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The Modern Law Library

What today’s rainmakers do differently

By Lee Rawles

May 21, 2025, 3:22 pm CDT

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, 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 podcast. “‘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,” he says.

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 3,000 professionals could be placed into one of five business development profiles,” Dixon says. 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,” Dixon says. “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.

“The reason we chose the term ‘activator’ instead of ‘connector’—people have asked about this before—is that they’re not about collecting business cards and letting them collect dust or just hoarding LinkedIn connections,” Dixon tells Rawles. “What these folks do is they try to turn these relationships, these connections, into paying client relationships. And the way that they do it, the way they activate those relationships, is they proactively bring new ideas to those clients, new ways to mitigate risk, new ways in consulting, new ways to make money or save money.”

Dixon offers practical advice on how to behave like an activator, including the most effective ways to use LinkedIn. Lawyers and other client-servicing professions can’t just sit back and wait for business opportunities to find them, he warns.

“Whether we like to admit it or not, clients are less loyal today than they once were,” he says. “They’re less likely to automatically come back to their incumbent provider. No matter how great a relationship you have or how great the value you’ve delivered is, they’re forcing us to compete in ways that we didn’t have to in the past. And so activators want to have a backup plan. They know that that great client today might not be a client tomorrow—no matter what you’ve done on your end to deliver value and build a great relationship. So you need a backup plan.”

In This Podcast:

Matthew Dixon

Matthew Dixon is the co-founder of DCM Insights. He has had executive leadership positions in product, research and consulting for Tethr (an Austin, Texas-based AI and machine learning venture), Korn Ferry and CEB (now Gartner), where he ran the global sales and service research group. He is the author or co-author of The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation, The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty, The Challenger Customer: Selling to the Hidden Influencer Who Can Multiply Your Results and The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision. He co-wrote The Activator Advantage: What Today’s Rainmakers Do Differently with Rory Channer, Karen Freeman and Ted McKenna. Dixon has a PhD from the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as a bachelor of arts degree in international studies from Mount St. Mary’s University. He and his family currently reside in the Washington, D.C., area.