Graham McGregor: How to hire a rainmaker

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A rainmaker is an influential employee who creates a great deal of business or revenue for his or her firm.

Now when we talk about hiring a rainmaker there is a traditional approach where you spend a lot of time and money hiring a full time person who you hope will make large amounts of new sales for your business.

Sometimes this works out and other times it doesn't. The disadvantage with this approach is that it takes a lot of time and is usually very expensive.

Here are two other ways to hire a rainmaker that could be worth testing in your own business:

In each case you hire a rain maker on a part time basis who can help you in key areas.

1: For instance you could hire someone who can help you to convert more of your qualified prospects into happy paying clients.

A good example of someone like this is Jeffrey J Fox the author of 'How to be a rainmaker'. Jeffrey has developed an interesting sales process called Dollarisation where he trains people on how to show the true value of their product and service to potential clients. Many of his clients are businesses that have a product or service that is very good and is priced considerably higher than many of their competitors.

If they don't know how to show the true value of their product or service many of these businesses will find they lose sales to low priced competitors.

And that's where Jeffrey comes in. He will train the sales people in an organisation like this to use Dollarisation to convert a much higher number of potential prospects into happy paying clients.

A good example is a firm that sold testing equipment to software chip manufacturers.

The equipment they sold cost around 2.8 million dollars and they had a competitor with a similar product that cost only 1 million dollars.

Before hiring Jeffrey they couldn't even get appointments to see potential clients.

After using Jeffrey to train their people on Dollarisation they not only got an appointment with a key prospect but walked out of the meeting with a confirmed order for three sales at 2.8 million dollars each!

Now you don't hire someone like Jeffery full time. You hire him for the time it takes to get your people good at converting more prospects into paying clients. This might be a day or two or longer of Jeffrey's time.

You can see more details about Jeffrey at www.foxandcompany.com

2: You could also hire a rainmaker who can generate large numbers of highly qualified prospects for your sales team to talk to.

You might engage a copy writer to write a wonderful sales letter that you send to key prospects to encourage them to request an appointment.

One of my favourite technical copy writers is Ivan Levison at www.levison.com

One of his clients offered graphic design services to the software industry. Ivan wrote a very simple sales letter for this client. This letter was sent out and it produced dozens and dozens of appointments within a few days for this graphic design firm.

You can see the exact letter that Ivan wrote at this link.

Make sure you also subscribe to Ivan's excellent monthly e-zine called The Levison Letter. It is very good and jam packed with useful tips to improve the effectiveness of a lot of your marketing material.

Now you can certainly do many things yourself to get better results in the areas of lead generation and sales conversion.

However a little outside help at the right time can also be a very useful step as well.

'Good advice is beyond all price'. Proverb

Action Exercise:
Who could you hire on a part time or project basis to help you get better results in the key areas of lead generation or sales conversion for your business?

Graham McGregor is a marketing consultant and the creator of the 396 page 'Unfair Business Advantage Report.' www.theunfairbusinessadvantage.com (This is free and has now been read by business owners from 27 countries.) You can email him at the link above.