We have now considered each of the separate stages of the Right Person–Right Approach method, one at a time. When you apply the method in pursuit of a business objective, though, you'll likely find that the process is actually more fluid than linear. The different stages in the framework almost invariably overlap one another.
For example, you may well find that you need to make gestures of progressive reciprocity very early in the development of your objective, even before you've identified a critical enabler, just to get through to the people who know the people who can help you. In addition, you're likely to find that, rather than a single referral to a single critical enabler, you may need to get several referrals to different people—each representing access to separate elements of intelligence or relationships that combine to have a catalytic effect on your progress toward your objectives.
In addition, rather than simply speeding up the pursuit of a simple business objective, the Right Person–Right Approach method often enables you to expand your objective substantially. For instance, if your initial goal is increasing sales by some percentage, you may find that following the method enables you to increase sales exponentially by reaching entirely new, untapped markets.
This chapter follows three individuals to illustrate how the stages fit together and overlap as they're put into action, and how finding the right critical enabler can take you to objectives that go far beyond your initial expectations. Further details appear throughout the chapter, but to begin, here are the people involved.
Sari. Sari's search for a critical enabler opens Chapter Four, but her whole story has much more to show about how the stages of the Right Person–Right Approach method merge and support one another. As noted, she was an introverted research chemist in need of a new job and having trouble locating the kinds of jobs where she would shine. This chapter skips much of the detail up through her delighted recognition that she already had a tie to her ideal critical enabler—a microscope salesman who'd done more than a million dollars worth of business with her.
Arthur. Arthur was developing a Web-based employee assessment application designed to enable employees to better align their values with those of the organizations for which they worked. He had worked in this field for a number of years at two large leadership development consulting firms, and he wanted to go into business for himself.
Already a very well-connected, well-respected professional, Arthur was likable, thoughtful, and articulate, and in many ways the consummate networker, at least in terms of activity and volume. He had his own blog to deal with issues of professional interest, with a loyal following for his work. Unlike many of the people I work with, he was comfortable making (cold) phone calls, and he had relationships with a number of professional associates who would do what they could to help him. In other words, he had accumulated a good deal of "relationship capital." Unfortunately, even though he'd contacted many of his closest associates in search of the people and resources he thought he needed, his network had not come through with help for him.
Nina. Nina worked for an international management psychology consulting firm as vice president for business development. This meant she had to deal with all of her fellow consultants, as the firm's products were too complex for a dedicated sales staff to handle—instead, the consultants were all expected to sell. Although this is a common new business development model in professional services, it wasn't working nearly as well as the firm would have liked, because most of the consultants were not natural salespeople, and they balked at being asked to promote their services to potential clients.
Nina was widely known and respected by her peers. Colleagues described her as a very good outbound marketer—that is, she sent out excellent newsletters, brochures, and Internet- and video-based materials—and she was also an accomplished seminar host. Her well-attended meetings were often a source of new business for the firm. As business development vice president, however, she was pressured to find other sources for new business leads.
It's useful to keep a number of principles in mind. First, once you've articulated your macro objective, you need to keep focused on it without trying to keep it frozen in its first form. This will allow you to notice how it evolves as you build your frame of reference about the objective from each conversation. Because this process is designed to produce quantum advances in the knowledge base you depend on for achieving your objective, each new critical enabler you target represents an opportunity to both refine and expand your objective. So focus is the key to applying the Right Person–Right Approach method to achieve your career and business objectives.
Second, the Right Person–Right Approach method can lead you in unexpected directions. It's important not to rule out anything when it comes to identifying your critical enabler—people seemingly far afield from your target may provide an end run that takes you straight to your decision maker. Although the seemingly shortest path may appear most obvious, it is all too often full of hidden barriers and obstacles. In the end, you wind up with far less from the referrals than might have been possible.
Third, in many cases as you achieve your macro objective you might find that it leads you beyond what you'd expected. Your macro objective can actually be a springboard to go far beyond your original goals. The three stories we follow in this chapter will help you get a sense of just how powerful understanding and applying the concept of the critical enabler can be.
In the beginning, each of our three protagonists was looking for success in all the wrong places—or at least in the wrong way, driving straight ahead on their own, without attempting to automate or to delegate the legwork.
