The Rainmaker

Making it rain!

I was introduced to the concept of a "rainmaker" about 10 years ago. At this point in my career, I was the VP of Sales for an MSP and IT services company that was about 7 years old. We had grown from $0 to about $15M in revenue in that time. My partner and I were meeting with a board member about our current organic sales growth. We had done better than 100% revenue growth year over year for the first 5 years, but that trend had begun to slow. (Doubling revenue from $10M to $20M in one year is an exceptionally challenging feat.) We only achieved about 40% growth the year before and we were on target for about 30% growth in that year. We were discussing how we could reverse the trend.

I had learned a lot by that point in our company's trajectory. Mostly, I had learned what not to do. I had outsourced business development teams that returned zero results. I had hired kids straight out of college that I had to babysit. I hired transactional salespeople with zero experience in complex IT solutions. I had churned my sales team about every 18 months due to poor performance and my bad decisions. It was remarkable that we had survived some of these missteps. Having adjusted my approach, I was more confident in the sales strategy we were deploying at this stage of our development. We were hiring better. We were training better. We had real activity and performance metrics. We were grinding, but we were seeing a better percentage of reps hitting quota than we had ever seen.

So, back to the meeting with our board member. This board member is a very savvy and intelligent business person. I was very impressed, in awe, and intimidated. He had been crazy successful and we felt so lucky to have him supporting our endeavor. When he spoke, I listened. His advice to us for improving our revenue scale was to hire a "Rainmaker". That was the first time I heard that term. I asked "What exactly is a rainmaker?". He had a very ambiguous answer that could be boiled down to something like "a highly networked individual that knew everyone in the industry". This was the first time I had ever disagreed with this particular board member, but he was adamant that this industry leprechaun existed.

If you are a fan of Malcolm Gladwell, in his book The Tipping Point, you may remember his concept of the "Connector". He states that a small percentage of human beings can support social networks of 100s of people. Even if a highly talented connector could maintain 1000s of connections,  how many are going to be able to purchase our services? I know the answer…almost none. We made a concerted effort to attract and find industry connectors for several years. I met some wacky and interesting folks, most of which gave me strong scam artist vibes. Many promised to help us achieve our goals, but there was always a large payment required upfront. The few connections that were made, never materialized a real opportunity because the nexus of time and need was impossible to correlate with this approach.

In the last couple of years, I have had several occasions in which a CEO was looking for a "rainmaker". They had delusions of grandeur that this uber connector was going to deliver them to the promised land with a couple of phone calls. One of these CEOs actually hired their supposed savior. After collecting a large check for six months, this "rainmaker" disappeared into the either like early morning mist on a sunny day. There wasn't even a single lead.

I will admit that there are definitely some people that are extremely well connected that can influence revenue. (I have had the honor to work with some AMAZING channel leaders!) But they are not sales and marketing experts that understand how to effectively target potential customers, manage complex sales cycles, or provide insight on GTM strategies. Connectors are at best lead generators. And YES, that is valuable, but it's not a sound strategy to depend on the limitations of a single person's network.

I understand the attraction to this unicorn idea: Low Investment, Fast Return. Unfortunately, building a sales strategy requires investment in smart people who know how to build a plan and execute it. That plan will need to be iterated often, new ideas will need to be allowed to penetrate, and a process for measuring success (and failures) will need to be incorporated. Instead of relying on a mythical rainmaker, businesses should invest in structured sales processes, proper training, and data-driven strategies to scale revenue. That takes time and will always have some risk, but done right, returns on investment are more likely.

Embrace the grind.