Selling a service is much different – and harder – than selling a product. Or, more appropriately, buying a service is a much different experience than buying a product.
The term business development is a euphemism used to describe sales and marketing activities in professional services. For a variety of historical and cultural reasons, we don’t use the word sales or selling in professional services.
I use the term client development instead of business development.
If I’m So Smart, Why Do I Feel So Stupid about Selling?
Things Rainmakers Do That Most of Us Don’t: The Five Rainmaker Skills
What is a rainmaker? A rainmaker generally refers to a partner in a professional services firm who is skilled at bringing in client business.
Rainmakers:
- Generate leads for new business
- Turn leads into new clients
- Are skilled at turning existing clients into referrals and repeat business
- Keep many people in their firms employed
- Are highly respected and frequently have a lot of influence in their firms.
Most successful people, in any given field, are often not the best teachers.
We’re not going to get much helpful coaching from the best rainmakers in our firms.
The Five Rainmaker Skills:
- Skill 1: Create Your Personal Brand Identity
- Skill 2: Demonstrate Your Professional Expertise. A product is used. A service is experienced. It’s the difference between what is and what could be. We must demonstrate our expertise in specific ways that helps a prospective client feel comfortable in choosing to work with us.
- Skill 3: Build Your Professional Ecosystem. I prefer to use the term “ecosystem” rather than “network”. Ecosystem is a better word, I believe, because networking has taken on a negative tone for some. Ecosystems are a complex mesh of mutually supportive, beneficial relationships.
- Skill 4: Develop Trust ‐ Based Relationships
- Skill 5: Practice Everyday Success Habits
It is particularly hard for people to make good decisions when they have trouble translating the choices, they face into the experiences they will have. If we are to become successful rainmakers, we have to build authentic relationships with those we wish to serve.
How Clients Buy
In How Clients Buy, we outline the seven elements of the clients buying decision journey.
- Element 1: Awareness – A prospective client becomes aware of you.
- Element 2: Understanding – Once your existence is known, the prospective client needs to clearly understand what you do, who you serve, and how you are unique.
- Element 3: Interest – Prospective clients have to be interested in what you do.
- Element 4: Respect – Respect relates to your professional credibility.
- Element 5: Trust – Others must believe that you are a trustworthy individual if they would ever consider hiring you or recommending you to a friend.
- Element 6: Ability – Ability refers to a prospective client having the budget, decision authority, and organizational support to hire you.
- Element 7: Readiness – As with many things in life, timing is everything.
If we have a better understanding of how clients buy, we can be sensitive to where the prospective client is in their thought process. And if we understand where the client is in their journey, we can do a better job of providing them with the things they need to become more confident in their decision.
Risk is an important component in the client’s buying decision journey. So much of what clients are trying to do, consciously or not, is mitigate the risks they face in choosing which expert to hire, or even if they should bring in outside help.
Here are just a few of the risks clients face:
- Competence risk: Are we really good at what we do?
- Culture risk: Are we a good cultural fit?
- Performance risk: Will we actually follow through on doing what we say we will?
- Integrity risk: Will we do what’s best for the client at all times?
- Reputational risk: Will this hurt my firm’s reputation if the project ends poorly?
- Financial Risk: Will this impact our firm’s financial performance if things don’t go well?
- Career risk: Will my career be derailed if this project goes badly?
Professional services are not easy to buy. We need to know someone. We need to respect their expertise. We need to trust that they are honest and ethical. These are not things that can be easily discerned in one hour’s time, or a day, or a week.
Where Clients Come From
I have discovered that clients arrive via seven predictable pathways:
- Repeat business (from a satisfied client)
- Referrals (from a satisfied client, trusted colleague, friend, or acquaintance)
- Inquiries (from someone you know)
- Inquiries (from someone you don’t know)
- Warm prospecting (with someone you know)
- Warm prospecting (with an introduction)
- Cold prospecting (with no introduction)
The referral source is split roughly 60/40 between our client base (57 %) and our professional network (39 %).
Prospecting is always going to be harder than repeat business, referrals, or an inquiry from someone actively seeking help.
