’m currently puzzling over the question of whether to focus on building a personal brand (my name) or a company brand. I know a couple of local associates who are in a similar position too.

When I first set up my practice a year or so ago I selected a “corporate” name for the business. At that stage I (perhaps lacking in confidence in my own reputation) wanted to give the impression of being an established business rather than just a “one man band”.

However, over the last year it’s become clear that no matter what the name of the business, my clients are hiring me personally – not a company.

With that in mind, I am now wondering whether it would be better to rebrand the business under my own name. That would make it easier for clients to remember and find me (by searching for my name rather than having to remember the name of the company) and also to refer me to others.

Over the long term, I also intend to publish a number of articles, and perhaps a book. This would obviously be under my name rather than under a company name.

A lot of the people I admire in consulting run their businesses under their own name: Yourself, David Maister, Andrew Sobel, etc. Others, however, have a company brand: Charlie Green as Trusted Advisor Associates; Suzanne Lowe as Expertise Marketing.

So the choice doesn’t seem obvious to me. At the moment I’m tending towards rebranding under my name. There would be a degree of administrative pain involved initially, but I guess better to go through that now than in 5 years time.

Any guidance?

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

I recently met with a client adjusting from the heady days of a boom economy to the current bust. Several of its professionals argued that they hadn’t been in a sellers’ market. Competition for large projects was always tough, they said, and though they had won a lot, they had lost some, too. True enough, but their firm’s major competitors had grown at rates over 20 percent per year and the firm, itself, faster than that, while maintaining or increasing prices. Sounds like a sellers’ market to me.

There is good reason to clarify this point, because recognizing when one is tipping from a sellers’ to a buyers’ market or vice verssus has important implications for many professional firms. That’s because the price of many professional services is quite elastic with demand. Boom turns to bust quite suddenly (see my post, Selling Professional Services in a Downturn, for an explanation of why), and you have to drop prices quickly, if you want to keep winning work. The market teaches this quite effectively, when too many firms compete for too few projects or assignments and clients play them off against each other to get the best deal.

When the tide turns to boom again, clients aren’t nearly so quick to help you see that you can raise your rates. This means that prices tend to go up more slowly in good times than they go down in bad. The firm which recognizes when it can charge its clients more generates much higher profits than its competitors.

My question is, how will we know when this downturn is over and we can begin to push up rates?