Becoming a Rainmaker in your company is the fast track to Partnership and becoming a firm leader.

1. The Rainmaker isn’t strickly about selling. It is a proactive mindset to grow and build relationships
2. Developing clients is synonymous with sales. Making new friends is sales. Identifying value is sales. Knowing how to sell makes you successful at many different levels.
3. Simple conversations turn out not to be so simple after all as you begin to dissect how to move closer and closer to a potential client’s reality, finally becoming a part of it.
4. Sales is not just about profit and meeting goals at any expense. On the contrary, sales is about understanding what your client deems valuable and providing them with that value.
5. Regardless of what your actual title is, you are always representing your company. When you can learn skills of how to discover  your potential clients’ real needs, you will be more effective to both your company and your client.
6. The truth is that selling is the lifeblood of any business.
7. The more adept you are at selling, the better able you will be to do your job because you will understand your customer, including what they need and consider valuable.
8. Understanding your customer’s needs and what they consider valuable will increase your value to them.
9. Developing a client base involves creating long term relationships that you can add value to. Asking questions and listening to the answers with an open mind and sincere heart are the core elements of rainmaking success.
10. To become a rainmaker, one must market their skills for success. Marketing starts with you: your intuition, technical, relationship, and persuasive skills as well as your ambition.
11. Intuition and technical expertise go hand-in-hand. That competency you have with numbers, deals, or operations is the grease on the wheels of your intuition. Technical experience supports intuition; it never supersedes it. Your technical ability needs to be tied to intuition in order to fit your services into your client’s needs.
12. To establish goals, start with a number. How many new clients, how much revenue you want to achieve within the next month, three months, six months, or year, etc.  Then determine how many clients you need to sign for you to meet your goal.
13. The difference between sales and marketing is similar to the difference between cooking a meal and serving it. In marketing, you prepare your product or service, gauging the customer’s needs and perceptions. In sales, you present your well-tailored product or service and encourage your client to purchase it.
14.  Setting time management goals depends on whether you are a sales professional whose job is one hundred percent business development or whether client development is a portion of your on-going job. How much time do you need to realistically meet your business development goals? For professional service providers that are responsible for production as well, allow 20% of your time to business development.
15. Build Advocates! Advocates are the people who will recommend you and support you. The foundation of your marketing plan should include your advocates. Advocates are people close to you in your field or a similar field. They support you, they know and honor your strengths and you feel confident that they will be a center of influence for you.
16. Advocates send you referrals, keep your name alive in business circles, and listen to you when you need advice. They use or recommend your service on an ongoing basis. Keeping your core advocate circle alive with meaningful contacts and touches keeps your focus on relationships at all times.
17. Advocates are your built-in business pipeline. When you lose touch with even one advocate, you can be sure that your development of new clients has suffered a setback.
18. Advocates are people that you trust. In turn, they know they can trust you and ask you to support them. Regardless of the changes you may be experiencing in your business expansion, restructuring, or new products; you should always keep in close touch with your advocates.
19. The number of advocates you have will grow as your business grows; and as your business grows, you will have to make more time to connect with your advocates. Prioritizing the maintenance of these important relationships becomes a greater challenge as your business expands. Never forget your 80/20 rule.
20. Stay in touch with at least 25 advocates. It is recommended that you either speak with your advocates or communicate with them in a meaningful way once per month. If you have less than 25 advocates, adapt the process to fit your number. The longer you work at developing clients, however, the more advocates you will have.
21. A mother will tell you that a child spells love, T-I-M-E. That is how all human beings spell successful relationships. Your clients want you to spend time fostering the relationship you have built together.
22. There is no comfort zone in sales. Sales is all about getting comfortable with change and moving on. There has never been a successful sales person who wasn’t moving, ever forward, toward bigger challenges.
23. It is up to you to anticipate your client’s needs. Your goal is to become their resource. Your ability to look at issues with a fresh set of eyes each day can be invaluable to your client.
24. To be a successful Rainmaker you need to nurture, ignite, and imagine new relationships, new solutions and new possibilities systematically, methodically, day in and day out. That is the strategic life of a rainmaker.
25. Technical ability, combined with customer relationship skills and persuasive ability, when multiplied by your achievement drive, will equal your success — provided that your skills and effort are high. (TA + CRS + PA) x AD = Success
26. Intuition, or “gut feelings” are hard to ignore. Be open to the signals that your intuition sends you and remember that what may seem illogical in the morning could turn out to be the exact right thing in the afternoon.  Never second guess your gut.
27. The 80/20 rule states that 80% of your income will come from 20% of your clients, 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts, and that 80% of your potential clients will come from 20% of the people you know and who know you.
28. Another 80/20 rule to follow is to listen 80% of the time and talk 20% of the time. Unsuccessful business developers usually have that backwards.
29. “Touch” means to make some form of contact with your advocates and potential clients each year. Touching means sincerity and building on connections that enhance the level of trust between you and the client. It creates a reassurance.
30. Making a conscious, persistent, systematic effort to “touch” your potential clients at least 16 times each year can almost triple your closing ratios
31. You can actually touch customers and potential clients 52 times a year or weekly if you are providing them content to grow their business.
32. Establish a Mastermind Mentoring group with like-minded peers. Having the support and encouragement of people with similar goals keeps you focused on learning about your business, the people around you, and yourself.
33. Success, as a process, begins with study. Know your potential customer’s business and understand their industry. Do your research before you sit down to talk with them.
34. Understanding your customer’s personality and environment, and building rapport, are critical to the success of your marketing plan.
35. Discover your customer’s needs, fears, values, and visions so that you can tailor or customer-ize your presentation to what they need.
36. Create a marriage between the potential client’s needs with the product or service that you provide.
37. Your potential client is looking for evidence that you are who you say you are, that you have integrity, and that you measure up to their expectations and their needs.
38. When you have established rapport, asked questions, and discovered your customer’s needs, you will be ready to negotiate a triple-win solution that satisfies your needs, the needs of the client, and the needs of the client’s customers.
39. Integrate your services with the long-term goals of your client to start a long-term partnership that will become bulletproof.
40. There are four dominant buying motivators for your client: the Pride they take in acquiring your product or service, the Pleasure that comes from the acquisition of a product or service, the Profit that a product or service will enable them to realize, and the Peace of Mind that a product or service provides.
41. When you make your client look good in front of their client, you have achieved a triple-win! A win for You , your client and your client’s client!
42. Be sure to say, “Thank you” to your client when
    • they help you do your job.
    • they make a suggestion.
    • they complain.
    • they give you a compliment.
    • they forgive you for making a mistake.
    • they share competitive information with you.
    • they spend their valuable time with you.

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