Sari started out by sending her résumé to any company that seemed likely to have a chem lab somewhere on the premises. Her operating question was basically, "OK, what companies are looking for people who do the kind of job I'm seeking?" Unfortunately, she was asking about jobs at a time when the job market was far from booming, and it is not surprising that the response was disappointing.
Arthur knew what he was looking for: a Web designer, an editor, a webmaster (depending on the capabilities of his designer), possibly a financial partner, and possibly someone to help him run the business once he'd gotten it launched. He figured he'd have to engage many different sources to fill all these needs. In other words, he was going about the job of putting together a new company in much the same way everyone else does: by trying to do a lot of different jobs simultaneously.
When I suggested that he stop sending his talent specifications to friends, headhunters, and job boards (no matter how much that looked like the most direct path to the talent he needed), he brushed off the idea. Looking instead for one critical enabler who could really help him seemed way too indirect—like wishful thinking. Why, he asked me, should he waste time building relationships with people who didn't have exactly what he wanted? And if he was to hear of someone who did have everything he wanted, why wouldn't he go directly for it? I assured him that these were understandable objections, but I maintained that, in practice, an indirect approach can be the most efficient and effective way to achieve an objective.
Nina realized that her own success might cut her off from further development. She was so good at the kind of sales pitch she was used to that she'd gotten just about all the mileage from it that it could offer. If she was going to increase her sales still further, and help her fellow consultants to do likewise, she needed to approach her targets from a different direction.
The classic mistake most people make when they're beginning to pursue an objective is to focus on the end of the process. Although another of Stephen R. Covey's classic principles—"Begin with the end in mind"—is timelessly true, it can be deceiving if you view the networking path to that end as necessarily straight. Looking for a job? Logically, you'd ask who's got jobs to offer, as Sari did. Looking for help? Obviously, you'd advertise for it, as Arthur did. But business is not geometry. For example, had Sari asked her colleagues for referrals to people they knew who might have leads, she'd have begun to make progress much earlier.
This concept often seems counterintuitive, but it's central to the Right Person–Right Approach method, which is based on the observation that in human affairs, the straight road is often the longest distance between two points, not the shortest. If you want a lasting relationship, a singles bar is not the place to find it. If you want a job, responding to posts on job boards will drop you into an army of young people responding to the same posting, and your chances of being seen at all, let alone considered seriously, are very low. If you want to buy the perfect house, spending all your time visiting open houses means you miss out on the best ones, which get scooped up before the signs reach the lawn. In line with this, I advised Sari that, rather than broadcasting her credentials far and wide, she needed to be more specific with her targets.
Arthur's problem turned out to be the use of search terms that were—unlike those I usually see—actually too specific. Had he continued on the path he was intent on following, he'd have been inundated with unqualified candidate résumés. Screening and interviewing so many people for each position would have taken months.
Not only would this have been a very inefficient way to pursue his objectives of staffing his new business and possibly finding a business partner, but it might not have worked at all. He was simply being too direct—placing the burden of all the legwork, including interviewing and hiring key employees, on himself. Instead, he should have been looking for a critical enabler, someone who was already familiar with the process of developing a company from scratch—and better still, someone who had already done it at least once.
Nina's insight'that she needed to take a different approach—was the first and most basic step in preparation. Until she realized that her best efforts had topped out'that as good as they were, and of their kind they were very good, they were not enough'she couldn't begin to look for improvements. As in many situations, something that almost works or works fairly well can make it difficult to perceive something that might work better.
Our collective wisdom constantly makes this point: If you don't know where you're going, you can't tell when you get there (or any place will do). If your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. If you want something in the worst way, that's generally how you'll go about getting it. Nonetheless, it's surprisingly hard to stop and think about objectives. People generally live by the opposing maxim: I don't understand X, but I'll know it when I see it. In practice, objectives are both obvious and elusive at the same time. You can feel as though you know what you want, but if you don't spell it out, you're leaving it to others to read your mind—and it is probably true that your mind isn't really made up after all. So, how did our three protagonists approach this task?