There are a host of headwinds we face when we are the one proposing the idea. These headwinds include:
- Caveat emptor: Buyer beware; our defenses are up when someone wants to sell us something.
- Status quo: Human nature being what it is, staying the current course is often perceived as the safer route.
- Buy‐in: Others in the organization aren’t on board with us or the idea.
- Budget: No funding is available at this time.
- Timing: Too many conflicting priorities exist.
Rainmaking for Introverts and People Who Don’t Want to Sell
I suspect that a healthy percentage of us in the professional services tilt toward introversion. By nature, many professionals are cerebral, inward‐focused problem‐solvers.
Mindset Shift One: Seeing ourselves as problem‐solvers instead of salespeople.
No one likes to be sold, but everyone loves to buy.
I encourage you to follow the wisdom offered by the most successful rainmakers: whatever you do, don’t call it selling.
The author Pico Iyer once quipped, “Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.”
Create Your Personal Brand Identity
The term “personal branding” was first coined in the late 1990s by management guru Tom Peters, during a period when employees were recovering from the downsizing of corporate America.
Your personal brand identity is a complex blend of many factors that represent you to the world:
- What you do (your expertise)
- Who you know (your personal ecosystem)
- Your experiences (what you’ve done)
- Who you wish to serve (your target audience)
- How you can help (the problems you solve)
- Your personality (funny, serious, outgoing, shy, etc.)
- Your character (trustworthy, generous, caring, kind, etc.)
- You can do anything, but you can’t do everything.
- You can be known for anything, but you can’t be known for everything.
The narrower and more focused your brand, the easier it is for people to remember who you are.
There’s a business concept that is crucial to understanding the importance of having a focused personal brand identity: it’s called TOMA. TOMA stands for top-of-mind awareness.
Two of the first individuals to identify the importance of TOMA were the legendary ad men Al Ries and Jack Trout. Ries and Trout discovered one of the secrets of achieving TOMA: positioning. It was Ries and Trout who coined the oft‐repeated but hard to follow advice: shrink the pond until you’re a big fish, and then grow your pond.
Blair Enns. Enns wrote an insightful book titled The Win Without Pitching Manifesto.
There’s a difference between reinventing our personal brands and changing directions with the wind. As with Society’s Hall Pass, we’re allowed to reinvent ourselves more frequently when we’re younger. As we get into mid‐career, we’re expected to stick with things longer and develop deeper expertise. After a successful career, I think society gives us another hall pass when we reach the final chapter of our careers.
There are three primary ways to define your personal brand identity:
- Functional expertise
- Target audience
- Geographic focus
Within management consulting lies a wide variety of functional expertise, including HR, supply chain logistics, strategy, and organizational design.
Establishing your unique brand identity is a combination of these three main variables: functional expertise, target market, and geographic focus.
The five‐year rule, which is simply this: Would you be willing to dedicate five years of your career to becoming an expert in this particular area?
The average work year is 2,000 hours, and five years puts you in the range of becoming an expert in many areas.
Many professional services firms are organized along industry lines – and our early career experiences will expose us to a variety of target audiences.
You have to be among the top three providers for what you do in order to find consistent success.
An unfocused, undifferentiated brand identity is like the bland decor we find in every government office.
Firms – as well as individuals – need to stay true to who they are. They need to ask themselves: Where do we have a right to a seat at the table?
Rosser Reeves is no longer a name most of us are familiar with. He has long since passed away. But his little gem of a book, Reality in Advertising, was hugely influential when it hit the bookshelves in 1961. Rosser’s biggest contribution to the field was an advertising concept called Unique Selling Proposition (USP).
USP needed three things: Each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer: “Buy this product, and you will get this benefit.” The proposition must be one that the competition either cannot, or does not, offer. It must be unique. The proposition must be so strong that it can pull new customers over to your product.
Demonstrate Your Professional Expertise
Rainmakers are skilled at providing prospects with clues to their authentic expertise, signs that we are really good at what we do. I think of these clues as channel markers – the buoys that safely guide a boat from sea to harbor while avoiding hidden dangers.
When people make decisions, they do not seek to maximize utility. They seek to minimize regret.
