This article was originally published
in our LinkedIn Newsletter “RainMasters Unfiltered“
“I hate those events.”
When Nina said it, she sort of laughed right after, the way people often do when they are trying to make a real confession sound lighter than it is.
I smiled. “Which events?”
“The big networking ones. The receptions. The cocktail things. The walk-into-a-room-full-of-strangers-and-start-performing kind of events.”
She shook her head.
“I mean, I can do them. That’s the annoying part. I know how to do it. I can walk around, introduce myself, ask smart questions, and be perfectly pleasant. But by the time I get back to my hotel room, I feel like someone unplugged my internal battery and stomped on it.”
“So it’s not that you can’t do it,” I said. “It’s that it costs you.”
“Yes! That’s exactly what it is. The cost is… my energy.”
“So tell me,” I said, “when do you feel most natural with people professionally?”
She thought for a second.
“Small groups,” she said. “Or one-on-one. Definitely one-on-one.”
“What happens there that’s different?”
“I slow down,” she said. “I get more curious. I ask better questions. I listen better. I’m not trying to keep ten conversations alive at once.”
“And how do people respond to you in those settings?”
She smiled. “Usually really well.”
“In what way?”
“They open up. They tell me what’s actually going on. They stop giving me the polished version.”
She laughed. “I know where you’re going with this.”
“Do you?”
“I think so. You’re about to tell me that maybe I’m not bad at business development. I just hate one particular version of it.”
“That is exactly what I’m about to tell you.”
Nina had recently become a partner, and she was still comparing herself with the lawyers who could work a room “like it’s an Olympic event.” You probably know the ones she meant: they remember everybody’s name, make people laugh, and seem to leave with their calendars full of lunches.
“And you think, ‘That should be me.’”
“Yes,” she said. “Or at least some version of me. Because otherwise it feels like maybe I’m not built for this.”
Are You Overlooking Your Own BD Strengths?
If you’ve had that thought, I’d like you to pause there for a moment. What are you using to judge whether you’re good at business development?
For Nina, the ability to hold someone’s attention in a crowded room counted. The ability to help someone feel comfortable enough to talk about a real concern barely registered. She could see her colleagues’ strengths so clearly that she was overlooking her own.
Yet consider what she had just told me. People stopped giving her the polished version. They trusted her enough to share what was actually happening. That gave her an opportunity to understand their circumstances and explore whether she could help. Why would we treat that as a consolation prize?
The most outgoing person in the room doesn’t automatically have the advantage, either. Adam Grant studied 340 outbound-call-center sales representatives and found that those in the middle of the extraversion range generated more revenue than those at either extreme. Grant proposed that balancing talking and listening could help explain the pattern.
Now, these weren’t lawyers, and the study doesn’t establish a formula for legal BD. But it does give us a reason to question the assumption that being more outgoing always means being a more effective networker or business developer.
Build a BD Approach You Can Sustain Over Time
“Let me ask you something,” I said to Nina. “If you try to build your practice in a way that consistently drains you, how sustainable is that?”
She smiled. “Not very.”
Think about your own week. Once you’ve made room for clients, supervising associates and everything else that comes with being a partner, what kind of BD activity are you likely to keep doing? Especially when the week gets difficult?
If focused conversations bring out your curiosity and help you connect, give them a deliberate place in your plans. You might arrange a coffee with someone you want to know better, invite a few people to discuss an industry issue, or continue a promising conference conversation individually. Choose people whose businesses and concerns you genuinely want to understand, then follow through on what you learn.
You’ll still need to stretch. Perhaps you need to become more comfortable initiating those conversations or explaining how you could help. We can develop those skills while building on the strengths you already have.
But please don’t make exhaustion the foundation of your BD plan!
Uncover Your Natural Rainmaking Strengths
If you’re curious about your natural rainmaking strengths and how you could build on them more effectively, our Natural Rainmaking Style Assessment is one of the tools we use with our coaching clients. It can help you explore your strengths and consider how to bring them into a BD approach that suits you. If you are interested in learning more, click here.
You have room to grow without making someone else’s strengths the model for your entire BD approach. Start with what you already do well, develop the skills you need, and build an approach you can sustain over your career without exhausting or draining yourself. You got this!
