Getting Attention

Most of us would assume a Senior Partner at a major global consulting firm would never stoop to the level of cold outreach as part of his job. But consider the story of Ricardo Sunderland.

While he was a Managing Director at BearingPoint, Sunderland was responsible for leading an innovation initiative for a large financial services client. As part of this initiative, he needed to assemble a small team of collaborators, and he soon learned about a highly esteemed data scientist with an impressive record of digital disruption in the payments industry.

Unfortunately, this person was extremely difficult to reach. Several members of Sunderland's team had already made many fruitless attempts to engage him. This was obviously an expert in high demand who had built defensive walls around his calendar and inbox.

So Sunderland did some digging into the man's professional background. He learned this expert had spent more than a decade at the University of Maryland, where he had applied new data-assimilation techniques to National Weather Service information. Then he had moved on to Silicon Valley, where he had become a key figure in the growth of eBay, PayPal, and LinkedIn.

Aside from an evident interest in solving big, transformational problems, there was something else that stood out in the expert's professional history. His decisions revealed an abiding concern for economically disenfranchised members of society. He was clearly a mission-driven individual.

Sunderland compressed these observations into a short, simple email with a provocative subject line: Do you want to help Dona Juana fund her crops? In the body of the email he included nothing more than his contact information.

The expert replied within five minutes, saying: "Who is Dona Juana and who are you?" Sunderland explained Dona was a Mexican farmer who couldn't finance her crops because she lived ten miles away from the nearest bank. He further explained she was one of 70 million mobile subscribers in Mexico. Then he asked whether the expert would be interested in discussing how this social and economic challenge might be overcome with the help of one of the world's most recognizable banks. That led to a face-to-face meeting and ultimately an extensive period of collaboration.

The story highlights two things for me. First, it's a splendid example of effective cold outreach: stripping complexity down to the essentials, building intrigue, appealing to emotion, personalizing the problem, customizing the content, among other things.

But it's also a wonderful illustration of what Daniel Pink argued more than 10 years ago in To Sell Is Human. Pink made the prescient claim that persuading and influencing, which already accounted for some 40% of knowledge workers’ time, would only become more important.

This has certainly proven to be true, with proliferating information sources, intensifying competition, and increasing pressure to perform responsible for progressive encroachments on our bandwidth. Anyone in a client-facing role, no matter how senior, must have a solid grasp of the elements of influence, starting with how to get someone's attention.

In my business unit at LinkedIn — Sales Solutions — we have historically worked only with sales organizations. That is quickly changing as many of the world's most prestigious consulting firms are now asking for our help as they evolve their business development skills, even within their most senior ranks.

Pink wouldn't be the least bit surprised to learn this.