In today's business culture, sales is one of the most competitive fields. There are more products and services available than ever before. To succeed in sales, you must be above average. To be a star, you must make it rain. The rainmaker is the sales person everyone else wants to be. The rainmaker brings the art of the deal to new levels. The author of How to Become CEO and Don't Send a Resume offers his trademark counterintuitive advice, this time for the competitive salesperson determined to exceed all expectations. Chapters include: Show Them the Money; Sell on Friday Afternoons; You're Not at Lunch to Eat Lunch; Customers Don't Care About You; Fish Where the Big Fish Are, and many more. How to Become a Rainmaker is a winning handbook filled with short, pithy advice that will raise some eyebrows and, no doubt, some income levels as readers follow the suggestions and bring on the rain.
INTRODUCTION
You Should Read This Book If Your Organization Needs
Revenues
American Indian tradition exalts the Rainmaker.
The Rainmaker used magical powers to bring the rain to nourish the crops
to feed the people. Without the rain, the people would weaken, die, or
have to move elsewhere.
Today, a Rainmaker is a person who brings revenue into an organization,
be it profit or not-for-profit. That revenue comes from customers and
donors. That revenue is the aqua viva -- the lifeblood -- of the
organization. Without it the organization will die.
Customers' money is the rain.
The term Rainmaker is more commonly used in such professional
service industries as legal, accounting, consulting, investment banking,
advertising, and architecture. In these industries, Rainmakers are the
two or so people in the firm who are responsible for generating most of
the new customers, the new business.
Big-hitting Rainmakers are among the highest paid employees in every
company in every industry. They operate under many titles: owner,
partner, chancellor, sales representative, CEO, agent, managing
director, and fund-raiser. If becoming a Rainmaker is your goal, then
this book will help you get there.
There is another kind of Rainmaker, and he or she is an employee -- or
associate or colleague or team member or crew member. Every employee
must be somehow involved in the identification, attraction, getting, and
keeping of customers. The advice in this book tilts to the salesperson,
but if you have contact with customers, or work with and support
colleagues who have contact with customers, this book will make you more
effective. You will be better able to sell inside, to sell your ideas to
your organization.
The most important success factor in any business or organization is
having a customer. This is more important than the business idea, the
products, the machinery, the buildings, the financing, or the people. It
is customer money that pays everyone's salary, that pays for 401(k)
plans, union dues, bonuses, vacations, health insurance, computers, and
office furniture. Customers are known by many names: members, students,
fans, soldiers, parishioners, and patients. Regardless of what they are
called, without customers no organization can continue to survive.
Therefore, the paramount job of every single employee in an organization
is to, directly or indirectly, get and keep customers. This is true
without exception!
The job of every employee is to help ring the cash register. The job of
every employee is to keep the customers coming, and to keep the
customers coming back.
This book is a recipe for how to sell, for how to make rain, be it
drizzle or deluge, sprinkle or storm. If your organization needs
revenues, and if you want to become invaluable to your organization,
then read this book.
Copyright © 2000 by Jeffrey J. Fox
