Of we have sent your clients introductory letters and emails to get meetings.  We have reminded the clients that you will see them in meeting confirmation letters and e-mails.  Once you have held meeting, someone must send a follow-up letter.  An earlier post described how to prepare follow-up e-mails and letters. Who on your team should send them?

After a team from a professional firm has a sales meeting with a client, someone often asks who should send follow-up e-mails to whom.  Sometimes that follow-up note is the last communication you have with a member of the client team before the company decides whom to hire.  You want that last communication to be powerful.

Of course, every member of the team can send a note to every person on the client team.  But that isn’t always best.  If the teams are large, the client may feel overwhelmed.  Key members of the client team may also pay more attention to one well drafted follow-up note than to a flurry of paper which will inevitably included many redundancies.

There is no answer to that is right for every occasion, but here are some things to consider when assigning follow-up responsibilities:

• Identify relationships you want to build.  Usually, you want the senior person on the client team to feel close to the client partner or other senior person your team.  So, too, with technical experts from both organizations.  If there is an engagement manager on your team, you want the client’s engagement manager to feel that this is someone he wants to work with.  In short, the members of your team should each, at the very least, send a follow-up note their counterparts in the client organization.

• Respond to concerns and questions with authority.  If a member of the client team has expressed concern or raised a question, she should get a response from the person on your team most suited to address that concern.  If it is a technical question, your technical person should follow-up.  If it is a question about the commitment of the firm, the senior person on your team should follow-up.

• Maintain and reinforce personal relationships.  Anyone on your team who has a business or personal relationship that predates the meeting with a member of the client team should send a personal note to that person afterwards.

• Don’t leave anyone out.  Every member of the client team should get a follow-up note from at least one person on yours.

Don’t let a competitor have the last word.  Send those follow-up letters and emails.

When two people who haven’t worked much with each other first go on a sales call together, one often dominates the conversation with the prospective client. When two people go on a sales call together and one is much senior to the other, the senior one tends to do most the talking. Anyone who sells with Maxwell Flushover (name changed—actually, this could be one of a dozen different people I know) learns that he will do most talking. In cases like these, what is the second seller to do?

She (or he) has several options:

1> Sit silently trying to look wise and interested. This may be good for starters, but if it goes on too long, the client may wonder why she is there.

2> Take notes. Good, but if it is all she does, the client may perceive her as junior help.

3> Fight with the colleague for airspace. This will alienate both the client and the colleague.

4> Take the role of monitor, carefully watching and listening to the client for visual or verbal cues that her colleague may miss during the exchange. When she sees one she will insert a question, like:

• I sense that you aren’t comfortable with that idea. Is there something you could share with us?
• You said there were three reasons you want to do this. Did we miss the third one?

It is, of course, this last alternative that I am advocating. As anyone with a lot of selling experience knows, a monitor can contribute hugely to a sales meeting. Every firm should have an understanding that anyone not speaking goes immediately into monitor mode. Everyone should know that the monitor will speak seldom, but when she does, everyone else backs off immediately.A good monitor can make the difference between winning and losing. The furrowed brow of the General Counsel, unnoticed by the first seller who is speaking to the CEO, may veil a concern that will go unspoken until later, unless an observant monitor draws him out. And the concern only voiced after you leave the room is the most hurtful to your cause.

Establishing the monitor’s role as an important one in all sales meetings counters the implicit and insidious bias that important people talk during sales meetings, while others listen. The job can be done by the most senior person on the team—and should be whenever someone else is speaking. Indeed, to instill the role in a firm, senior people must model it. And they must complement those who have effectively monitored their exchanges with a client.

There are no second sellers.

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

I received the following question from a reader in Singapore.  He was responding to Rain Making Problem #9: Lead Generation when Your Back is to the Wall to which he refers several times.  What would you suggest?

