Observed

The film "Undefeated" won the 2012 Best Documentary Oscar, despite its rejection in 2011 by the Sundance Film Festival. The filmmakers' resiliency (they got the boost they needed from the South by Southwest conference) is the same kind of resourcefulness it takes out-numbered attorneys to Get Found and Get Picked.

The parallels between marketing a film and selling professional services ought to be obvious.

First, in either case, the numbers are apparently against you. A recent report in The New York Times, for example, noted that the Sundance Film Festival which begins today in Park City, Utah, vetted over 12,000 submissions for 193 slots. By comparison, I read recently that there are 1,250,000 attorneys in the United States competing for increasingly demanding markets less tolerant of hourly billings and other examples of business as usual.

Second, despite the numbers, there’s hope. If history is a reliable guide, many of the films that didn’t make the cut at Sundance will nevertheless earn critical and commercial success. Same with attorneys and other professional service providers who play it smart.

The Times piece describes the advice John Cooper, the director of the Sundance festival, has for the ways rejected films have skillfully used the Internet and other means to build an audience — Sundance or no Sundance.  Responding to a rejected filmmaker’s plans to offer his work via sites like iTunes or Netflix, the Times reported the following:

That’s a resourcefulness that Mr. Cooper would encourage. “Filmmakers need to be creative,” he said. “They should use the cleverness it takes to make a movie to also find an audience.”

This common-sense attitude is precisely what Mike O’Horo and other legal sales thought leaders have been offering their clients for years.  They say that lawyers are — by training or nature — relentless question-askers.  Lawyers also tend to be painstakingly systematic, analytical, well-prepared and hard-working and have a bunch of other qualities that serve business development and sales of their services and firms.

Makes sense, yes?

Ancient cultures were obsessed with tracking and measuring time long before Simon Vouet's 1627 "Time Vanquished by Love, Hope & Beauty." But in the business world, to manage something, you have to measure it.

Phyllis Korkki, who reports on workplace issues for The New York Times, recently tag-teamed with Robert Pozen to challenge the notion that putting in more hours is a sign of productivity and value.

Pozen, a former attorney who’s a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a lecturer at Harvard Business School, is the author of Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours (HarperCollins).

Among other benefits, Korkki offers that regular breaks not only reduce stress but also amp up creativity.  In a second, related Times article, Pozen echoes what law firms have been hearing with increased frequency and sincerity from clients for at least a decade:  Measure results, not hours.

He says there are three things most of us could do to significantly boost our efficiency: Run better meetings, read smarter and let go of our Inner Perfectionists as writers.

This last point reminded me of what my friend Mike O’Horo calls DemandTrigger — the business need that helps drive a sale.  In my case, I might write for a living, but what I sell (i.e., my Demand Trigger) is time management.

As in, let me get that off your to-do list.

Because chances are good that every busy, high-earning lawyer or other executive has some writing chore on their desk that they keep putting off.  It’s simply competing with too many other priorities for which the Cost of Doing Nothing (thanks again, Mike) is less than finishing or editing that article-practice group description-proposal or whatever.

But, hey, who’s counting?

How does a rainmaker make it rain?  How do these dinosaurs manage to walk into a room and suddenly, magically seem to own it…and leave with a satchelful of new clients?

First, there’s nothing sudden or magical about it.  In all likelihood, it has taken:

• Years of hard work. Mike O’Horo, Malcolm Gladwell and lots of others have spoken about the years of constant practice it takes to master anything — including business development.
• Vulnerability. Along the way, that means kissing a lot of frogs.  The typical rainmaker has become conditioned to dislike taking the hit (at least a little) and doing it anyway.

There’s more.  And, sure, there are the exceptions, the tireless extroverts who edited the law review, thrive on rejection and delegate easily.

A silver bullet?

For now, however, it’s important to acknowledge that there’s no silver bullet.  It’s not, as O’Horo and Dave Waldschmidt argue, about working smarter.  “To grow your book,” Mike wrote, “you must get out there and compete.”

Which brings me to Frank Bruni and Phil Libin.  The former writes for The New York Times, and the latter is the autocrat founder in charge of Evernote, a company that peddles note-taking and archiving technologies.

