Creating Rainmakers

The Manager's Guide to Training Professionals to Attract New Clients

Ford Harding

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780471920731, 9780471920731
• eBook ISBN: 9781118429686
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Every manager of a professional firm realizes that generating leads and landing new clients are critical components of any successful business venture. But transforming accountants, architects, attorneys, consultants, engineers, and other professionals into client-generators is not always easy to do. Divided into two comprehensive parts-The Rainmaker Model and The Elements of Rainmaking-Creating Rainmakers outlines all the steps you should take to turn your professional staff into a powerful team of sales winners. Filled with in-depth insight and practical advice, this book will show you how to: * Generate leads * Build a strong network of contacts * Master a variety of sales techniques * Develop capable successors to current rainmakers * And much more Based on more than 100 interviews with the principals of professional firms, including many of today's preeminent rainmakers, this valuable guide has the information you need to help your company succeed.

Part I

The Rainmaker Model

Chapter 1

What Is a Rainmaker?

To create rainmakers, you must first have a clear idea of what a rainmaker is and does. Yet, there is little information about this special group of people. What exists is largely impressionistic or based on the experiences of one or two people rather than on research.

To remedy this, I studied rainmakers, people who have been phenomenally successful at bringing in work to their firms and who keep many other professionals employed by doing so. I interviewed both rainmakers and people who know them well. More than 100 rainmakers were included in the survey from the fields of management consulting, benefits consulting, accounting, law, consulting engineering, and architecture. In many cases, I was able to gather information on the same rainmaker from two or more sources. I have supplemented this original research with a review of biographies, autobiographies, articles, and other published sources that describe how rainmakers generate business.

For the purposes of this work, I define rainmakers as professionals who do two things well. First, they generate leads for new business. That is, they go out and create opportunities to talk with prospective clients about problems they can help solve. True rainmakers don’t just wait for the phone to ring; they go out and find business. Second, they turn a portion of these leads into new business with their selling skills. To be true rainmakers, they must generate enough business to keep many others in their firms employed. Other professionals may do one or the other of these things, but they don’t do both. They are best at minding clients and grinding out work.

From the rainmaker interviews and reading, this is what I have learned:

Rainmakers Don’t Fit a Single Personality Type

People who run professional firms are apt to make judgments on the basis of personality types about who has potential to develop as a rainmaker. Although some of these judgments are probably correct, most are made without any real understanding of what it takes to be successful at developing business. Some professionals fall into the “are-they-like-us” trap, epitomized by the head of a midsize accounting firm who told one of his aspiring marketers, “you need to be more like me. You’re about 80 percent like me, but you need to be exactly like me.” Though few people have so simplistic or arrogant a view, there is a tendency to compare young professionals to current rainmakers to decide whether they have potential.

Those who run firms are not the only ones who make these comparisons. Over the years, many young professionals have told me that they don’t really consider themselves to be “the selling type.” By this they usually mean they are not aggressive extroverts. Alternatively, they compare themselves to one or two highly successful rainmakers and, not surprisingly, given differences in age and experience, find they come up short.

Anyone who holds such views needs to know that people of many different personality types can succeed at client development. Listen to these descriptions of different rainmakers:

• He was impressive, well-tailored, and when he walked into a room everybody looked up. There was an immediate magnetism and attractiveness.1
• He was unimpressive. He was very ordinary. People’s heads didn’t turn when he entered the room.
• He is extremely personable and charming. He is lively and cheerful. People feel a lift after being with him.
• He had a gray personality. He looked like the archetypical industrial engineer with a pocket protector.
• At first she seems mature and serious, but when she laughs, you would think she was twelve years old.
• He was a gambler and always heavily leveraged.
• He was cautious and never did anything he wasn’t comfortable with.
• He reminded me of a used car salesman.
• Above all else, he was a gentleman.

I could go on and on with contrasting statements:

• He was very articulate with an acerbic wit. He had the ability to be totally charming. But he could be totally cold when he rebuffed someone. He was extremely volatile. He was mercurial.
• He had a gentle manner. If he was angry, it was always expressed in his face and not in what he said. He was admired by everyone who knew him.
• Money wasn’t the primary driver for him.
• He likes to surround himself with nice things. He has fresh flowers every day in his office and wants top-quality things around him all the time and takes it for granted that he should have them. He is generous. If he thinks you’re worth x, he will give you x +1.
• He knows how to pinch a penny.

Listen to these quotes about two partners at the same firm, each of whom brings in about $6 million of business a year:

• He is an old-line WASP; very organized, very quiet, and very thoughtful.
• He’s a cowboy. He goes out and sells. No matter what he does, he is always laughing. Something funny always comes out. He has a talent for that. He’s a good talker. He speaks very fast and always has an answer for everything, though it isn’t always the right answer.

Perhaps not surprisingly, these two rainmakers are reported to not get along with each other.

Here are three final quotes that I want you to remember. The first is from Roland Berger, perhaps the most successful rainmaker in the consulting industry today; the second about an extremely successful attorney at a western firm; and the third from a big accounting firm:

• Everyone in the firm says I am so extroverted. But I have always thought of myself as an introvert. I was very much so in my early years.
• He is not a born rainmaker. He doesn’t have the gift of gab and is unprepossessing. He is soft-spoken. . .. He is not comfortable with groups, but has disciplined himself to be good at it.
• Early on, I had a lot of difficulty with [client development]. I am very shy, though most people who know me would laugh if you told them this. I had a lot of difficulty going to those lunches, but I forced myself to do it.