Hi all,

Ford, I just want to say first that I think what you’re doing is great. I was so unhappy with my previous firm, I set up my own practice last year with just one client. From what the client told me before I quit, I was going to be extremely busy just servicing them. However, for various reasons they have sent me only about one-quarter to one-third of the work they indicated they would send me before I quit, so your books and your website have been a life saver for me.

I’m sorry that I don’t have any tips for Lenore, but I do have a question which relates to Mel’s point on focusing on serving rather than winning. I like to think I provide first-rate service. I’m not aware of anyone else in my geographical region and area of practice who provides service and does work to the standard I do. The only trouble is, how does one show that to a potential client? The way I see it, the scope for doing this is pretty limited: you can only go so far in writing proposals, and you may be limited to just one, or if you’re lucky, two meetings with the potential client to talk over their needs, etc. Otherwise, “We’re great. Our service is awesome and we’re much better than everybody else” just sounds like another sales pitch that the potential client also heard from the competition. It is only when you actually land the work that you can show what you do.

So, do you have any tips to share on focusing on servicing during the sales process? Thanks in advance if you do.

In a sling in Singapore,

Willem

Of course, I am responsible for the in-a-sling close. Forgive me Willem; I couldn’t stop myself.

I sat with a friend today who described frustration with a colleague who had lost a sale my friend had been pursuing for a long time. The client had asked the colleague, whom I will call Ernest, if he had ever done work in a foundry. Ernest had answered, “Yes, but only once and it was over twenty years ago for a company that was so different from yours that there isn’t much relevance to your situation.” After the meeting, Ernest had argued that a less detailed response would have been misleading, and so, dishonest.

First, I want to commend Ernest for his desire to be honest.  There is, unfortunately, too much lying in selling situations and it gives selling a bad name.  I do not think Ernest was being prudish nor that his colleague wanted him to do something unprincipled. Yet, I think his answer was a mistake.

In making his defense of his answer, he committed at least two logical fallacies. First, he assumed he could read the client’s mind. Ernest presumed that the question was about relevant client experience. What if it wasn’t? For example, it may have been a simple devise to get Ernest to talk to get a sense of what he would be like to work with. If so, and I think this at least as likely as the reason Ernest assumed, he showed the client that he was likely to bore him with unwanted detail and, worse, that he was none too savvy.

Or the client could have wanted to know how Ernest felt about spending a good part of the next few months in a place with a lot of banging and crashing. We will never know. If so, Ernest’s answer showed no tolerance or interest in such a place. Unless you know why a person is asking a question, you don’t really know how to answer.

Second, he assumed that an accurate but imprecise answer would be misleading and dishonest. The distinction between accuracy and precision should be kept in mind when answering client questions. An accurate statement, such as Ford Harding is between 20 and 70 years old, can be imprecise. And a precise one; Ford Harding is 18 years, four months and six days old; can be inaccurate. When we answer questions, we often make tradeoffs, explicitly or implicitly, between accuracy and precision.  An answer that is sufficiently precise in one context may not be in another.  If a policeman asks a young person’s age at a bar, he requires a precision not usually necessary, for example.

Answers to the question, Have you ever worked in a foundry?, such as Yes or Yes, but it was a while ago are both accurate, if imprecise in that they don’t give much detail. If they satisfy the client and are true, he may be put off by having more information pressed upon him. He can follow up with more questions, if he wants to.

If you are concerned that you may have misled him or that you may appear to have been evasive if he does ask for detail, the solution is simple: ask before you tell more. Yes. Is experience in a foundry important to you? His answer will guide you to the right level of precision. For example, he might answer, Only in that it would be better, if you knew what it is like to spend months in a place with so much noise, before you take the assignment. This might open the opportunity to describe work you did at a heavy metal stamping plant or the noise your child’s rock band makes when it rehearses in your living room, information relevant but not obvious.

But Ernest assumed he knew what the client was thinking and the level of detail the client wanted. Ernest is a nice man and generally good to be around.  But trying to read another’s intentions, as he did in this case, can be an annoying thing to do. How would you feel, if you asked a travel agent if she had ever been to Sweden, and you got a lengthy, qualified answer which seemed to suggested she wasn’t certain about anything on the subject, when all you really wanted to know is if the currency there is the Euro?