Mr. Bruni recently noted that under-25s had better pick more marketable college majors and get some help making the mountain of debt many take on look more like a molehill.  Otherwise unemployment or underemployment in their ranks will continue to top 50 percent (according to the Associated Press based on 2011 data).

What he and his hundreds of commenters (as many as I had time to read) failed to mention, however, is that finding work also takes time, hard work and a bunch of flexibility.  Especially the most rewarding kinds of work.

As for Mr. Libin, he boasts that he banished landlines on a whim when he set up shop in Mountain View, Calif., in 2008.  (The company also has an office in Austin, Texas.)  He says,

We thought, why do you really need a phone?  If you have a phone at your desk, it’s just sitting there and you’re kind of encouraging people to talk on it.  Everyone’s got a cellphone, and the company pays for the plans.  There are phones in the conference room.  We’re not a sales organization, so we’re not making a lot of calls, either.  If you’re at your desk, you should be working.  And that’s actually worked really well. I don’t think anyone misses phones.   Even though it’s one big room, it’s actually fairly quiet because no one is sitting there talking at their desk. The culture very much is that if you want to talk, you go 10 or 20 feet in some direction to a quiet area.

Hey, I have news for anybody who buys the bit about we’re not a sales organization.  We’re ALL sales organizations.

First, we all have relationships inside and outside the company with people we’d better be treating as if they were our customers…or, we’d better be OK kissing those relationships good-bye.  And second, no one can express or accurately read the range of emotions it takes to sustain a relationship without hearing a voice and, even better, seeing a face…in person.  At least occasionally.

Add these up and you get sales.

Ramping up to a point about competitive advantage

Banishing landlines — and the conversations that they nurture — is nothing new or surprising.  Mr. Libin just happens to be one of the more flamboyant examples of the digitally cocooned of our times.  (He also deploys a robot surrogate with telepresence when he’s not in the office.)

In a recent article, Sherry Turkle recounts a scene in a Boston law office described by a senior partner.

Young associates lay out their suite of technologies: laptops, iPods and multiple phones. And then they put their earphones on. “Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits.”  With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be broken.

Ms. Turkle, an MIT professor and the author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, also notes that we “seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship.”

As Ms. Turkle notes, “Face-to-face conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience.”

The silver lining in this cloud (finally!)

In a world that texts and wears headphones (or earbuds), fortune favors the exception, anyone willing and able to pick up a phone and carry on a conversation.

So, that’s how.  That’s how (OK, one of the hows) a rainmaker gets to be (and to stay) a rainmaker.

PS:  If you have some thoughts about how, I’d love to know.  Call me.

OK, so he's not Robert Redford. However, if you're a lawyer or law firm marketer hunting for great clients, you want to have lunch with The Coach.

Mike “The Coach” O’Horo isn’t the first sales coach to harness the power of the Webinar.  In the legal services niche, however, he may be the best.

Find out for yourself.  If you’re interested in getting immediate, proven, one-on-one help for whatever sales opportunity you’re facing, then register for Mike’s Lunch with the Coach.  It’s a free, interactive Webinar-based training being launched today via RainmakerVT.

Do it today.  Mike says space is limited.

Seth reminded me this morning of the creative tension I see in myself.  Part of me is in a hurry to ship.  I’ve been given a deadline, I want to please and impress my client and so on.  Another part of me  understands that I need to slow down and just be with myself in order to create.

I would be wise to remember that most readers experience the same tension.  They, too, are being pulled in a million directions and are seeking balance — consciously or not.

So, what can I do to facilitate what they need to have happen?  How do I make life/work easier for others?  Others who have way too much on their plates.

The ones interested in a life with fewer traffic jams.

Shoemaker, Das Ständebuch, 1568

There are two kinds of entrepreneurs:  Craftsmen and Opportunists.  Picture the first type bent over a workbench or keyboard perfecting whatever.  This one figures that the excellence of their product is enough to keep the work coming in.

The other type of entrepreneur has a pair or binoculars, a periscope (that can look around corners) or some other kind of optic or diagnostic tool.  This type is looking for…well, opportunities.  Potentially lucrative gaps in the supply chain where the competition is thin or thinner.

I’m a little of both types.  As a freelance writer, I had better be crafting something of high quality for which there’s a profitable market or I cannot sustain what I do.

That’s what I do.  It’s not, however, what I’m selling. (more…)