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Personality styles have been studied since biblical times. The ancient Greek Hypocrites identified four distinct personalities.

Others have identified many more and have concluded that everyone has several personality styles.

I have learned that you can do a lot with Hypocrites’ four styles: directors, compliants, influencers, and steadies. These styles are similar to a modern system called DISC.

Directors
The directors are usually quick decision makers and will allow you only a small amount of access time.

They require few facts and are very bottom-line and goal-oriented. Directors live life their way. Director personalities are exhibited in a high percentage of CEOs.

Compliant
Compliants are people who measure their decisions by some internal or external set of rules.

The compliant personality is a methodical decision maker and will examine many facts. Engineers, accountants, and doctors have a high percentage of compliant personalities.

Influencers
Influencers exhibit persuasive and outgoing personalities. They enjoy moving other people to their point of view.

Influencers are friendly and powerful communicators. They are fast paced and have a short attention span. Influencer personalities are exhibited in many CEOs and sales managers.

Steadies
The Steady personality is a friendly person who thrives on consensus and being well liked.

Steadies are usually uncomfortable with making rapid decisions. Their primary concern is for the effect of a change on other people in the organization.

Wrapping up
By utilizing this knowledge of different personality types, you will be better able to present yourself in a way that is more likely to be accepted.

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One of the saddest events I witness in professional firms is the exodus of good people with experience. Yet this is just the group of people firms want to keep.

The policy of “up or out” – you make partner or you leave – strips firms of great experience.

And it can cheat staffers who are not supported in doing what it takes to make partner. All too often, the staffers leave because they or their firms did not make a regular investment in their future.

Partners who focus junior associates on the technical job at hand and then skimp on training and marketing may profit in the short run, but will lose long-term profitability.

Invest in Yourself
If you are an associate professional or staff member, avoid the easy trap of exclusive focus on your work.

Make this the year that you invest in yourself (even if your firm does not). You will make yourself more valuable to the firm, and enjoy your job more as well.

Recently I asked a group of about 50 professionals if anyone had spend as much as $100 of their own money during the preceding 12 months on education.

Two people raised their hands. Most people spend more on the outside of their heads (hair styles and cuts) than they do on the inside of their heads.

At a recent marketing session, several of the people complained about the time (four hours) to read two paperback books on customer service. These 30-year-olds had begun the process of retirement at an early age.

Developing Your Selling Skills
Here are three key areas where you should invest in your marketing acumen now:

1. Speaking and Writing
All professions are changing from technicians to communicators. Technology is becoming the “technician.” Join Toastmasters International or take a speaking course. When you invest in your communication skills, you are creating a bright future for yourself.

Write at least two articles for publication in the next year. If you do not feel qualified, as someone who is an excellent writer to coach you and proof your material. Consider taking a creative writing course.

2. Invest in Your Clients
Spend 2% to 5% of your time meeting with clients “off the clock.” Find out about your clients’ businesses.

Learn about their problems, competition, and technology. Learn about their families, friends, and other acquaintances.

Others are selling to your clients. Why shouldn’t you? Don’t assume you know what your clients want – ask them.

Make certain you let you clients know you are investing in the relationships so they don’t think you are billing them.

3. Develop Two New Referral Sources
Your clients’ other professionals and bankers are good places to begin developing referral contacts.

If you will focus on developing two new strong referral sources a year until you’ve gained 12, you will never starve for new clients.

Partners who have 12 acquaintances who send them just one referred lead a year are known as rainmakers.

If you start building referral contacts early in your career, it is easy. If you wait until you’ve been in the business for 10 years, building 12 referral sources is hard. Inch by inch, anything is a cinch. Yard by yard, anything is hard.

3  Strategic Advances for Your Owner Group
A retreat is really a preparation to advance vigorously. That’s why most of my clients now use the word advance. Holding an annual strategic advance will help you accomplish three key things:

• Strengthen your firm’s overall strategy.

• Assure that your structure, systems, and staffing are in alignment with your strategy.

• Improve your commitment to action.

With a strategic advance, all of your owners can feel involved in the firm and its management processes, enthusiastic about marketing the firm to clients and others, motivated to achieve their individual objectives, and an important part of a committed them.

The principals of Waugh & Co. have conducted and facilitated advances for over 25 years. Our clients have used them with great success.

