Selling Your Expertise

CHAPTER 12Protect Your Rainmaking Time

Chapter 12: Protect Your Rainmaking Time

If you execute your business development strategy well, you'll soon find yourself in an inevitable predicament: not having enough time. At first, being busy with client delivery almost sounds like a good problem to have. But as stressed earlier, rainmakers need to keep their pipelines full, continuously building their book of business. The more successful you are in generating business, the less time you will have to sell. Each successful client meeting leads to more non-selling follow-up work, including client service, engagement delivery, and general administration. In addition, you will have issues to resolve, people to manage, IP to create, associations to join, commitments to keep—it all adds up, and you'll find yourself being diverted from crucial business development activities.

Sometimes, you're pulled away from business development because you want to make sure everything goes just right when delivering the work you've put so much time and effort into selling in the first place. Other times, you have a blowout year and get swamped with client management activities or are flooded with billable work you have to manage because you're short staffed. Naturally, once you land your own clients, they will command your attention, and you will want to keep them happy. Unfortunately, if you don't actively protect your business development time, you'll find yourself overwhelmed with work that doesn't ...