Because human decision ‐ making is influenced by regret avoidance, any steps we can take as professionals to reduce this anticipated feeling will increase our chances of success.
There are many techniques for demonstrating our expertise. We can – and should – select the methods that are best suited for us.
The art is in learning to talk about ourselves in a way that isn’t bragging. When we stick to facts and avoid bold, unfounded assertions, we demonstrate our capabilities in honest and authentic ways.
The choices you make in how you demonstrate your expertise will depend upon a number of factors. One factor is your profession.
Another factor is what fits best with your personal skills and preferences.
The work you have done for others becomes your reputation. Longfellow noted, “We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.” Many successful rainmakers leverage their high ‐ profile work to open the doors to similar client work.
Clients often struggle to tell who the real experts are. Often there is a large gap between the client’s expertise and your own as it relates to the work you do.
The internet is the bridge between demonstrating your expertise and building your professional ecosystem.
At its most basic level, the internet provides two essential functions:
- Sharing information
- Connecting people
Professional services are purchased when a relationship exists between those who need help and those who provide the help.
Occasionally, however rare, two conditions may exist that allows a rainmaker to succeed without committing to credibility markers:
- Condition A: Your target audience is local.
- Condition B: The market is not overly competitive for your type of work.
Build Your Professional Ecosystem
Respect and trust are the currency of our trades. You may be a strategist, litigator, auditor, or designer by profession, but at the end of the day we’re all in the relationship business.
Each of us has roughly 200 people who would make all the difference if we knew them.
Our relatively small network of professionals provides an enormous source of value for everyone involved – through the currency of shared respect and trust.
Mindset Shift One: Seeing ourselves as problem‐solvers instead of salespeople
Mindset Shift Two: Viewing our professional accomplishments as credibility markers rather than bragging
Mindset Shift Three: Thinking of our professional network as authentic relationships rather than names in a database.
The world operates best when an ecosystem works together to solve important world problems and satisfy vital client needs. We’re simply one node in a network of mutually supportive professionals.
75 % of all new client business originates from your professional ecosystem.
The term ecosystem was first coined by British ecologist Sir Arthur Tansley in the 1930s. This biological concept provides a valuable construct for us to study our professional communities as well.
Cold‐calling has the lowest success rate in winning new client business – representing roughly 12 % according to my survey data.
Don’t Talk to Strangers idea; it’s called the Make Friends on the Playground concept. Kids naturally make friends by gravitating to the things that interest them.
In observing how successful people build their networks, I’ve witnessed how they make friends in a natural way, as we did as kids.
Cold‐calling or prospecting can be effective when used with services that have been “productized”. If your service lends itself to packaging into a product, then cold prospecting can be effective, in much the same way that salespeople sell products every day – everything from pharmaceuticals to network servers to medical equipment.
When a prospective client is unaware that a service exists, they are unlikely to ask a trusted colleague for a referral, or even think to inquire about the service. It’s so niche that the referral and inquiry pathways don’t easily flow like they may in other professions. In situations like these, cold prospecting may be one of your only choices.
Clients work with people with whom they have relationships, or in many cases a chain of relationships. Rainmakers develop webs of talented people that help one another succeed. Warm prospecting is simply making new friends through introductions from your existing relationships.
Mindset Shift Four: Using our professional ecosystem to make new friends is highly appropriate when it’s based upon a genuine desire to help others.
Don’t turn into human spam, wanting everyone to help you when you’re unwilling to help others.
Like kindness, referrals work best when they are given without asking.
In a well‐known sociology study at Stanford in the early 1970s, Mark Granovetter tested the common assumption that we get the most help from our closest ties – our Tier 1. What Granovetter found was surprising. He discovered that professionals are nearly two times more likely to find a new job from an acquaintance than from our closest colleagues.
The secret to success in any business is to deliver a great, compelling product.
Advertising can’t earn you respect and trust. This can only be built one day at time, one relationship at a time, in doing great work for clients and demonstrating your expertise to the world.
When you write a good article and share it, that provides a natural means for others to find you. And, unlike advertising, it establishes you as a person with valuable insight.