Sari realized she needed to take a step back and rethink things, because the broadcast-your-résumé approach had not produced positive results. That meant that her macro objective—find a job—wasn't accessible, so we had to break it down into micro components in order to find someone who could lead her to the decision makers she needed to get in front of. To do that, we had to figure out what knowledge gaps were keeping her from finding the right person. So she started by describing her ideal working environment in great detail: the kind of laboratory, the types of projects it worked on, the technology it employed.
Arthur realized that he didn't have a macro objective at all. He'd bypassed the macro stage and gone directly to a number of micro objectives. Unfortunately, even if he hired a headhunter to help him find a Web designer or an editor, he would still be conducting a very haphazard search, one that would demand a great deal of his time. Best case, he'd have to interview perhaps dozens of candidates, just to find one whose résumé came close and who appeared to be congenial—a process that quite likely would lead him to discover that he still hadn't found what he was looking for. Arthur needed to step back and refocus on his overall objective—a well-balanced and highly qualified staff that could make a success of the company he was building—and to find that, he needed help from someone who really knew the market and the common denominators among the various functional specialties he sought.
Nina started by asking me, "What companies do you know that need organizational change management consulting?"
My answer didn't help her much: "Perhaps 'everybody—; perhaps 'nobody.'"
The problem was, Nina was framing her search in the wrong terms. She was focusing on the state of mind of the decision makers at her potential client companies and essentially saying, "Get me in front of decision makers at companies that need organizational change management consulting services on a large scale." Because she'd framed her objective as "make another sale," her results depended on decision makers— giving her a call when they needed her. That meant she was not in control of the process by which she was trying to realize her business objectives. She was broadcasting material to thousands of targets and trying to build relationships with every one of her potential clients individually, and that meant she had to repeat the same "contact, present, and follow up" process with all of them, one at a time.
She needed to rethink how she was expressing her needs. She'd homed in on a micro objective—her audience—when she really needed to step back and ask, "Who has the answers to the question 'What companies need the services my firm provides?—"
Sari's story illustrates an important component in identifying an objective: be very specific when defining the knowledge you need. And one key to her success is that she was able to articulate very clearly precisely what her needs were, what she was looking for. Because she wanted advice about labs and not just a list of labs, she was able to save herself the dozens, if not hundreds, of phone calls that she would have needed to get in to talk with each of them. Framing her objective properly led her to someone who could introduce her to the right people and, fueled by a great referral and enough background information, approach them in the right way: demonstrating knowledge that opened doors immediately.
Your macro and micro objective statements are a crucial part of the process of putting together Internet search terms and querying trusted advisers who can provide honest feedback as to the vagueness or over-specificity of what you are asking. In other words, if you're defining your search terms too narrowly—if you find you're looking for six or eight different types of resources, as Arthur was doing—you need to step back and recreate a macro statement. You need to remember that you're not really looking for resources; rather, you're looking for someone who has the knowledge of those resources and who can direct you to them. You're trying to define a critical enabler, and you need to construct your objective statement with that end in mind.
Another key point in these stories is that a properly defined set of objective statements makes it possible to redefine objectives and aim much higher than may originally seem possible. For example, when Arthur first set out to staff his start-up, he was looking for "a Web designer and probably a webmaster." In other words, he was looking for, in sports terms, "a utility player"'someone who could do a workmanlike job on the immediate tasks. He'd set his goals fairly low, and hundreds of people on the market could have met those specifications. This may seem like a rich field—but it's more like a pile of manure: useful as it is, you don't want to sift through it by hand.
So don't let yourself worry about aiming too high. It isn't productive to ask, "What if the ideal candidate for the employee or partner I'm looking for doesn't exist?" or "What if my ideal employer doesn't exist?" Instead, aim for the best possible outcome. Even if you find you can't achieve it, you'll still very likely end up in a much better place than you would have if you'd aimed lower.
This argues, again, for keeping your focus on your macro objective. The point is that in seeking to accomplish any career or business objective, you need to articulate your objective in such a way that you're aiming for the best possible outcome. Don't start with low expectations; if you meet those, you'll likely fall short of your ultimate goal.
At the same time, you need to keep your objectives in perspective. To make progress toward her macro objective of finding new clients for her company, Nina couldn't go straight for it—asking for clients wouldn't get them to show up. When she rethought the path to that objective and started looking for people who would know where to find clients, that simple shift led her to a gateway to new opportunities that she'd never thought possible.
