Ever stop to think about rain and how it works? Probably not until you’re in a drought and wondering where the rain is.
Here’s the short version: rain is water. It evaporates from the ground. The tiniest little drops of water in the air float around and by chance bump into each other. Every time they do, they get a little bigger, eventually forming clouds. At a certain point, the water has coalesced so much that it’s too heavy to remain floating in the air and it falls to the ground as a raindrop.
In sales and marketing, we often talk about high performing salespeople as rainmakers, people who are exceptionally skilled at bringing in new business. They are the water droplet bumping into all the other droplets, bringing rain out of the sky. In the past, the bumping into other droplets part was exceptionally difficult, requiring a lot of cold calling, a lot of door to door and face to face time.
The social web changes all of that. It’s never been a better time to be a rainmaker. You have the chance to bump into people all the time now in the social web. The air is literally swollen with droplets ready to become rain, and plenty that are still too small to fall out of the sky with a bump. For those that are ready, they just need that bump from you to fall out of the cloud. That means, however, you can’t be sitting on the ground, waiting for rain to fall on you by chance. You have to be out there in the cloud with the droplets to find them, bump into them, and bring them to the farms and fields that need the rain – your company.
For those that are not ready, they will be eventually. They need to bump and grow more first, but if you forget about them, then when they’re ready, they’ll bump and fall to the ground with someone else.
Want to make your business grow? Want more rain on your fields? Use the social web and the relationships you build to stay in touch with all the droplets you encounter. Stay present of mind by offering legitimate value to them consistently, and when they’ve grown enough and are just ready to fall out of the sky, you’ll be ready to bring them to your fields.
In part 2, we’ll talk about what to do when there aren’t enough water droplets in the air that are ready to make rain. There’s a social answer for that as well.
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In old Japan, it was fairly common for a young person in the tradesman class to be apprenticed to a master. Whether it was blacksmithing, cooking, or any tradeskill, apprenticeship was just about the only way to get an education. What’s interesting about old Japanese apprenticeships was the duration and work asked of the apprentice. In many cases, an apprentice would spend many years doing very menial work, like sweeping the floor of the blacksmith shop.
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1. Thank you cards. This is something Ziglar was absolutely punishing on. You had to send thank you cards. No surprise, in the age of electronic automation of everything, a handwritten thank you card to a closed sale makes a huge impression because it’s so out of the ordinary.
Do you ever ask these questions?
The flip side of the coin is that we tend to become the company we keep. If we surround ourselves with bitter, angry, uninspiring people who do nothing but urinate into our mental pool, we go that route too – and unlike positive, inspiring people, it doesn’t take much. As Tony Robbins once quipped, you don’t need to drink a gallon of poison to have an effect – just a little is more than enough.
Where the martial arts (good ones, anyway) differ is the continued emphasis on the basics. We learn the basics but constantly revisit them to refine our understanding and improve them. As our basics get stronger, the “advanced” material (which is comprised of basics strategically arranged and put together) improve as well. Because advanced material relies on the basics, if we stop refining them, our advanced skills and techniques suffer as well.
