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Mike Southon is one of the UK's leading business experts and entrepreneurs. He's best known today for his best selling “Beermat Entrepreneur” series of books and his regular column in the Financial Times. Mike built his reputation, however, in sales - and in particular: selling professional services. I caught up with Mike recently and asked Read More

The Rainmaker Network is a worldwide free to join network (hosted on Linkedin) focused on helping partners, marketers and business developers in Professional Service Firms to attract new clients and win new business. The network provides a forum for debate, discussion and help for all those involved in selling professional services - from law f Read More

Selling services to large companies can often feel like you're “wading through treacle”. Progress is slow at best, and it often feels like you've taken one step forwards only to take two steps back. Often the challenge is not the company itself, or even their slow decision-making processes - it's the professional's lack of knowledge of how deci Read More

Pitching - making a sales presentation to win a large piece of work - is critical to high end sales of major products and services. yet it's so often done badly. Joey Asher's book "How to Win a Pitch" provides a simple yet comprehensive framework to deliver all they key fundamentlas needed to excel at pitching. Read More

"Referrals from Colleagues" and "Referrals from Other Service Providers" were identified as the #1 and #2 method used by buyers of professional services to identify and learn more about providers in the 2009 RainToday.com Benchmarking Study "How Clients Buy". But in practice, few of us get enough high quality referrals. This article sh Read More

More and more people seem to be subscribing me to their email newsletters after we meet face to face. But just because I give them my business card doesn't mean it's the right thing to do to put me on their mailing list. Read More

Great tips on following up after networking events Read More

What salespeople can learn from a young magician and his approach to promoting his magic school. Read More

Networking is a vital skill for lawyers hoping to bring in new business. Two key learnings from recent research highlight that: a) You need to start early to reap the benefits later - it takes much longer to build a network than you expect b) Formal networking training can accelerate the skill building process - but is most often overlooked Read More

Back in 1999 “Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play” was published. It was a groundbreaking work - one of the very first books to focus on selling for consultants and other professionals; and one of the very first to take the stance that selling should be about seller and buyer working together to achieve mutual objectives - not one trying to manipulat Read More