Management’s Advance
While some advances are opportunities to “get away from it all,” advances really should be for “getting into it”.

Educational and religious groups have used advances for years. But only recently have advances become popular for professional firms.

Objectives
We want to get away from the daily routine, the phone calls, the meetings, and all other activities that might distract us from the advance’s objectives.

A successful advance will have a major impact on the achievement of company goals. Therefore, it requires the unfettered participation of the attendees.

Leadership by top management in planning and conducting the advance is a must.
Advances can have any or all of several objectives.

A group that hasn’t worked together very long or closely can use the advance to build lines of communication and establish relationships among members.

The advance should almost always be used to motivate the management team and build a spirit of teamwork. Achieving those objectives can be greatly enhanced by following a few simple rules:

• Keep the dress and atmosphere informal.
• Keep the size of the group manageable so everyone can and must participate.
• Arrange seating so participants are comfortable and feel part of the group.
• Eat meals as a group.
• Provide some social time for spontaneous interactions among members.
• Everyone remains at the advance from start to finish.

Wrapping up
An advance offers an exceptional vehicle for educational programs for management. Remember, it’s imperative that you know what your objectives are for the advance, or a substantial time and money investment will go down the drain.

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One of the crises many professional firms face today is a scarcity of loyal, talented, and experienced people.

What if, when you were age 24, one of the partners of your firm, whom you respected, invited you for a cup of coffee.

Then after some initial chitchat, the partner said to you, “I’d like to help you succeed in this business.”

Develop Your Staff’s Talents
What if that partner went on to say something like this: “We have several young staffers in our firm, but I’d like to coach you.

We hired you because you are talented and I think you are outstanding. I want to help you succeed here or wherever your career takes you.”

And what if, over time, that partner followed through? He met with you, watched over you, guided you, and helped you make better choices and avoid mistakes.

Many of the best people gravitate to firms that recognize, pay for, and appreciate them. Yet too many firms use a sink-or-swim approach with their young talent and often the firm is the loser in the end.

There is a way to help cure this problem once and for all if it exists in your firm: Develop a formal coaching or mentoring program.

A marketing coaching program can promote a can-do attitude throughout your staff. It can have a dramatic ripple effect throughout your firm.

You can help your staffers build a business network. And, should your protégé leave your employ, you will have a friend for life.

How to Do It
Coaching for success can help both your and your employees develop dramatically better skills. For the most part, you should only coach one or two people at a time.

Take them on sales calls, take them to Rotary Club, and take them home with you for a meal.

Talk to your young associate about what it really takes to succeed. Pour out your wisdom and help them build relationships and grow.

A basic rule for coaching is to be friendly, frank, fair, and firm. With that formula, you can grow an excellent crop of future partners and build your firm for the long term. Coaching need only take an hour or so a week, but it should be consistent.

Want to learn more on how to coach? One of my favorite writers, Linda Richardson, has a book titled Sales Coaching. The book, published by McGraw-Hill, can be found in your local book store.

Would you like to work more deeply and become a mentor? Whereas a coach is more skill focused, a mentor helps a protégé with his entire life: financial, physical, family, and faith. Bobb Biehl’s Christian-based book titled Mentoring (Broadman & Holman Publishers) is an excellent choice for people of all faiths.

2 The Value of Training to Train
Give your staff the training to train. For example, students of our Rainmaker Academy are asked to teach what they learned at the Academy to other people at their offices. No matter what the content area, research shows that teaching enhances learning.

1. People who are expected to teach pay more attention and learn more than students who do not expect to teach.

Preparing to teach will help embed the newly learned information more deeply into the attendees. We highly recommend the material be taught within seven days of learning it.

2. Training gets passed on to managers and others in the firm who have not attended the training session.

Everyone who aspires to leadership in professional firms must develop sales and marketing skills.

Training just one person from a firm impacts only that person, whereas training three to five people is obviously more fruitful.

3. Students subtly develop a mentoring and coaching program in selling skills. One student should train three to five others in the firm.

Training only a few others puts less pressure on the student and requires less logistical planning time.

For ongoing training, teaching the same protégés over time creates strong relationships among the team members.

If the teaching and coaching works well, the firm can expect to double the effects created from the student.

4. Students develop leadership and teaching skills. Good leaders model the activities for less experienced people to adopt.

