From rainmaker to rainmaking

“I’m not really a salesperson.” Almost every founder says it, and almost every founder is wrong. Not because they underestimate themselves, but because the choice is not theirs to make. Whoever starts a company becomes its face. In those first years, clients don’t buy an offering, they buy a person. The same goes for the partner in a professional firm: the client does business with him, not with the firm behind him.

We have a word for someone who brings in clients without anyone being able to explain how. We call him a rainmaker, after the rainmakers who promised water to dry land. The word predates business: it first appeared in 1775, for the medicine man who summoned rain through ritual. And that image is precisely the problem. It assumes magic, and magic cannot be taught, planned or handed over.

The two faces of one skill

Rainmaking is not a trait but a skill, and that skill has two faces. In the beginning it is about you: can you, with who you are and who you know, win clients? Later it is about something else entirely: can you make rain fall without dancing for it yourself? Can you uncouple yourself from every client conversation, without fully letting go of what attracted the clients in the first place?

This is where most companies get stuck, and the two common answers don’t help. Keep doing everything yourself: the company plateaus on one agenda, because there is only one rainmaker at the table and his week has as many hours as yours. Give everything away: then exactly what the clients came for disappears. The third way is a mix, and that mix is not a compromise but a paradox. Part 3 of this series is about that.

Why this is not a luxury problem

Research among 120 entrepreneurs in six countries shows how stubborn the pattern is: founders postpone selling, finish their product first and treat the commercial side as something to add later (Onyemah, Rivera Pesquera and Ali 2013). Those who do sell, sell alone, and keep selling alone. Recent research on scaling ventures shows that founder roles do evolve, but the commercial role sticks to the founder hardest (Van Lancker et al. 2023). The client wants the founder, the founder wants the client, and meanwhile nobody in the organisation learns to make rain.

In established professional services firms the pattern is identical, except the rainmaker there is called a partner. The relationship lives in one head, the team works behind the scenes on files, and when the partner leaves or retires, the rain leaves with him. Zoltners, Sinha and Lorimer (2011) asked the question every firm should ask itself: who actually owns the client relationship, your people or your company? As long as the answer is one name, your revenue has a single point of failure, and your company is neither scalable nor sellable.

The movement

From rainmaker to rainmaking is the movement from winning clients as a person to winning clients as an organisation. Understand that movement well: it is the company that moves, not the rainmaker who disappears. I know CEOs of organisations with thousands of people who still make rain themselves, and that is not a failure but their strength. What changes is their second assignment: making sure the organisation learns to make rain itself, what growers so elegantly call organic growth. Keep making rain, and build rainmaking. This series follows that movement in five links.

The five links of the movement

1. Steering growth means being proactive. Waiting for whoever calls is no longer a strategy.

2. Being proactive means choosing. Your time is limited, so which clients yes, and which ones no.

3. Choosing is only possible from your DNA. Without DNA every choice is arbitrary, and arbitrariness doesn’t last.

4. Keeping focus only works with your people on board. Define the DNA together with everyone who carries the growth story, not in the boardroom.

5. Focus only becomes growth in the conversation. As the rainmaker, teach your people to hold conversations that add value.

From rainmaker to rainmaking. That is the movement.

In practice: take your ten most important clients and write behind each name who they call when things get tense. If the same name appears ten times, you know where your ceiling hangs. The next parts are about lifting it.

References

• Merriam-Webster. s.v. “Rainmaker.” Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Accessed August 2026.
• Onyemah, Vincent, Martha Rivera Pesquera, and Abdul Ali. 2013. “What Entrepreneurs Get Wrong.” Harvard Business Review, May 2013.
• Van Lancker, Evy, Mirjam Knockaert, Veroniek Collewaert, and Nicola Breugst. 2023. “Preparing for Scaling: A Study on Founder Role Evolution.” Journal of Business Venturing 38 (4): 106315.
• Zoltners, Andris A., Prabhakant Sinha, and Sally E. Lorimer. 2011. “Who Owns Your Customer Relationships: Your Salespeople or Your Company?” Harvard Business Review, July 2011.

Series · From rainmaker to rainmaking · Add Business