If you can define what you want clearly enough, it makes it much easier to see who could help you get it.
As noted in Chapter Four, Sari leapt almost instantly from (1) what the labs she wanted to find needed, to (2) who provided it to them, to (3) the perfect critical enabler.
Once Arthur redefined his objective as knowledge rather than personnel, a whole series of useful questions opened up. He first asked—and I encourage you to ask yourself the same questions when you're working your way toward a job or career goal—"What do I really need to know here?" and then "What search terms can I come up with that will help me find out what I need to know?"
Because Arthur was developing a Web-based business, the Internet needed to be part of his search strategy. He was also looking to work in the area of values-based assessment and leadership, so those words would also be included. And because he'd be providing consulting services, he needed to use that in his search. When we searched on these terms, one of the first results was a company that specialized in the very type of values-based leadership development consulting that Arthur was pursuing—but with a business model just different enough to represent the perfect slight overlap in the services they provided, and to be truly complementary. A visit to its Web site yielded names of its key players, who almost certainly made a point of knowing just what Arthur needed to know.
Nina narrowed her search to these questions:
Who makes it their business to know what companies are in need of services like ours?
Who has developed relationships with my target market, but for somewhat different reasons than we've developed them?
It would have been great to find one answer to these questions, but (as is commonly the case outside real estate, finance, or dating services) no one made a profession of identifying clients for the specific service her company offered, and she was stuck. But there was a group of people who did make a business of knowing what she needed to know: other consultants in the same business! They were virtually the only sources we could come up with that would be likely to have the information she wanted to obtain. The obvious problem was that they were essentially her competitors, and it seemed like none of them would want to share that information with her, any more than she'd want to share it with them. Or would they?
When we parsed the situation further, we identified a subgroup of competitors who might very well be happy to share what they knew about the client base Nina wanted to penetrate. That's because not all of her competitors were as large as her company. In fact, a lot of leadership development consultants worked alone or with a small group, without support staff, and concentrated on providing services on a smaller, more individualized basis to departments and groups within the same large corporations Nina's firm served. Nina already knew several of the principals of these firms; she just hadn't been thinking of them as potential allies.
That was a good start, but she needed more names than she could come up with off the top of her head, so I suggested that she use the "watering hole" approach to generate the list she sought. In essence, the watering hole approach asks the question, "Where do the kinds of people I want to get in touch with hang out?" In other words, what organizations do they belong to, what journals do they read, and what Web sites do they visit?
One of the first names we came up with as a watering hole connection was an independent consultants association. When we accessed its Web site, it was clear that this was a key to identifying her new source of critical enablers. In this case, we needed to be able to screen these independent consultants to determine which of them had the qualifications Nina was looking for in her potential business partners. We defined this group of smaller independent consultants as people who provided services similar to those of Nina's company but on a smaller scale, to anywhere from one to five flagship clients, and who we suspected were regularly exposed to opportunities for similar types of consulting on a scale larger than they were capable of handling.
Our first task was to determine who they were. Rather than ask for the names of small consulting firms that provide organizational change consulting services to corporate clients, we returned to the basic question, "Who makes it their business to know who these people are?" The answer we came up with was the Organizational Consultants Development Network. Now we needed to ask, "Who in the OCDN makes it their business to know which of its members provide the kinds of consulting services Nina's company provides?"
The questions that lead you indirectly to people who can help you achieve your business objectives can cover an extraordinarily wide range, and finding them is frequently a very interesting creative challenge. Articulating the objective in such a way that it's broken down into specific steps is the key, not only to success but to efficient success. It's the way to save time and to ultimately attain your goal. Taking this approach is one of the reasons the Right Person–Right Approach framework saves so much time in the pursuit of career and business objectives.
Nina, for example, later expanded her search from providers of small-scale services along the same lines as her own to providers of products likely to be used by companies in a position to hire her. The watering hole approach continued to prove its utility, too—once you figure out what sort of people you want to meet, the first thing to look for is where they hang out. Besides organizations, look at speaker rosters for professional conferences and meetings. In most cases, the people who are actively involved and well respected in their fields will also be the ones chosen to share their knowledge and best practices with conference attendees. And stick with what works; there's no reason to reinvent the wheel every time you're looking for new business partners. It's much better to work with others who have not only perfected the wheel but improved it so that it rolls along effortlessly.