If you work for a prestigious firm that is among the most well‐known and respected in your industry, then you are more likely to receive a favorable reply to a cold call or letter.
Develop Trust-Based Relationships
Trust is a living, breathing, emotional bond that connects people to one another. It’s intimate, personal and powerful. In a world where it seems like everyone is out to pitch, scam, or screw you, it is also a rare and precious commodity. — John Hall, author, Top of Mind
Being likeable on its own will not win you client business, but not being likeable can lose you client business.
Likeable people:
- Are interested in you
- Ask good questions
- Are good listeners
- Are helpful
- Are comfortable with who they are
- Are informative – they share interesting information
- Are honest
People feel comfortable being around people with whom they have things in common.
When a customer realizes they have a lot in common with a brand, they fill in all the unknown nuances with trust. Essentially, the customer batches their thinking, meaning they’re thinking in “chunks” rather than details.
Many of us in professional services tend to be more introverted. Some of us reluctantly admit that talking with new people is challenging.
As we begin to build relationships with people, finding common ground through small talk serves as a natural starting point. It’s something we can all benefit from – introverts as well as extroverts.
After repeat business, there is no better client pathway than a referral.
All relationships – personal as well as professional – are based upon caring for others, showing genuine concern and empathy for another human being.
When we’re transparent about what we believe in and what our interests are, we are judged by others. This is scary for many of us; we were raised by caring parents who emphasized a philosophy of “not offending anyone ”. Don’t stand out – fit in. Better to swim with the current. When it comes to business, though, not sticking out leads to being ignored.
Losing a portion of the market due to transparency is a much better alternative than being ignored by everyone.
I draw the line, however, at using our business ecosystem as a dumping ground for our personal problems.
Practice Everyday Success Habits
Each of the skills we’ve covered thus far is important to our success in becoming rainmakers:
- Skill One: Create Your Personal Brand Identity
- Skill Two: Demonstrate Your Professional Expertise
- Skill Three: Build Your Professional Ecosystem
- Skill Four: Develop Trust‐Based Relationships
- The fifth and final skill: practice everyday success habits, may be the most important.
Without applying these skills in our daily lives, it’s just theory – nice to know, for sure, but having little impact on our careers. The first four skills are about what to do; the final skill is about actually doing it. This is what sets the rainmakers apart from the rest of the pack.
Laura Vanderkam has made a career out of studying the daily habits of successful people. She shares these findings in her engaging book What Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast. She observed a pattern in the ways in which many successful people start their day. They begin with an hour of reflection and planning before phones start ringing, emails start whirling, and countless other distractions fall upon us.
If we are to build the rainmaker habits, we have to start with a daily plan.
Here’s what the researchers found: on average, it takes more than two months before a new behavior becomes automatic – 66 days to be exact.
If we commit to a three‐month period – figuring the average month has roughly 22 working days – we’ll build into our lives the daily habits demonstrated by successful rainmakers.
The Rainmaker’s Journey
There is no best in business. There are just great companies doing what they do best for the people they aim to please. Magretta goes on to explain that some strategists have compared business to sports. She explains Porter’s belief that “The sports analogy is just as misleading. Athletes vie with each other to see who will be crowned ‘the best’. They compete to win. But in sports, there is one contest with one set of rules. There can be only one winner. Business competition is much more complex, more open ended and multidimensional.”
What role does passion play in the client’s decision‐making journey? I prefer the word “enthusiasm,” because I believe the word “passion” – like zeal – has lost a lot of its original meaning.
When you’re taking the high road with a long view, you need patience and persistence.
There is a strong sense of urgency in American culture. Everything from Nike’s Just Do It campaign to a George S. Patton’s advice to his troops during WWII: “A good plan … executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.”
Having a healthy bias for action is good, to the extent that we don’t lose sight of the fact that our rainmaker journey will be long.
I’ve come to realize that fulfillment in one’s career comes not from success, but rather the hard work that is required to achieve it.
Give up on the notion of perfection in winning client business. It won’t happen. Perfection – like infinity – is a theoretical construct that doesn’t exist. Failure is a part of the process of being a rainmaker.
