Rainmaking

As a consultant or a person working in professional services, all of us know we have to become rainmakers—the people at the top who bring client business into their firms. In most large firms, you have to be successful bringing in new business to be considered for promotion to partner. And, if you're a founder or cofounder in a small to midsized firm, you live and die by the work you bring in to feed your troops.

It's the harsh imperative of consulting and professional services: being smart about something is not enough. You have to know how to engage with potential clients, understand their unique challenges, and scope business. You have to figure out a way to build a bridge from your expertise to those it can most help. You have to make it rain, or you will die in the desert of commerce.

The problem is that selling consulting and professional services is hard. Some would say really, really hard.

It's hard because selling consulting and professional services is different from selling shoes. The former is sold on relationships, referrals, and reputation, while the latter is sold on attributes like size, weight, color, style, and performance. It's the difference between an intangible and tangible sale.

Further, despite the importance of becoming an effective rainmaker, we're never taught how to sell the work we do. We're trained as lawyers, accountants, web developers, financial analysts, engineers, or architects, how to do the work, but not in how to bring in new clients.

Then, there's the inconvenient fact that in our line of work, sales is a dirty word. While researching for this book, we interviewed dozens of rainmaking pros and were struck by how many of them said, “Never say ‘sell.’” In fact, they reported that they don't even think about selling. To them, it's counterproductive. Dominic Barton, Global Managing Partner of McKinsey & Co., one of the world's premier strategy consulting firms, put it this way: “If I mentioned sales in our firm, I'd be hauled up in front of our professional ethics board. It's just not the way we think.”

On top of that, our consulting niches are becoming more specific as they become more global. A client today is just as likely to be in Singapore as San Francisco. A generation or two ago, golf on Saturday was a good way to meet new clients. In the twenty-first century, methods like these are outdated.

Finally, much of what we think we know about selling—the need to generate leads, prequalify them, then pitch and close prospects—is wholly inappropriate to consulting and professional services. What really matters is your relationship with a would-be client, which is formed and nurtured over a lifetime.

Call it the rainmaker conundrum: we need to do business development or we die, and yet we're hobbled by obstacles that keep us from effectively developing this very same business.

There must be a better way.

Chuck McDonald, a senior attorney practicing in Columbia, South Carolina, puts it this way:

The one thing they don't teach you in law school is that the most important thing in private practice is how to get clients. You find out fairly early whether you are going to be able to do that which enables you to climb the ladder within a firm structure. If you're not, you're a fungible good. There are what we call “worker bees,” but they just don't get the same, frankly, respect within the firm or the same compensation. So, it is a very important component.

And so, it's strange to us that more isn't written about business development in the consulting and professional services trades. A quick Amazon search of books on the topic of leadership generates a staggering 191,348 listings. Yet you can count on one hand the number of books that have been written on becoming an effective rainmaker in the expert services professions.

Consulting and professional services is a $1.7 trillion global industry, with 6.1 million of us in the United States working as consultants or in professional services. As the U.S. economy has shifted from manufacturing to a more knowledge-intensive economy, the consulting and professional services sector has expanded, enjoying growth that outpaces the wider economy. While gross domestic product grew on average 2.2% over the last two years, the consulting and professional services sector grew on average an astonishing 11.5%. That's five times as fast.

It is high time we got smart about how to connect with those we can best serve.

The Promise of How Clients Buy

We will help you understand how clients buy consulting and professional services. This knowledge will increase the number of clients you have and earn you more money. More importantly, it will cause your expertise to find its home, solve more problems, and make the world a better place.

To be clear, this is not a book on the sales funnel, selling techniques, better prospecting, persuasion, closing, or negotiation tactics. Instead we describe the client's buying decision journey, knowing that it is this perspective that can give rise to a business development approach based on service and not manipulation.

The Breakthrough

For us, the breakthrough in understanding how to best sell professional services was when we realized that those who successfully build their consulting and professional services practices are students of how clients buy and work to support that buying journey using very specific strategies and techniques. They aren't focused on sales at all.

These pros tell us there are very specific requirements that must be satisfied before a client pulls a trigger and decides to buy our services, preconditions we call the Seven Elements of How Clients Buy.

• Prospective clients become aware of your existence. This might be from an introduction from a friend, an article you wrote, or because they met you at a conference.
• They come to understand what you do and how you are unique. They can articulate what you do clearly to others.
• They develop an interest in you and your firm. They have goals, set by themselves or others, and they can see how what you do might be useful in their efforts to realize those goals. What you do is relevant.
• They respect your work and are filled with confidence that you can help. They look to your track record, to their peers, and to a variety of social clues to determine if you are credible and likely to move the needle on their goals.
• They trust you, confident you will have their best interests at heart.
• They have the ability to pull the trigger, meaning they are in a position to corral the money and organizational support needed to buy from you.
• They are ready to do something. The timing is right inside their organizations, and they have the headspace to manage you.

Our Method

The advice that we offer in this book around each of these elements comes from three primary sources:

1. Interviews conducted with over two dozen senior professionals working in a wide range of consulting and professional services, including law, accounting, investment banking, commercial real estate, and management consulting (strategy, advertising, and HR). While most of those we interviewed were seasoned “rainmakers” in their field, we did speak with a handful of individuals at the beginning and midway points of their careers. We spoke with individuals at some of the largest firms in their industry and also with professionals at midsized, boutique, and solo firms. Finally, we spoke with professionals who bought professional services.
2. A review of the existing literature, both academic and popular, on the subject of business development for consulting and professional services. There are some strong materials out there. Three of our favorites are Ford Harding's Rain Making, Arthur Gensler's Art's Principles, and Mike Schultz and John Doerr's Professional Services Marketing. Our hope is that what we have written here builds on their work and contributes to the ongoing conversation about what works and what doesn't.
3. Our collective experience working in management consulting and business services for fifty years. We looked to our own personal experiences in our consulting practices to capture what we had learned and share it. It was encouraging to us that much of what we feel is true was echoed in what we heard from those we interviewed.

Onward

Your expertise deserves to find an audience—the exact right audience where what you know and what you've seen (and you've seen some stuff) will find a home where it can create value, not just for you, but more importantly, for the people whom you most want to serve.

The world needs your expertise. Let's dig in and learn how to build a better bridge to those that could use it.