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

In my last post, I noted that curing bad habits is easier if you know what to do, rather than just what not to do. Instead of saying I, say we. Increase your eye contact and you will say uhm less often.

Over the years, the people in our firm have developed lots of prescriptions to deal with common bad sales habits. But I haven’t found satisfactory solutions to others. For example, what would you advise people to do to:

1> Stop talking so fast? I have never found a satisfactory cure to this common malady.
2> Stop selling after a client has agreed to a point? We all know do this, but failure rates remain high. What advice will reduce them?

Are there bad sales habits that you would like other readers’ advice on curing?

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

I recently received this problem from a reader in New York, whom I will call Steve . I have blinded it to protect the anonymity of those involved. Steve wrote:

I came across your blog this evening as I sought answers/understanding for a prospective job that went south. Perhaps you can use this for your Rainmaking Problems; it’s at least cathartic to type this confessional and I thank you for your indulgence.

I first met the prospective client, a [charity organization], in the summer of 2008, introduced by an acquaintance who was a member of the board and said they were looking for [the kinds of services we offer]. I had two good meetings with them, developed a thorough and very reasonable proposal, and was led to believe that we would be authorized to start work soon.

After a few weeks of being told approval was pending, my acquaintance informed me that the board was also talking to other [firms in our field] – and that they’d used my proposal as the basis for these conversations (after stripping any identifying or cost language). I felt this was somewhat unethical but I was interested in the project and didn’t make a protest.

After many more weeks, the board apparently narrowed the selection to us and one other firm. My acquaintance sent me a copy of the other firm’s proposal – the language of the scope was nearly identical to ours, but there were many more restrictions and [their cost] was higher. The other firm, however, had strong allies on the Board (so says my acquaintance) and they were awarded the project. I was a gracious loser, sending notes thanking everyone who’d I met, and genuinely disappointed not to be doing the work.

Then, a few days later, my acquaintance calls to say they want to see us again. We put together a new presentation to support our proposal and I’m told we were far superior to the other guy.

I reach out to my acquaintance to learn the verdict, and he tells me they want us to return again, this time [after doing some upfront work at our expense to get a sense of our approach] – no decision yet.

At this point, five months since the initial meeting and one apparently rigged loss already, I’m a little frustrated; given what had happened with my proposal am distrustful of their motives in seeking new original content; and feel [preliminary free work] would be grossly premature & would foul the planning process should we actually get the work. However, I accept the invitation.

I elect to not provide [the free work] and instead focus on planning issues, as if it were the beginning of the work as layed out in my proposal. The other guy comes in with a dog & pony show and gets the job.

So after mulling this over, I feel the critical moment was when I accepted the invitation to return the last time; that everyone would have been better served by me challenging the need to return and by me saying flat-out that thought we’d already made our case and wouldn’t be doing any [free work] (sounds arrogant as I type it!). Or perhaps we should have thrown together a dog & pony show too, but I still believe this would have come back to haunt us had we landed the job, and really would have stung if we’d lost.

Was it right to feel squeamish about the way they appropriated our proposal? Was it right to feel frustrated? Was this job better not to get, or was it even possible to get?

My gut tells me we were being used to make the rigged choice shape up, and that we should be grateful not to have gotten the job, but still, I know there’s an improved me that would have found a way to handle this better – and would be interested in a true Rainmaker’s perspective.

I have sent Steve a preliminary response, but think he would welcome the chance to hear other people’s assessment of the situation, before they are biased by mine. What are your responses to the author’s questions?

In earlier posts (Dealing with Unreturned Phone Calls, A Lesson from Joe) I described how easy it is to misinterpret a lack of response from a prospective client. This is but one example of a broader tendency for rainmakers to see things differently from the rest of us.  Here are two more examples:

Being stood up for a meeting with a prospective client: