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Friday with Phil - ROE #4 Be True to Your School

Remember the passion and excitement of high school pep rallies and homecoming games? Remember how you believed – in your heart of hearts – that your school was truly second to none? Your passion served two purposes: it helped motivate the athletic team to deliver its best performance, and it made you feel like part of something much larger. As every successful rainmaker will attest, it’s a lot easier to sell a product that you believe in than one that simply puts dollars in your pocket. Passion sells. Enthusiasm serves to enthuse. And passionate enthusiasm is the most engaging and persuasive force known to the rainmaking universe.

It boils down to the difference between knowing your business and loving your business—a difference that will be readily apparent to your clients, colleagues, and staff members. While I’ve heard that the climactic aspects of love can sometimes be faked, truly passionate love must be authentic or it will ring sadly hollow. The first order of rainmaker marketing, then, is to choose a field, product, or specialty that truly interests, fascinates and energizes you. Most often that will mean a field, product, or specialty that you believe contributes to the greater good. If you truly believe you are adding value through your work, you will make the life-altering transformation from being a worker to an evangelist. You view your work as a mission, you believe your words because you live them yourself everyday, and you feel sad when clients choose a competitive offering because they won’t experience the benefits that only you can deliver. If it all sounds cult-like, that’s because it is. Many of the greatest corporate successes of the past and present have enjoyed cult-like loyalty among employees and customers. In the past, that list included firms like IBM, Disney, and Merck. Today, the list includes Apple, Starbucks, FedEx, and Target. The common element among these diverse corporate entities translates to an evangelist-like belief that they were doing the right thing for the right reasons. Sure they were making gobs of money, but that was the byproduct of what they viewed as their core mission.

Going back to the high school pep rally analogy, think about the basis of your excitement and passion. While you might have had a favorite player or a particularly hated rival, your dedication to the team had much more to do with a feeling of vicarious belonging and the belief that you too were contributing to a victory. You truly believed that the harder you cheered the harder the athletes would play and the more likely victory would become. And there’s a lot of truth to that. Home field advantage is a widely accepted and verifiable aspect of college-level and professional sports. In fact, Las Vegas oddsmakers typically add an extra two or three points to the home team when setting the point spread in football games. That also explains why sports fans live and die with their beloved teams. They see themselves as being on the field with their heroes, blocking, tackling and talking trash. When their team wins, they relish the victory; and when the team falls to defeat, they feel beaten as well. The most effective salespeople, marketers, and rainmakers experience similar feelings of euphoria and anguish as their professional efforts succeed or fail.

Rainmaking is built upon a strong foundation of interpersonal relationships based on mutual trust and mutual interests.

Logic plays a part, but emotional connections rule the day. Let me share a personal example that occurred over twenty years ago yet still remains vivid in my memory. I was selling my home and invited several real estate agents to view the house and submit proposals for the listing. Now there is no single financial transaction with stronger emotional implications than the process of selling one’s home; and so I paid close attention to every word, nuance, and facial tic that might provide a hint of each agent’s true character and feelings. The first few agents were uniformly business-like and pointed out things that should be fixed, provided their view of current market conditions, and quoted fair asking prices. Another one took the same business-like approach, but I heard something extra in the tone of his voice and saw something comforting in his body language. He truly loved what he was doing and especially enjoyed working with older homes like mine. He genuinely liked its quirky character, appreciated the renovations we had done, and saw the potential that new owners could further enjoy. His contract, commission, and recommended listing price were in line with his competitors; but he won the business because he was focused not on selling a house but on finding a new owner who would love the wainscoted, albeit slightly askew, pantry as much as he and I did. He had turned a transactional relationship into a team effort, and we entered into a personal partnership that was to our mutual benefit.

The real estate agent who won my business, and high school pep rallies share a critically important rainmaker attribute—a clearly defined goal. A pep rally on the Tuesday before a bye week would be hard-pressed to generate a modicum of excitement. In order to cheer with wild enthusiasm, we need to have a particular end in mind. We want to score the touchdown, block the kick, sack the quarterback, win the championship, and earn bragging rights. Generic cheers about doing one’s best and trying hard would be annoyingly lame. (I do, however, have a soft spot in my heart for the somewhat generic cheer shouted by Harvard students when their team is losing: “That’s all right. That’s okay. You’ll all work for us some day.” It’s a brilliant balloon-bursting sentiment that reminds one and all that football, basketball, and hockey are simply games, and the business of real life begins after the whistle blows.) Rainmaker marketing works the same way. It requires specificity and focus. Vague-sounding goals like “I’ll work hard to get the best possible price” wither against a promise to “find new owners you’ll be happy to entrust with your home.” Emotion beats logic, and enthusiasm and passion feed emotional connections. Be true to your school and be true to the essence of rainmaking.

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Phil Fragasso is the author of the engaging new book Marketing for Rainmakers: 52 Rules of Engagement to Attract and Retain Customers for Life, and a good friend.  Phil has over 25 years of marketing experience in high-tech and financial services, and now serves as President of I-Pension LLC, an innovative investment advisory firm. Prior to his current position, Phil was chief marketing officer for Rydex Investments and Columbia Funds.  His marketing career began in the computer industry working at Honeywell and Wang.  Here are links to Phils' web site and to his book on Amazon.com.

Posted September 5, 2008
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