I kept experimenting with ideas, some didn’t work-but a lot did, and in two years my business up to around $250,000. That was in 2002, and as you may recall, that was the year that the internet really started to take off. All of a sudden websites became a lot easier (and cheaper) to put up.
Now there were these programs called autoresponders that enabled someone like me (who had absolutely no technical skills whatsoever), to automate almost the entire marketing system. My income increased by 50%. And then it did it again.
I’ll admit this was pretty great. Instead of having to go out and try to strike up conversations with strangers at networking events, I literally had a waiting list of clients. Which meant that it could raise my fees and even more importantly… choose whom I wanted to work with. (If you’ve ever had a jerk as a client you know how valuable it is to be highly selective about who you decide to work with.) Anyway, that was my life for the next 3 years, and it was great. But things change, and in my case the change came in the form of the international management consulting firm A.T. Kearney. You may or may not have heard of them, but they’re one of the world’s elite consulting firms, up there with McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group and Accenture.
A.T. Kearney was going through a tough patch. Surprisingly, for a $1 billion consulting firm, they didn’t really do any marketing. Virtually all of their business came from referrals and repeat assignments. Which worked fine until a number of their long-term clients didn’t renew their contracts, and the referrals started to dry up. Then they started to get worried about how they were going to fill their pipeline back up with new business. One of their senior partners, Bill Jeffrey read a book I wrote called, Power Prospecting, liked my non-hard selling approach and asked me to fly up to New York to meet with him and some of the other senior partners. That conversation led to a 5-year engagement in which I trained 275 of the 350 partners at A.T. Kearney on my Gentle Rain methodology. Did it work? Obviously I wouldn’t be telling you this story if the answer was “No” and to be totally honest the success they achieved was mostly due to their willingness to implement what I taught and embrace new ideas and approaches. As you may be aware, A.T. Kearney stage one of the most dramatic turnarounds in the consulting industry. They recovered so well that the partners bought the firm back from their corporate owner EDS, and today are once again one of the most profitable firms (on an income per partner basis) in the world.