1: The bailiffs and other court personnel have a nickname for one particular, successful criminal attorney.
They call her the “Furniture Mover.”
“Before each trial,” Jeffrey Fox writes in How to Become a Rainmaker, “she visits the courtroom and, depending on her strategy, moves her client’s chair closer to or farther from the jury. She places tables in the sunlight or the shade. She speaks aloud, checking the acoustics.
Anything she can control, she does.
“Rainmakers always test in private what they are going to sell in public,” Jeffrey observes.
This is what it means to taste the wine before a wine tasting.
“Unlike the hapless winemaker,” Jeffrey notes, “when the Furniture Mover opens her case, her jury savors the product.”
2: What do Rainmakers do? We check and re-check everything that can be checked in advance.
We pay attention to every detail. We “roll up our sleeves.” We “get our hands dirty,” Jeffrey reminds us. Because every detail matters.
Why are Broadway plays exhaustively rehearsed?
Why do experienced pilots always complete a comprehensive preflight checklist?
Because that’s what it takes to win.
Rainmakers always double-check the internet connection and power source before the presentation. We test the microphone before giving a speech. We confirm that our website works properly before showing it to a potential investor.
We always “pre-call plan” every sales call.
3: Rainmakers know “customers need to be convinced that our product or service will work as claimed,” Jeffrey writes.
“The greater the investment, the greater the need for the customer to be sure.
“The newer the technology, the greater the need to test.
“Anything new,” he writes, “product, supplier, salesperson, usually triggers the need for some kind of proof.”
Rainmakers are always present when the customer tests the product. Because they know “that 95 percent of all samples left to be tested are still in a drawer or were tested incorrectly,” Jeffrey writes.
How do Rainmakers handle these situations?
“When a customer asks for a product demonstration,” Jeffrey notes, the Rainmaker says: ‘We would be happy to give you a demonstration. . . If the demo is successful, is there anything else prohibiting you from going ahead?'”
Jeffrey calls this “a killer sales question.”
When we ask, “Is there anything else prohibiting you…” we will either uncover an unresolved objection or receive an agreement that leads to a closed sale.
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: What can I learn from the “Furniture Mover”? How diligent am I about “tasting the wine before the wine tasting”?
Action: Create a checklist to help prepare for presentations or important meetings.
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