As students implement training and are held accountable for doing what they say they’ll do, they become model leaders for their firm.

When others are also held accountable, they develop significant credibility within the firm.

5. Skills are delivered in a more cost-effective way. When the participants teach the material they’ve learned to three other people, the per-person training cost to the firm drops considerably.

Summing up
While the return on investment is still very powerful for one person’s training participation, the return on investment becomes overwhelming using the training to train concepts.

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In many legal and accounting firms, CE, CLE, or CPE selling is a frequently neglected marketing tool. Continuing education (CE) is viewed as a burden rather than a beneficial sales tool.

Many professionals view their CE requirement with disdain. Some even cram their hours into the last month of the year and try to do as little as possible to maintain their licenses.

I’ve even heard some complain to their clients about their CE requirements.
Every businessperson competing in today’s economy knows that to stay ahead and on top of changes, their professional advisors must continuously upgrade their skills.

The best and the brightest have adopted a lifelong learning attitude. Yet some professionals neglect their training and forego the tremendous marketing advantage it gives us.

Why not make a strong commitment to your training program and then use your efforts to market your practice?

Whenever you plan to attend a training course of any type, consider how you might use the training to your marketing advantage. Here are a few examples.

Learn More Marketing and Selling Skills
In some states, such as California, attorneys can’t take marketing CLE classes. Nevertheless, even there, they can take customer service and ethics classes that deal with marketing issues.

In most states, you can find classes that will improve your skills in this crucial area. You benefit your business, and receive CE credit besides.

Obtain Skills that Will Attract Clients
If your area of concentration is family businesses, why take a course in credit unions just because it is being held in Las Vegas?

Clients of advisory firms are screaming for their professionals to add more value to the relationship by acquiring a deeper understanding of the clients’ businesses.

Don’t be content with just a general understanding of your clients’ businesses, limited by what they tell you. Become a decision influencer by learning how you can help your clients grow and prosper.

Let Your Clients Know about Your Commitment to Training
A while ago, I read a great article in American Way magazine, written by American Airlines’ Chairman.

The article was titled “Where School is Never Out”” and covered American’s commitment to training.

Just reading the article made me feel safer about flying on American Airlines. My clients are now sending a similar letter to their clients.

The letter emphasizes the value of their commitment to CE and how it can help the clients. This can only build their loyalty.

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Great advances have occurred in the professional training programs available today. Firms want a bigger payback from their investment in training.

Accountants and attorneys are looking for courses that are satisfying, challenging, and rewarding.

They want practical, exciting ideas for gaining efficiency and increasing their value to clients and prospects.

How to make training in technical areas work for you more generally will be addressed in the next strategy.

Marketing and sales training has some obvious paybacks, starting with more business and the ability to select the kinds of clients you want for your firm.

Motorola and others repeatedly have shown that a dollar invested in training returns 15 to 30 times the investment.

Yet many firms say, “I don’t want to invest in training then have people leave.” But the more relevant question is, “Would you rather not invest in training and have your nontrained people stay?”

How to Make Training Work
Even the finest training will not succeed without three keys. The first key is top management’s support.

Top management must not only agree to the training, but they must also become strong adherents of developing new habits.

To improve marketing and client relations, partners need to tell staff members, “We have been training you technically for years, but to advance further, let’s work together to develop skills and habits that will hone your competitive edge.”

The next important key is follow-up commitment by the firm and staff members to rise to the challenge of developing new habits.

For instance, we have added a self-directed 12-week follow-up program to many of our training courses.

Firms need to hold follow-up marketing meetings, brown bag lunches, or periodic role-playing exercises to build new skills.

Third, commit yourself and your partners to train constantly in areas of client needs. Many professionals design their training classes around a good location or an interesting intellectual subject. These criteria should take a back seat to impact raining.

Wrapping up
The most successful professionals and firms are those that commit to excellence in training.
 

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You know the old story about the youngster who asked how to be successful. The successful professional said you need experience.

And how do you get experience? You try and fail. The error of the past is the success of the future.

Encouraging Effort
How can you encourage your partners and professionals to fail more in marketing so they can succeed long-term? Can you create a forgiving or “brainstorming” attitude? In doing so, you will make your firm more dynamic.

A mistake is evidence that someone tried to do something. Nowhere is this truer than in selling accounting and legal services.