I look at the search as exploring a sort of huge Venn diagram'the one that shows a bunch of intersecting circles. Each macro criterion in your search can be represented as a separate circle, and the best prospect for a critical enabler is the person who touches the most circles. But as you cast about for possible critical enablers, remember Nina's experience: don't eliminate any category of people from your search; you can find common ground in surprising places.
In the abstract, the whole idea of getting referrals can seem forced and off-putting. It can feel as though the people who could serve as critical enablers are way out of reach, and even the people who could introduce you to them may seem unlikely to be willing to talk to you. Nonetheless, this phase of the Right Person–Right Approach method almost invariably turns out to work smoothly, much to the surprise of the many naysayers I've converted.
Sari had discovered that she was in the happy position of knowing her ideal critical enabler. The question was the answer: as soon as she asked what her target labs used and who supplied it to them, the name leapt to mind.
Once he had the name of a company in a business very similar to the one he wanted to develop, Arthur queried his network in a very different way. Instead of asking his network whether they knew any Web developers or editors or people possibly interested in partnering in his business venture, he asked them a very specific question about a specific company that looked interesting to him.
Within a day one of his contacts got back to him saying that she knew the vice president of business development of the company Arthur had found. She further told Arthur that her contact, Mark, had been involved in several start-ups over the past ten years or so. She gave Arthur a referral to Mark, backed up by additional information about him, and Arthur contacted him immediately by phone.
Nina found it easy to reach many of the smaller consultants she'd identified in her search for critical enablers, and she moved straight to developing the dynamite gesture of progressive reciprocity described in the next installment of her story. (As noted, the Right Person–Right Approach method often doubles back and moves forward on several fronts rather than proceeding in the sort of linear fashion that makes a story easy to tell.) Based on the success of that effort, we began to look for ways to expand the new corps of critical enablers beyond the initial group of small-scale service providers. Asking, "Who else makes it their business to know the companies likely to need the kind of services Nina's company could provide?" we made the jump from service providers to vendors. The same group of potential client companies not only purchased consulting services similar to those Nina's firm provided, but also purchased products, including training materials and assessment tools, that helped them carry out their organizational development aims.
Nina's search on the term "professional organizations corporate training" produced very useful leads—including, among the first twenty-five results, more than a dozen professional organizations specializing in corporate training and training materials development and delivery as well as announcements of upcoming conferences and minutes of past conferences. Nina was familiar with most of them; she simply hadn't thought of them in relation to her own business. That is, she hadn't expanded her "universe of discourse" to include this category of potential business partner, so she hadn't been reminded of the large number of her associates who might be interested in partnering with her company for everyone's mutual benefit.
Nina called a few of the Organizational Consultants Development Network members she knew and asked if they knew and could provide her a referral to one of the board members of the organization. Almost immediately she received a "yes" response from one of her contacts who knew the OCDN's membership chair, and she used the referral when she called that person.
The key to getting referrals is to begin with the right question—and that is almost never going to be any form of "Do you know someone who can give me exactly what I want, based on my macro objective?" That approach puts the one you're asking for a referral on the spot, expected to answer a question to which they simply don't have the direct answer. The answer to "Who do you know that needs X" is almost always going to be "Nobody, but I'll keep an eye out"—followed by nothing but silence. The one you hit up for a referral will be worrying, Suppose the suggested source doesn't come through for you? Suppose the suggested source gets irritated about being offered up for something that seems inappropriate or unobtainable? Instead, you need to begin with a very clear and specific request for an introduction to someone who knows the sort of people who can provide the answer to your question.
The watering hole approach is especially effective at this stage—it's altogether unthreatening to ask where the sort of people you want to find hang out, or to get introductions to one or another of them once you're in the right place (either physically or via social media). Once Nina began focusing on potential critical enablers who made it their business to know the key training and evaluation companies and which of them might be interested in partnerships designed to extend their limited capabilities, progress soon followed. This thought process is essentially an adaptation and application of corporate channel partnership and alliance theory to an individual scale'throwing away the traditional do-it-yourself mind-set for sales, fundraising, job search, and other objectives and adopting a mind-set that enlists other people with shared interests.
