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Meet the Masterminds: Ford Harding on Rainmaking for Consultants

Ford Harding is the founder and president of Harding & Company, a firm that helps professional service providers win in the marketplace. He is the author of the newly revised classic, Rainmaking: Attract New Clients No Matter What Your Field. His other books include Creating Rainmakers and Cross-Selling Success.

We asked Harding about the new edition of his book and what has changed in the marketing and selling of professional services.

McLaughlin: What made you decide to write a new edition of Rainmaking?

Harding: The world has changed since publication of the first edition in 1994. The most obvious development is the rise of the Internet, which the first book didn’t mention.

In my continuing work with professionals on effective selling, some questions have come up regularly that I wanted to address. For example: How do you shorten the sales cycle? How do you turn down small projects? How do you sell in teams? How do you network with executives who are much older and more prosperous than you are? How do you generate more leads from your network?

McLaughlin: What do you think are the most significant ways the Internet has changed how professionals sell?

Harding: Well, the Internet is certainly a new channel to market, and professionals are taking advantage of the immediacy, convenience, and informality that make it a powerful communication tool.

That tool has greatly enhanced the ability of professionals and clients to collect information on one another, and that changes selling. The Internet has also had a significant impact on business development methods.

While the Internet is a great blessing, it can also be a crutch—an excuse to avoid doing what you should do.

Webinars, for example, are very popular these days and offer greater geographic reach at lower cost. Of course, a web-based presentation requires a very different selling dynamic than meeting face to face with the client.

While the Internet is a great blessing, it can also be a crutch—an excuse to avoid doing what you should do. Obviously, you should send emails to prospective clients. But there are times when you should use other communication channels.

It’s tempting to use email instead of picking up the phone. Before you send an email, ask yourself this: Do you want to send an email because it’s the right way to communicate in this particular situation, or because you’re chicken? If the latter, you’ve got to pluck up the courage and call.

McLaughlin: How effective are professional service providers at using the Internet for client relationship management?

Harding: While that varies a lot with the individual, I’d say most professional still have a lot to learn. Many webinars are pretty horrible, for instance, and people send tons of emails pointlessly.

Trust is the foundation of relationship selling, which is what we’re talking about. It’s hard to establish the kind of trust we need strictly over the Internet. Some consultants think they should be doing everything via the Internet. Well, how many pieces of work have you sold just using the Internet, without talking to the client? For professional services, that’s still rare.

Your use of the Internet should supplement, not supplant, your relationship building strategy. With every contact in your network, you need to mix the media you use. You need face-to-face, voice-to-voice, and correspondence time.

McLaughlin: What advice do you have for consultants who want to strengthen their networks and their relationship building strategies?

Harding: The first thing I would say is that all business development is activity-based. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for planning and analyzing but it is fundamentally about taking action. If you aren’t out there interacting with people, you aren’t doing the job. We often see avoidance of that responsibility.

Secondly, as it relates to networking, especially during the early stages of relationships, it is much more about what you can do for other people than what they can do for you.

People probably waste more time and money on the subject of networking than any other corporate activity. Skilled networkers will tell you that they spend their time instead figuring out how they can help other people. That’s just ingrained behavior for them.

When you are talking with somebody, you should be thinking, “What do I know and who do I know that might benefit this person?”

McLaughlin: You’ve written about your concept of “call discipline.” Can you explain that idea?

Harding: Sure. Call discipline means that you have a process for making client calls and sending emails to your contacts and that you are committed to that process. You call every week, whether it’s because you set a quota, or you block out a particular time every week, or because your contact management software reminds you. You need ways to make sure that you stay in the minds of the people who are important to you in the marketplace.

McLaughlin: Consultants sometimes hesitate to call clients and maybe they don’t like to do it. Is there any remedy other than just doing it?

Harding: Well, it’s like learning to play a particularly difficult hand progression on the piano. You can only learn so much by instruction. You’ve got to do it 100 times, and then you might be ready for more instruction.

On the other hand, there are reasons why people have difficulty making calls, and some of them are understandable. One rationale for hesitating is the natural question: What reason do I have for calling this person? That’s a major concern when people begin this activity. It almost disappears by the time they’ve been doing it for a year.

The next issue in terms of call discipline is the size of your network. I think many professionals are somewhat naive about the amount of networking they need to do. If you have a network of twenty people, you can’t make many calls each day unless those people really love to hear from you.