As professional firms are becoming more entrepreneurial and less bureaucratic, great managing partners and CEOs are encouraging experimentation and risk.

Business is too competitive to wait for perfection. In order to succeed in sales, you must risk failure time after time.

All advertising, public relations, and direct mail programs have failure rates (nonresponse) that exceed 95%. But the 1% to 5% success can create excellent leads and pay for all your efforts.

Redefining Failure
Bill Jenkins, CEO of Kennedy & Coe, recently addressed his owner and management group with, “Setbacks are not to be considered failures.

Instead consider breakdowns as breakthroughs, and disappointment as opportunity. This requires guts and self-confidence.

Day after day, as a leader, you must reassure people of the benefits of failure until everyone in our firm learns to embrace setbacks as windows to learning.” I predict Kennedy & Coe will succeed even more by learning from experimentation.

Networking can often seem fruitless. But the most powerful rainmakers have built a Rolodex of powerful people by sorting through the one-in-a-hundred odds at networking events.

Wrapping up
In high-growth companies, failure is prized, not scorned as it is in many firms. In fact, almost all successful entrepreneurs have failed multiple times. This is how they learned how to succeed.

It’s not that you fail, its how you deal with the failure that counts. Do you not try again? Only then do you fail.

If you are undaunted; if you learned from the failure; if you keep trying to obtain that impact client – then your “failures,” mistakes, or experiments will ultimately lead to success.

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Has business life for your clients become more complex? How about competitive? Regulated?

Are tax and legal issues more difficult? If your answer to any of these questions is in the affirmative, you believe as I do: “The demand for high-level professional services is growing, not declining.”

This phenomenon puts great pressure on the service professional who sees all the opportunities in the complexity, but does not have the capital to build the solution from the ground up.

Available Resources
A solution to this perplexing issue is to become involved in a strategic alliance with other similar professional service firms.

One such alliance is the Enterprise Network. Enterprise Network is one of the largest alliances of professional service firms in the United States.

Enterprise Network partners share resources and work together to strengthen the business skills of each partner.

What should you look for in strategic partners? The key ingredient I’ve found in successful alliances is that the cultures of each member must be synergistic.

Each member must have a similar business philosophy and a need for each other’s expertise and assistance.

Besides, the most successful firms in an alliance are those who have an inclination toward participation, enthusiasm for the mutual sharing of ideas and services, and a desire for sharing and open cooperation in alliance development.

Sharing the Benefits
Clearly, two or more heads are better than one. Partners always searching for a better answer for their clients tend to be the most successful.

Partners who believe in abundance are more apt to be open and cooperative. They want to share their best practices with the expectation that others will reciprocate.

Everyone wins in this scenario. Professional firms that take the team approach to client service within their own firms only multiply those advantages when they participate in an alliance relationship.

Wrapping up
If you want to serve your clients with better services, consider the benefits of a strategic alliance.

These alliances offer you value, best practices, expertise, education, efficiency, productivity, and improved client relationships.

Growing your firm through a strength-in-numbers approach can be powerful for you and your partners.

An alliance with other service professionals will make the whole worth more than the sum of the parts.

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Building a brand can be a powerful force in your practice if your firm truly operates as one firm.

Most firms operate as a collection of practitioners sharing overhead. Operating together as one firm enables you to create synergy when communicating with clients and prospects.

Synergy from One Firm
How can you tell if you are operating as one firm? Ask yourself a few questions:
• The partner compensation system built on the book of business mentally rather than each partner’s total contribution to the firm?

• Does a significant amount of our revenue come from partners introducing other partners’ services to clients?

• Do we have a system in place that will consistently achieve good service from partner to partner and from office to office?

Even beyond the desire to operate as – and present – a one-firm image, every professional firm needs to “reposition” themselves in the minds of the customer.

Using Branding
Branding can be the key to extending your most trusted advisor status to the new service areas you’re offering.

Do your clients think of you first when they need human resource services? Business advice? If you haven’t extended your brand in a way that redefines who you are, I guarantee you the answer is “no”.

Branding is a method to build a larger – and possibly redefined – space in the minds of your customers.

Successful branding connects what clients are passionate about buying with what you are passionate about delivering.

Branding is not just advertising or promotion. Your brand must permeate your entire operation.

