As a professional services provider, you may have the support of a top-shelf marketing team in a global powerhouse firm. Perhaps they keep your firm’s name top of mind as the go-to choice for prospective clients. Yet still, you are personally responsible for building your own book of business. This is not something you can delegate. You can get help and work strategically to get maximum return for your time, but the time you spend on this is not something you can delegate.
In my work as a partner-level legal recruiter niched in corporate and finance practices for global law firms, I have read hundreds of business plans and listened to thousands of partners tell me about their practices. From this empirical research, I noticed that there are three commonalities or themes that all these successful rainmakers have in common.
1) They are deliberate and intentional about doing the work of getting noticed, building relationships, and offering to be a helpful resource along the way. They never assumed that they would sit back and let their powerful legal acumen drive traffic. Sure, it’s always great to receive inbound referrals or even repeat work from clients. But there are still more people who do not know you than who do know you, and you need to bridge that gap through sweat equity.
2) It takes time, but it does not take as much time as you think. Each hour you spend in client development activities are leverageable units of time, especially with the concept of “one to many”, such as writing articles, getting quoted or published, or speaking at conferences or sitting on panels. It may take you four hours to prepare for a presentation delivered to 150 professionals at a trade conference. The time spent delivering that presentation will be about 45 to 60 minutes. So that means in five hours you have begun to plant seeds of a relationship with most of the people in that room, and some of them may advance to trust, and even others could advance to them reaching out to ask for your help to solve their problems.
3) They are curious. When they approach a new relationship or find that one is developing, they are not looking to “close” but are “curious” as to how they can help that person. Perhaps it is a referral to another resource, or it might very well develop into an invitation to discuss business. Either way, this theme of “curiosity” is one I have noticed not just from those partners I have connected with, but is also a theme of nearly all of our 280+ guests on The Rainmaking Podcast.
Intention. Time. Curiosity.
Make these three values a significant part of your book-building focus. And if you do this, all of the help you receive from your colleagues in the marketing department will achieve even greater results.
Copyright © 2025 Scott Love
Scott Love is the founder of the Attorney Search Group, a legal recruiting firm niched in recruiting corporate and finance partners in major markets for global law firms. He is also the host and producer of The Rainmaking Podcast, the Editor in Chief of The Rainmaking Magazine, and speaks professionally at business and legal conferences on business development, sales, and recruiting.