Sari knew a sales rep who'd be ideal as a critical enabler, and she didn't need a referral to him, so we moved straight to figuring out what she had to offer in return for his help. It seemed very likely that he would be pleased to have someone well-disposed to him and his company in the sort of influential staff position she was seeking. Here is the e-mail message she sent to him:
Dear _________,
You may recall our meeting about five years ago when I was a member of the procurement team from _________ company tasked with purchasing spectrometers for our laboratory.
You recently came to mind, as I'm looking for a position in another company, and it occurred to me we could easily help each other. The companies in my target market are the same as yours. Hence I was wondering if you saw the mutual benefit of selectively referring me to the people directly in charge of hiring for the labs I'm targeting, and sharing any information you're at liberty to about their specific needs. That would allow me to approach them more intelligently than I'm currently able.
I'm also hopeful this could be an opportunity for you to be perceived as providing added value by referring a well-qualified candidate. Of course, I would also do anything I could to advance your interests at any of these companies.
I'll follow up shortly to see if my logic makes sense to you.
Best regards,
Sari
Because his new contact, Mark, was a vice president of business development and had an eye for start-ups, Arthur needed very little by way of a gesture of progressive reciprocity to encourage him to talk. His own thoughtful preparation and clear intent to develop a business represented an attractive enough opportunity that anyone Mark referred would likely be grateful. Mark really did make it his business to know everyone and everything about the field Arthur was interested in, and advising Arthur put Mark in a position to build relationship capital on several fronts.
Nina recognized that the smaller consulting firms in her field didn't have the resources to take on the kinds of larger jobs that Nina's company was capable of handling. Nonetheless, they were probably aware of many opportunities that they were too small to take on, and if she approached these independent consultants, they might be willing to become, in effect, the sales staff her company didn't have. They might very well be willing'say, in exchange for a finder's fee'to steer their corporate clients to Nina's firm when potential projects that were larger than they could handle came to their attention.
Nina therefore suggested that they might consider entering into a formal referral agreement by which the Organizational Consultants Development Network could hand off larger projects to Nina's company in exchange for referral fees for both the company recommending the project and the OCDN, while Nina's company sent business to the OCDN and its members if the scale was more appropriate for them. A formal agreement was developed and signed that outlined the framework of their referral relationship, which was formalized as the Business Development Network. The mission of the OCDN was to help the development and careers of its members and to add real value, so the gesture was perfectly in keeping with the OCDN's charter.
Progressive reciprocity needn't be too elegant and obscure. It's pleasant to be able to come up with connections or social gestures that will warm prospective critical enablers— hearts and enlist their assistance, but sometimes the way to their hearts is through their wallets. Nina, for example, didn't have to get too creative in coming up with a persuasive gesture—cold hard cash was the only incentive needed to motivate the smaller consultants, who quickly scrambled to find new business leads for her. This kind of gesture isn't always wise or even legal'don't try to enlist your Congressional representative's assistance this way—but an ongoing and mutually rewarding financial arrangement can work. That said, while a viable option, I do find the most natural reciprocal relationships occur organically without the artificial stimulus of money.
Let's return to Sari's message, because it is worthy of study. It illustrates two actions that I recommend everyone take:
Establish the connection. This is the place for a referral, if that's what you're using to make a connection, but Sari didn't actually need a referral. Instead, her message reminds the sales rep of an earlier contact, when she was a member of her company's procurement team for spectrometers. (She didn't have to remind him that their interaction had resulted in her lab's making a $1 million purchase from his company. That's the sort of thing people remember!)
Offer bait. Sari made it clear that it would be beneficial for the sales rep to advise her. On one hand, the advantage was built into the contact; if he referred her to the right kinds of places, the laboratory management would be glad to know he was thinking of them so intelligently, and the one that hired her would be especially glad of the assistance in finding someone they needed. And on the other hand, once she was hired, she'd be in a position to encourage the lab to view his company's products favorably—a quid pro quo more subtle than Nina's, but just as real.