In order for your branding campaign to have impact, your marketing messages should express your firm’s culture and values.

Your messages should be clear and your operations should be consistent and congruous with the message.

Wrapping up
Your brand may be an intangible asset, but never doubt that effective branding can deliver bottom-line results.

Successful branding will enable your firm to obtain premium pricing, to receive more opportunities to serve clients and prospects, and to become recognized as a market leader.

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Successful leaders have a vision for their business. Whether you are CEO of your firm or a practice leader, you will be more successful when you lead with vision.

The “Vision Thing”
What is a vision? A vision is reality in the future. A vision shows where you want to go and what things will be like when you get there.

Vision is derived from the Latin word videre, which means “to see.” Your vision can be a powerful driving force to keep your team members focused on the growth you want to achieve.

Working on your vision requires you to consider mission: What is it you want to do? Our mission is to transform the lives of professionals.

We truly want professionals to be different after an encounter with us. For your mission to be powerful, it must make a difference. Without a difference, you will be just another vendor of services.

Usually the difference you make with your clients will translate into competitive advantage for your firm. Prospects and clients use you because of the difference you make in their business.

Acting on Your Vision
Once your vision is in focus and linked to an appropriate mission, your strategy must support the achievement of your vision and mission.

Remember, your strategy is more flexible than your vision or your mission. Your realized strategy may be quite different from your intended strategy, because you adapted along the way.

Once you have a clear vision, mission, and strategy, your attention must focus on getting the structure, systems, and staffing in alignment with your goals.

Structure and Systems
For instance, if your vision calls for rapid and consistent growth, you must have structure, systems, and staffing that will support the growth.

To achieve rapid growth, a firm must be able to make decisions quickly. We often encounter firms who have high growth strategies but because their structure is a partnership, the high growth cannot be achieved.

A partnership structure, by its nature, is more deliberative and less concerned about making decisions quickly.

The same can be true with systems. For instance, hourly billing and collection systems deter partner attention from serving the client.

To achieve your vision, you must adopt systems that won’t fight the achievement of your goals.

Wrapping up
A team that is emotionally moved by their vision has the strength to overcome the obstacles of business life.

A clear vision for your firm creates a good picture of your future. Sharing this picture with your associates can be a major motivator to them.
 

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Becoming an insider and selling to owners, board members, and top management takes a unique combination of attitude and aptitude.

Attitude
To operate successfully in the boardroom, you need the self-confidence to feel on equal footing with the top officers.

Such an attitude also presumes that you can understand the issues facing the top officers.

It means that you are willing to articulate your solutions in such a way that you can be a change agent in the business relationship.

Top officers exude power. If you are reticent about networking with top officers, you must push yourself to learn the ropes and overcome your fear.

After you have met with a few chiefs (a common reference to CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, CAOs, and related titles), you will begin to relax as you realize they are just like you, but different.

As my football coach used to say to get us to overcome our fear of the opposition, “he puts his pants on just like you.”

Aptitude
Time is a precious commodity to top officers in businesses. The further up the food chain you move in a company, the more time sensitive your prospects and clients will be. For this reason, you will also need aptitude in dealing with the chiefs.

People who are unsuccessful selling to top officers waste time, don’t tell the whole story, and communicate poorly.

Top officers and especially CEOs have learned to make decisions with very little information – they want only the key facts.

Their jobs require them to make lots of decisions in a short amount of time. Many of them fear wasting time with someone trying to sell something.

Investing her time wisely will enable a chief to make steady progress toward company objectives.

Before you meet with a top officer you must do your homework and know about the company and its problems. You should have other insiders on your side, if possible.

CEOs are particularly suspicious of a professional who only covers the upside and fails to cover the downside.

In his book, Think and Sell like a CEO, Tony Parinello recommends you use a balanced reward equation to communicate your benefits.

When you say that your service will save $400,000 in taxes, the CEO is thinking, “And how much audit risk or extra compliance costs will I have?”

Be like Abraham Lincoln, who always gave both sides of the case in a debate to appear fair and to disarm potential counterarguments.

Last, communicating with CEOs takes skill. You must learn to cover the “bullet points” succinctly and accurately. As you cover the bullet points, use written materials to handle the details.

Wrapping up
With the right attitude and aptitude, any professional can sell successfully to top managers, board members, and owners.
 

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