It’s important to remind yourself that, if you don’t talk to anybody, you’ll never sell anything.

So you try to work with too few contacts and then convince yourself that it’s not worthwhile calling anyone else. I know from my experience that you can go through your entire contact list and figure out a valid, logical reason why it’s not worth calling every person on the list.

It’s important to remind yourself that, if you don’t talk to anybody, you’ll never sell anything. We frequently hear rainmakers say that you never know where the next piece of business is going to come from. We have to be more inclusive about who we consider to be part of our networks.

McLaughlin: In your opinion, what holds people back from becoming rainmakers?

Harding: People get discouraged. I think the main reason that people don’t excel at selling is that they give up too soon. Anybody who has made it to a senior manager level in a consulting firm probably has the interpersonal skills and the content knowledge to be an effective seller. But they have to stick with it and go the distance.

Instead, they get disheartened and give up. That’s partly because they don’t know how to interpret feedback from the marketplace. If a client doesn’t return their calls, they think that the client doesn’t like them or doesn’t want to talk to them. But 99 percent of the time, the lack of response has nothing to do with them.

I was cured of that when I found out why one person I was trying to reach didn’t respond. I had created a whole scenario in my mind: His boss had brought me in; he resented that and he didn’t like me, and so on. And I was sure it was true.

Finally, I called his assistant and asked if there was any way I could get through to him. She told me he was in the hospital dying of cancer and I felt awful. Of course he didn’t return my calls. He had much more important things to think about. That taught me a lesson.

McLaughlin: Are you saying that we have to push through our own perceptions of what’s happening because we could be completely wrong?

Harding: Yes. We all have little voices inside us that say “Good job!” or that beat us up over mistakes. If the voice is giving you accurate information, then it’s useful. If the voice is wrong, it can hold you back. You have to become aware of what that little voice is saying, catch it making mistakes, and modify your reactions.

McLaughlin: If a consultant was just beginning to develop a personal marketing strategy, what would you suggest?

Harding: My first advice is figure out what will get you in front of people. Listen to the market, which is a great teacher. If potential clients are asking about a certain issue, you should be doing research on it. Maybe you call people and interview them on the subject. That associates your name with that particular issue. But keep it market focused.

We all have little voices inside us that say “Good job!” or that beat us up over mistakes.

Second, you have to learn about your client. You do that when the client’s mouth is open and lips are moving, not when yours are. You don’t have to show how smart you are every minute. Let the spotlight stay on the client.

McLaughlin: Professionals do tend to focus on themselves during the sales process. Why do you think that is?

Harding: One reason is that most consultants were the “smart” kids in class. They had the answer before the teacher even called on them, right? So that’s their training from early on in life.

Also, there is the pressure in a client meeting that I’ve only got an hour to spend with the client and I want a sale, so I’d better say something. Selling does not equal talking.

When you pull the spotlight back on yourself, you change the client’s mental state from reflective mode to evaluative mode. That’s fine, as it should be there—but not all the time or right away.

McLaughlin: Let’s talk about target marketing. How effective is target marketing for consultants?

Harding: I think people are targeting crazy in the professions. Target marketing is an analytical, internal process. You can sit in your office and target away all day. Obviously, you have to start somewhere, but some consultants get carried away.

I met one strategy consultant who showed me a 2 x 2 matrix on how he planned to allocate attention to his twenty-seven contacts. I said well, that’s interesting. But you can call those in an hour. Then what are you going to do?

McLaughlin: What’s the most common mistake consultants make regarding their target marketing plans?

Harding: I think many consultants underestimate the effort they must expend to succeed. There’s a mathematical logic to what it takes to win new business. If you need to make four sales a year of say $500,000 each, how many opportunities, or at-bats, with target clients will you need?

If we assume that you will win the work for one out of four proposals that you submit, how many companies do you have to talk to get those opportunities? It doesn’t have to be precise—just broadly accurate. Are you talking to enough people to get where you want to go?

You should work backwards to find the number. People are often stunned by how big the numbers are. And they don’t realize that they can’t succeed by ignoring this reality.

McLaughlin: If you were to give a consultant one piece of advice about improving the ability to sell services, what would it be?

Harding: I would say get out in the marketplace and start talking with people. Smart professionals can figure out what clients need from them. But you won’t learn that by sitting in the office wondering about it or just creating 2 x 2 matrices.

McLaughlin: Thanks for your time.

Read more about and by Ford Harding at his author page, and visit his site at www.hardingco.com.