Hiring Rainmakers to Build Your Business

This article was written by Mark Henricks of Entrepreneur.com

Michael Lacey is in the business of IT consulting, not creating weather. But the 38-year-old Plymouth, Minn., entrepreneur knows that hiring employees who can make it rain is critical to the continued success of Digineer Inc., the 87-person company he founded in 1998. Three years ago, Lacey brought on a new salesperson he felt would be a rainmaker -- someone with a marked ability to attract and retain customers.

The company's rapid expansion since then -- sales growth of more than 80 percent a year to the current level of $14 million - is due largely to the direct and indirect effects of adding that rainmaker, Lacey says. "If I had hired another salesperson, a good salesperson but not a great one, we would have grown," he says, "but I don't think it would have been as explosively."

Hiring a rainmaker is the most important task of any entrepreneur, according to Jeffrey Fox, a Chester, Conn., sales training consultant and author of "Secrets of Great Rainmakers: The Keys to Success and Wealth." Sales is job one," Fox says. "It's the critical first job."

Hiring a rainmaker starts with finding one, and that starts with defining one. To Lacey, a rainmaker is skilled at understanding customer needs and then dealing with customers the way the rainmaker would like to be dealt with. "The best way I could describe a rainmaker is somebody who understands the Golden Rule," he says. To identify such a person, Lacey looks at a candidate's track record, and he interviews intensively.