What Successful Rainmakers Do
Effective rainmakers find out not only what clients or potential clients need, but also what they want. That requires communication with clients at their level of understanding, finding out how they best receive information and then providing it to them in a way they find useful. Successful rainmakers communicate in a way that builds loyalty and collaboration over time by putting the emphasis on the client and not on the lawyer.
Rainmakers take a customer-service approach to dealing with prospects, just like a successful shop or restaurant (businesses ultimately not much different from law firms) takes with its customers. They make clients feel like part of the team, seek out their opinions, ask them what they want to accomplish. Rainmakers never put prospective clients on the defensive. They follow a win-win communications strategy that does not use the same style of questioning required when taking a deposition or structuring a contract. The better prospects feel when talking to a lawyer, the more positive they are and the more they will seek out the lawyer's services. The rainmaker's key attributes are empathy and rapport, expressed by using a lawyer's skill to ask a hypothetical business client questions like:
What's the biggest project you have going on now? What kind of a year has it been so far? Are you concerned about recent product liability litigation trends? What do you think would give you the most help in dealing with employees or customers? What do you want your organization to look like in one year, two years or five years? Will you be offering new products or services in the next year?
There is only one way to get this kind of information: personal, face-to-face meetings. Social networking on the Internet is effective, but personal contact is the differentiating factor that gets a lawyer noticed. An excellent example of how to do this is attending a trade show. There is no better way to establish effective marketing relationships with prospective clients than by establishing a presence at industry trade shows and association meetings. By properly researching and targeting attendance, a lawyer can meet more prospects in one day than might otherwise be possible in months. And by physically being present at these meetings of potential clients demonstrates knowledge of their business, understanding of their concerns, and seriousness about offering solutions. Rainmakers use this kind of contact to begin an ongoing process of contact with clients or prospects to develop and expand a working relationship outside of the lawyer's own services.
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