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Meet the MasterMinds: Ford Harding on Creating
Rainmakers

Ford Harding is the founder and president of Harding & Company, a firm that helps professional service providers win new clients. Harding has trained professionals in twelve countries in the art of selling and marketing services. He is the author of Rain Making, Cross-Selling Success, and the recently re-released, Creating Rainmakers.

In this interview, I ask Harding how we can make it rain.

McLaughlin: Are rainmakers—people who are very effective marketers and sellers—born that way or can you create them?

Harding: Obviously, I couldn’t do my work with integrity if I didn’t believe we could create rainmakers. We’ve worked with hundreds of people in professional service firms and you see some people who appear to have a natural knack and who will make it one way or the other, and you see others who appear much less likely to do so.

Yet I have found that even those who seem to be the least likely candidates can become successful rainmakers and significant contributors to a firm’s success.

McLaughlin: Can you pinpoint the essential skills for a rainmaker?

Harding: Of course, you must have good listening, presentation, networking, and selling skills. But skills alone aren’t enough. I think you have to give people four things to help them make the transition to rainmaker: skills, standards, systems, and support.

You need standards to interpret the feedback (or lack thereof) you get from the marketplace and how that affects what you do. When we do client work, for example, we have standards to let us know when the project’s in trouble and when it’s going well.

In business development, the standards are less clear. For example, how do you interpret it when you don’t receive a return phone call? I just got a lead from a former client who had been totally unresponsive to my calls for years. It would have been easy to believe the client’s lack of responsiveness was also a lack of interest.

But I didn’t give up. I continued to call and leave messages, and he put in a good word at his new employer that will probably bring us business.

Without the right standards, you misinterpret. You don’t know when to do more, when you can lighten up a little bit, or when to change what you’re doing because it’s not working. To develop rainmakers, you need to help people develop the appropriate standards so that they can pace their own inputs to get the outcomes they want.

McLaughlin: You mentioned systems as an important part of rain making, can you elaborate?

Harding: Ask most consultants about their systems—the combination of the formal systems provided by the firm and the informal systems they use on their own—and most will describe the multiple systems they use. When you ask them about the quality of those systems, that is, how well their systems support business development efforts, “not very well” is the usual response.

The point is to make sure your people are using systems that are effective.

McLaughlin: What is the distinction you make between systems and support?

Business development is much more of an emotional roller coaster than client work.

Harding: I mean emotional support. Business development is much more of an emotional roller coaster than client work. If you work six hard months on a client project, it’s likely to produce a good outcome for the client.

You can work for six months or even two years to land a piece of work, and at the last minute something happens and you lose it. People need emotional support through the highs and lows.

McLaughlin: It seems like most firms have a small number of rainmakers. Is that fair to say?

Harding: Yes. It has to do with the structure of firms. A good rainmaker—the founder of a firm or a practice—can spin off far more work than he or she can do personally. Founder-types need good executors underneath them in the firm, and most tend to be supported by anywhere from two to four highly competent project managers.

Those managers do not necessarily have good business development skills. They don’t need them because they’re living off the largesse of the rainmaker. Project managers help rainmakers succeed by allowing them to go out and do what they do best, which is sell more work.

But the project managers are usually the ones who do the primary training of the next tier of people under them, and they train those people in their own image. That perpetuates the situation with one rainmaker at the top feeding work to those who execute.

McLaughlin: If the rainmaker is, as in your example, the founder of the practice, wouldn’t it be in that person’s interest to grow another rainmaker?

Harding: That seems logical and on one level it’s true, but people are complex. Our research shows that only fifteen to twenty percent of rainmakers have any mentoring skills at all in the area of rain making.

McLaughlin: Is there a way to break that bottleneck—to transition from a single or a small number of rainmakers to a larger group that incorporates the managers and others in the practice?

