Entrepreneur.com

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.

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