Matthew Dixon, co-founder of DCM Insights, is a researcher who’s spent the bulk of his career looking into the shared characteristics and behaviors of successful B2B salespeople. In 2011, he released a study called “The Challenger Sale.” when giving a keynote on his findings at an annual partner retreat, when an audience member stood up and challenged him.

“He said, ‘Dr. Dixon, you’ve been talking now for 45 minutes about sales effectiveness and salespeople and selling and sales process, and it’s all very fascinating and I’m sure our clients would be very interested in this,’” Dixon recounts to the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles in this episode of The Modern Law Library. “‘And after all, we do a lot of consulting work around go-to-market strategy. But what maybe you don’t recognize is that we are partners at our firm. We are not salespeople. In fact, there’s not a single salesperson in this audience. I might go so far as to say we don’t sell anything here.’”

Dixon was taken aback. “What I realized was this world of partnerships, of professional services, of doer-sellers is actually quite a bit different from the world of sales and what we had written and all this research we’d done over the years.”

In 2022, he tackled this population with the Rainmaker Genome Project, a study that became the basis for The Activator Advantage: What Today’s Rainmakers Do Differently, co-written by Dixon, Rory Channer, Karen Freeman and Ted McKenna.

The Rainmaker Genome Project surveyed 3,000 partner-level professionals in 41 firms from the fields of law, public relations, accounting and investment banking. About 39% of respondents were lawyers. Each received a score for their effectiveness in business development and were analyzed for how they provided client services. And it turns out that partner was correct: What makes a lawyer an effective rainmaker is not necessarily what makes a salesperson an effective seller.
After doing a vector analysis on the data, “what we found was that every one of those 3000 professionals could be placed into one of five business development profiles,” says Dixon. The five profiles were the expert, the confidant, the debater, the challenger and the activator.
Dixon stresses that the five categories are not about your personality. While personalities are immutable, behaviors can be changed.
“These are about the things that we can all learn to be better at,” says Dixon. “It’s about the way we spend our time, it’s about the way we engage our clients, it’s about how we use resources, about how we collaborate with our colleagues, and those are things we can all get better at with the right training, coaching and support from our firms.” In this episode, Dixon expands on each type, but the most effective performers in terms of business development were found to be the activators.