Harding: Yes, but there are challenges. If you do it right, business development gets easier and easier as the years go by. But it’s very hard at first. You have to help people to do the right things often enough and long enough so they become successful. Success breeds the self-motivation and determination to keep going until it becomes self-reinforcing in the marketplace. And that’s not easy to do.

You need to start people early, and with realistic expectations—not that they will bring in work, but rather information. You should help them develop relationships with people who are not buyers today but may be buyers tomorrow. Start building a “call and meeting” discipline appropriate to their level in the organization, and step that up over time.

McLaughlin: For those who are new to business development, what should they expect?

Harding: Be patient because business development takes time. Think of a traditional J curve—very flat at first, but growing quickly later. How long that slow period lasts depends on the nature of your practice, the economy, and a variety of other things.

When you begin to develop a new area of business, you work and you work and nothing happens. And then you work some more and still nothing happens. And then you get one lousy little case. You work and work some more and bam, business starts to come in.

That’s the way it happens for most people. You have to get through those early stages when the curve is flat and persist long enough to start seeing success. That is the key.

McLaughlin: Many consultants wonder whether it makes more sense to be a generalist or a specialist. Which approach is more useful for developing rainmakers?

Harding: Most firms have a definite path concerning specialization. But even in a specialist firm, there are specialties within specialties. And you can be more of a generalist even within a specialist firm.

Consultants tend to start out as generalists within whatever framework the firm has. But at some point in their careers, they have to specialize in something and get known for that. They have to capture some light when they’re in the shadow of more senior, more experienced generalist players.

Most consultants go through a specialization process as their careers develop. If they do things right, their clients will eventually seek their advice on general issues facing the business, not just on something that they specialize in. Most consultants broaden their expertise as their careers advance.

McLaughlin: Let’s talk about strategies for reaching the market. For instance, what’s your view on the use of direct mail?

Harding: Let me deal with the broader issue first. In our research, we found rainmakers that use a specific technique as a part of their marketing mix and find it very critical, but we could identify others that never use that technique. No one technique is required or essential and there’s a lot of room for personal choice.

But you do need a process to take you from a broad understanding of your market to get face-to-face with a client and have a conversation about the problems the client has that you might be able to solve. Direct mail is one step in that process.

If you treat direct mail as a stand-alone item, though, in today’s world you’re likely to get slim pickings. You can’t expect to send out a mailing and then get a flurry of opportunities that lead directly to business. It’s not likely someone will get your mail, call you, and say gee, I loved what you said and I’m dying to hire you.

That’s certainly unlikely when the economy turns. But direct mail can be a very powerful tool that allows you to meet the people you want to meet and to remind others that you’re out there, you’re thinking about them, and you’re in this business. It’s one element in a broader market effort.

McLaughlin: How does cold calling fit into the whole process?

Harding: There’s a lot of debate about cold calling. It’s been proven to work for professional service firms. There are rainmakers in old firms that have relied on cold calling techniques. But it’s not required. There are firms and rainmakers who never made a cold call in their lives and wouldn’t think of it.

It’s tough in today’s world to go on a cold call and come back with a piece of business. It’s one way of meeting people and as one rainmaker put it to me, I meet people through cold calling but I have to build them into my network for a while before they become clients.

McLaughlin: So, like all techniques, cold calling is not for everybody but there are cases where it is a good way to meet people and to begin a relationship?

Cold calls are not the way for most consultants to start their business development efforts unless they have a walk-through-walls mentality.

Harding: Yes. Cold calls are not the way for most consultants to start their business development efforts unless they have a walk-through-walls mentality.

McLaughlin: If you could give an aspiring rainmaker one piece of advice, what would it be?

Harding: When you get in front of clients and prospective clients, talk about their issues, rather than yourself, and good things will happen. Get clients’ attention frequently and remind them who you are and build that relationship with them.

McLaughlin: Thanks. I appreciate your time.

Find out more about Ford Harding, his books, and services.

You might also be interested in a previous interview with Harding in Management Consulting News on the topic of cross-selling.