Founder or partner becomes really good at selling.

Founder or partner becomes burned out from being responsible for selling, or has their responsibilities expand much beyond where they can effectively keep selling at the same volume.

Founder brings in a business development team to help duplicate their efforts.

But the necessary sales don't materialize.

Founder invests in marketing to drive inbound leads to the business development team.

But the necessary sales still don't materialize.

Founder fires the business development team and the marketing agency, and goes back to selling, and is now incredibly stressed.

If this story sounds all too familiar, let me let you in on a little secret... you can't duplicate your "rainmakers."

Rainmakers are unique

In the consulting and advisory space, rainmakers are unique because they have unique skillsets, unique knowledge of the market, and unique expertise which allows them to easily relate to those they are selling to. They have often been in their shoes before. They get it.

These rainmakers are most often founders, founding partners, or managing partners, with a significant stake in the firm, and a personal need for the firm to grow. Because of their position, they have deep industry expertise, wide networks to tap into, and a ton of practice presenting the firm's value proposition. They are often the ones who developed it.

These things can't be replicated.

Rainmakers can be scaled

In most firms, rainmakers are under-leveraged. It's not because they aren't doing enough selling, but because the majority of their business development activity is focused on 1:1 relationship building. And while at the end of the day, a 1:1 relationship is required to close a deal, there is a ton of opportunity to scale the rainmakers' presence to build affinity (trust and credibility) at scale.

This means building and scaling their digital persona and brand presence.

Executive-level influencer marketing is the most effective and capital efficient way to build credibility and trust with your ideal customers and prospects.

Connecting their faces and names with the thought leadership content coming from the firm allows people outside of their network to get to know them, build a relationship with them, and in-turn build affinity to your firm.

This addresses a major challenge your buyers are having right now. There is so much noise out there, that people don’t know what information to trust. So they revert to a very well known human behavior: trusting those they know.

By enabling and empowering your rainmakers to produce, distribute and engage with thought leadership content in digital channels, you can scale their presence in a non-linear fashion. This simply can't be done by hiring more business development people. If you are the founder or rainmaker partner, this means working with your internal marketing team, or bringing in an external consultant to build this infrastructure. Whether this is an internal or external effort, either way you will want to ensure that they understand your needs as a founder: your time constraints, your delivery expectations, and your content development preferences so that they can provide you with the right level of support.

Focus on strategic activation

Creating and distributing content isn't enough, not if growth is a priority and the need to feel the impact soon is paramount. You need to also activate using this content. This means knowing when and how to use it in your outreach and follow-ups. This means knowing how to integrate this content into the existing industry ecosystem of events, influencers, and information sources. This means engaging with people who engage with this content.

Without activation, pipeline impact will be minimal and will take too long.

Tactically, there are lots of ways to achieve this through things like podcasts, webinars, proprietary research, an in-office video recording studio for your rainmakers to use, etc.

If you want to discuss how to make this work for your rainmakers, reach out. I'm happy to chat.