And sometimes the opportunity for reciprocity is so clear that you barely need to mention it. When you locate a prospective critical enabler whose interests dovetail with yours as neatly as Mark's did with Arthur's, it takes very little explanation. Indeed, your main task is to adjust your own thinking—you truly are doing a favor by making the connection, not just asking for one, and the clearer that is in your own mind, the easier it will be for your prospect to recognize.
Sari's sales rep instantly understood that Sari was clearly proposing something of mutual benefit for both of them, and he answered her message at once. He was warm and forthcoming from the first, very generously sharing not only a list of the decision makers in the labs at the companies Sari was interested in, but also identifying which ones would be best to approach and where they were regarding need for personnel. He also gave her express permission to use him as a reference in approaching these companies. Sari and the sales rep further discussed key projects that each of the companies was involved in and how it made sense that she and he could and should help each other.
Arthur and Mark found common ground right away. It turned out that, just as Arthur's referring party had thought, Mark knew the business Arthur was interested in inside and out: he knew values-based assessment and leadership training, and he knew the companies that were interested in obtaining those services. Although Mark wasn't available to work with Arthur himself, he had worked in the area of values-based assessment and was in touch with a whole community of people across all functional skills areas—including executives, marketing specialists, and computer programmers and Web designers—who had extensive backgrounds in this niche.
In particular, Mark identified someone who not only had the functional skills Arthur needed in a chief technology officer—including the ability to put together a staff for a start-up—but who also shared a background in and passion for values-based assessment.
Because Nina had keyed into organizations that were essentially set up to promote the kind of thing she was proposing, she found that she really didn't have to work to engender willingness.
Surprisingly often, prospective critical enablers are just as engaged and pleased to help as the ones Sari, Nina, and Arthur consulted. You need to think about the inclination, availability, and like-mindedness of any given prospect, but most of the people I work with find that their selection criteria have brought them to the right person—or at least, a right person. Where they run into resistance, like Bella (the customer service VP in Chapter Seven), they often realize that their first choice was not actually the best one available to them. If that happens to you, it's OK—just move on to the next prospect and don't succumb to the temptation to go back to your old ways.
The main thing to do when you communicate with each prospect is to pay attention. For one thing, it's rewarding in itself—in today's social climate, simply being focused on by someone who is genuinely looking for ways to help can be as welcome as water in the desert. It also will allow you to see signs of growing or declining interest and guide you to refine your offer of progressive reciprocity—or to thank your prospect and move on.
With referrals and inside information from the sales rep, Sari approached the five companies she found most attractive. She displayed specific knowledge of each company by writing, "Dear [decision maker's name], I was referred to you by [sales rep's name] from [sales rep's company]. I understand that you face some unique challenges in your polymer chemistry lab"—followed by outlining the salient issues for that specific company and her accomplishments that were most relevant to those areas.
Flush with newfound confidence, she felt no hesitation in picking up the phone and following up with each of them several days later, something she wouldn't have thought of even a few weeks earlier. Every one of her five prospects invited her in for an interview, and three of them offered her a job.
In an important sense, her Right Person–Right Approach job search became for Sari not just a career-changing event but a life-changing one as well, because she realized she could apply the principles she'd learned in her job search to virtually every other business or career objective she sought. The entire process, from preparation to settling into her new lab, took one month.
Once he talked with Mark—a critical enabler who knew the industry and the players inside and out—Arthur learned that he could set his sights much higher than picking up a few utility helpers. He could actually add elements to his wish list he had never thought possible. Not only were there competent people who could both program and design out there, but some both met the job spec and shared Arthur's values, and could thus provide much more than simply computer expertise. Once his eyes were opened, Arthur found that the real possibility of achieving his objective—and achieving it very quickly—was within reach. He was able to move ahead within a couple of weeks on a project that might otherwise have taken up to a year to get off the ground. The chief technology officer he eventually hired was able to put together a staff to handle every one of the separate functions Arthur had initially said he needed, allowing him to accomplish all of his original micro objectives with a single hire.
Working with the membership chair of the Organizational Consultants Development Network, Nina was able to vet a number of the smaller consultants on the OCDN's membership rolls, and she came up with a very select list of six of the best-connected, most highly regarded consultants, to which she added two others that she had already identified from her own network.