Not much here will help us identify or train future rainmakers, but there is an important message, nonetheless. We need to exercise great caution about making judgments on the basis of superficial personality types about who has potential to make it as a rainmaker. Specifically, contrary to popular sentiments, extroversion is not a prerequisite to successful rainmaking.

There Is No One Way That Rainmakers Make Rain

If there is no single personality type that makes a good rainmaker, you might ask, do rainmakers share a common way of getting business? Is there a best way to make rain?

A lot has been written about how to bring business into a professional firm, much of it recommending one approach over another. Attitudes toward cold calling provide a good example of the differences of opinions about how a firm should develop clients. David Maister, for example, classifies marketing tactics into three groups with cold calling falling into the “Clutching at Straws” category.2 Another anti–cold caller, Alan Weiss, says “. . .your marketing thrust should not be. . .—heaven forfend—making cold calls”3 (italics in original). Contrast these opinions with those of Richard Connor and Jeffrey Davidson,4 or of Stephan Schiffman,5 all of whom promote what are essentially cold-calling systems. Although cold calling seems to attract especially strong and divergent opinions, similar differences can be found in other ways of getting business.

The survey of rainmakers that was conducted for this book shows that there is no single right way of getting business. Here are descriptions of a few of the ways that rainmakers attract new clients:

• He would gather names from speaking engagements and enter them on his list. He had a clipping service and two secretaries who would look for articles mentioning any company on the list. He would send these articles to his contacts with a personal note asking what they thought about the situation or asking how it would affect compensation [his consulting specialty]. Twenty to twenty-five or more of these letters went out every week, and they generated a flow of calls back to him. That’s where his business came from.
• Basically, he got his business through cold calling. He would decide to make a business development trip four or five weeks in advance. He would then send a letter and call people and let them know he was coming. He would organize his trip to tie into affirmative responses he received. He was not a campaign-oriented salesman. His approach was to go out and close a sale and he could do it, often in one meeting. He was the best closer I ever saw.
• When he had an engagement, he would make a point of meeting second-level people, like the chief financial officers, and develop a relationship with them. When they moved on to another company, as some of them always did, he would stay in touch and eventually get work. He never lost touch and had a real knack for cultivating these second- and third-level people. He had a skill for picking out people on the way up. He liked the sharks and got on well with them. He would only have half a dozen to a dozen of these relationships at any one time, but they were remarkably fruitful.
• His business comes almost exclusively from his personal network. He has been at it for forty years now and is at the top of the heap. He pays a lot of attention to getting to know people, and wants to know them at a lot of levels. He has always done a lot of charity work and meets people there. He then establishes a personal relationship. He [sees people socially and] often takes his wife along and likes to meet [his contacts’] spouses. He consciously sits down each morning and goes through a mental Rolodex of who he hasn’t seen for awhile and then calls to see if someone can have lunch. He makes a list each day and makes a series of calls from it. He stays in touch with every major client every six to eight weeks. He sends them opera tickets or buys them lunch or calls just to say hi. When he hears about a possible piece of business, he will call around to find someone who can make an introduction for him. He always can. It never fails.
• He didn’t have an awful lot of leads. Most of them came from past clients, who he kept in close contact with. His skill was turning [a small opportunity] into a substantial account. He was able to surround an account. He was good at moving up the food chain. Our firm always came in at the middle and moved up. It was sort of insidious. He always made a point of going to the next level up and touching base.

As you can see, there are many ways to make rain. Within a few professions, there is a tendency for many rainmakers to rely on one approach. Engineers, for example, are likely to rely on networks. But this is only a tendency, and different approaches are chosen by different professionals, depending upon their circumstances and personalities. Most rainmakers combine several methods.

Having highlighted the different opinions that several authors hold about cold calling, I should note that cold calling is far from uncommon and is used by rainmakers in every profession covered in the survey. Contrary to what some people believe, cold calling can be used to sell many types of professional services. But it is not necessarily the best way for everyone.

Given this finding, I looked for tactics that all aspiring rainmakers should employ, if only as an adjunct to their main business development efforts. The most obvious candidate was public speaking. Almost all the literature recommends this activity. Reviewing the interview summaries, you might at first think they would confirm this common knowledge:

• He built his stature by writing prolifically for law reviews and journals and speaking often on panels.
• He had an aggressive speaking and writing schedule.
• She built her business by speaking. For years she spoke to every group she could get in front of.
• He loved to give speeches and was excellent at it. He was a brilliant speaker.
• He built his reputation on the platform. He was a terrific platform guy. Everyone wanted to hear him speak.
• Public speaking is like falling off a log for him. He likes to get up in front of people and speak extemporaneously so he can charm them.

But a substantial minority of the rainmakers are poor public speakers or speak infrequently, if at all:

• He didn’t give speeches because he was terrible at it. He would mumble.
• I’m not a big speaker. In my field, giving away secrets in speeches doesn’t help you.
• He did no public speaking or publishing.

One can only conclude that public speaking is often helpful, but is not a prerequisite, to becoming a rainmaker.

The quotes repeated here should caution all of us from making any simple assumptions about what rainmakers are like or what they do. To understand what truly distinguishes rainmakers from other people, one has to look deeper. Let us start with personality traits, as opposed to personality types.

Others have done work in this area, most notably James Weitzul.6 He identifies seven behavioral traits that are common among this group (overachiever, entrepreneur, active, passive, aggre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: The Rainmaker Model
• Part II: The Elements of Rainmaking
• Conclusion
• Introduction to Appendices
• Index