Today we continue reviewing the book Rainmaking Conversations.

RAIN making conversations follows a process, beginning with helping us take stock of our readiness to succeed in a sales role, planning your actions and helping us build skills and knowledge, and providing a process for our rainmaking conversations.

In the conversation readiness stage of the RAIN making conversations roadmap, we begin by defining what success readiness is. This and goal setting affect each other.  Goal setting determines the sales knowledge we need. Consequently sales knowledge leads to success readiness. Between these three stages, we articulate our objectives in a way that we can start planning actions. Therefore Action Planning follows goal setting.  Action Planning leads to both Conversation Planning and Conversation Generation.  Conversation planning also affects conversation generation.

When the conversations are planned and generated we can transition from RAMP stage to RAIN stage where the first step is to build a rapport. Armed with the readiness and conversation planning, we proceed to building the rapport with our customer. Throughout our engagement from rapport to commitment, we maintain the influence and trust.  The authors developed the Rainmaking Conversations to provide a framework, a road map and a learning process to those who want to become rainmakers. To realize this, we should take the following ten principles to heart: 1. Play to win-win  : satisfy the best interests of both the prospects and clients as well as ourselves. The play-to-win part is never lost though.
2. Live by goals - Rainmakers are goal-setting and goal-following fanatics. Goals are their part of daily rituals.
3. Take action - Rainmakers realize the goal without actions don't get us very far. Rainmakers do it.
4. Think buying first, selling second - The selling processes is mapped to the customer's processes and psychology of buying.
5. Be a fluent expert  - Rainmakers are masters of the market knowledge, customer needs and their products and services, their value, their competition and everything else they need to know to succeed at selling.
6. Create new customers every day. Rainmakers never coast. They do not let a single day go by without speaking to customers, prospects, and referral sources, with the intent to source new business.
7. Lead masterful rainmaking conversations - Rainmakers lead the conversations through prospecting, discovery, closing and account management.
8. Set the agenda, be a change agent - Rainmakers recommend, advise and assist.  They are change agents who are not afraid to push when it benefits the customer.
9. Be brave - Rainmakers rise to the occasion in sales no matter how difficult the challenges may be. 10. Assess yourself, get feedback and improve continuously - Rainmakers are never afraid to learn the cold hard truth about themselves. They take what they discover - the good and the bad - to learn grow and change for the better. They never stop their cycle.