With these select consultants, she formed what she called the Business Development Network, made up of smaller independent consultants who were out in the field, working with the very companies Nina's firm needed to reach. Because they were already working with major corporate clients, they were gathering valuable intelligence about their consulting needs. When they couldn't handle a job on their own, they were happy to be able to refer the client to Nina's company in exchange for a percentage of the revenues generated.
Her company's workload snowballed as a result, to the general satisfaction of all concerned. Within the first month, it landed a major project based on a referral from one of the new Business Development Network affiliates. Each of the consulting firms and suppliers that joined the network served as an ongoing critical enabler, providing invaluable intelligence and referrals to Nina's company and generating an ongoing stream of successes rather than one big win.
Each of the three people discussed in this chapter achieved the original objective and then some. Sari learned both where to look and what to point out about her background and abilities to differentiate herself from the flood of jobseekers. She didn't even need to send a résumé with her initial communication, because she knew what mattered most and could put it into a letter. In short, she took charge of the situation rather than passively sending out generic e-mails that would most likely end up in a folder in the filing cabinet of the companies— HR directors.
That is a common feature of the Right Person–Right Approach method; it makes it possible to stop deluging prospects with information in the hope that something will strike a responsive chord. The brevity and impact of the resulting message is itself part of its success, because the less labor you demand of a contact, the more likely you are to get what you want.
One of the things that I find most instructive about Sari's story is the way the experience changed Sari herself. She began with low confidence, uncertain of her English language skills and uncomfortable reaching out to people she didn't know well. As she gathered valuable intelligence from her critical enabler and began to realize this would enable her to differentiate herself from her competition, her confidence grew and grew.
Arthur's success was rooted in developing and focusing on a macro objective, setting aside the numerous micro objectives that he began with. It illustrates the importance of starting with the highest expectations'something I see over and over. If you don't aim for what you really want, you probably won't get it. For example, another client in a position much like Arthur's told me, "I want a whole team." And sure enough, a critical enabler referred that client to a whole management team, just laid off as a unit, who turned out to be perfect for the start-up she was putting together. So begin by articulating the ideal you'd like to realize, not some intermediate step that will get you only halfway to your finish line.
Nina discovered what was essentially a new business development model—not one new sale or one source of new sales but an expanding network feeding business to her company. By following it with an open mind, she found that the Right Person–Right Approach method allowed her to redefine her objectives on an ever-larger scale.
The Right Person–Right Approach method really is a fluid process. It's easiest to understand the elements that make it up if they're addressed as separate steps, but in practice you will find yourself looping back and doing things similar to what you've done before, but on another level.
Another thing you'll discover as you put the Right Person–Right Approach method into action is that it opens up new fields of inquiry and new objectives that you hadn't realized existed before. Although Nina began with the objective of increasing sales, it became evident, as she went through the process of developing new sales leads through working with her competitors, that there were other possible avenues for expanding sales that she was just discovering. In fact, Nina found she was just scratching the surface in expanding her company's opportunities.
Finally, although it's important to set your goals high, it's also important to understand that just randomly broadcasting well-articulated objectives rarely, if ever, will help you to realize such high expectations. The second key to Arthur's success is that, once he'd articulated his macro objective, he kept his focus on that objective. He used his well-articulated objective to find a critical enabler, someone who really knew the market and could actually match Arthur's specifications to real people in the marketplace. Keeping your focus on your macro objective to find the right critical enabler is one of the most important keys to achieving the best possible result.
Pursuing a business objective can feel like a matter of life and death—without the job, the funding, the information required to accomplish a project, you may face true hardship. So it's not easy to keep your spirits up, especially if—as often happens in today's economic conditions'the hunt drags on and on. Nonetheless, it can turn into a good game. I've seen it over and over in the context of the whole range of business and career objectives; once someone begins to apply the Right Person–Right Approach method, the obstacles become challenges that can be addressed. Reaching the objective starts to look like a puzzle with known pieces—and everything falls together neatly. As discussed in Chapter Nine, once you frame your objective clearly and take control of the process, you can proceed with confidence.