What Today’s Rainmakers Do Differently.

As “doer-sellers,” professional services partners are responsible for not just delivering services but also the entire business-development process. As “rainmakers,” they must build awareness of their expertise in the market to generate demand, identify and close new client business, deliver the work to the client, and then renew and expand the relationship over time. But there is a growing problem with this long-standing practice: Clients are much less loyal to firms and partners than they once were. Competition for business among professional services firms is intensifying, which has cast in sharp relief the troubling gap in the ability of high performers and core performers to bring in work. In this article, the authors identify five statistically determined profiles that professional services partners fall into, only one of which is correlated with positive performance, and they lay out the three key behaviors of a successful business-development approach: (1) building connected networks of colleagues and clients, (2) creating value through collaboration, and (3) committing to a proactive and consistent business-development routine. INSET: What Activators Do Well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]