Why You Need A Rainmaker To Pair With Your Visionary And Integrator Roles

For any of you familiar with EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, you know it features two roles that every company needs to be successful: the Visionary and the Integrator.

In the EOS system, the role of Visionary is to provide long-term strategic direction and vision for the company. The Visionary is responsible for articulating the goals and objectives of the company, and for ensuring that the team is aligned with the overall vision. Additionally, the Visionary is often involved in community engagement and outreach and may play a key role in fundraising or business development activities.

The Integrator, meanwhile, ensures the day-to-day operations of the company are running smoothly and that the team is making progress toward achieving the goals set out by the Visionary. The Integrator is responsible for coordinating the work of the team, managing project timelines and budgets, and ensuring that the company is meeting the needs of stakeholders. Additionally, the Integrator may be involved in hiring and onboarding new team members and facilitating communication and collaboration within the team.

But these two roles might not be enough to get your company to grow. We believe there is a role missing from this model: the Rainmaker.

What Is A Rainmaker?

The Rainmaker is the person accountable and responsible for generating revenue across the entire organization. It’s very likely that you have a head of sales, someone responsible for marketing and a third person responsible for customer service, customer happiness or customer satisfaction.

But if you don’t have a single person responsible for every aspect of incoming revenue for the company, you don’t have a Rainmaker.

It’s possible you already have this role. A Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Customer Officer or Chief Marketing Officer is also responsible for sales and customer service. But every source of revenue needs to flow up and be overseen by one person: the Rainmaker.

Rainmakers Should Be Laser-Focused

Or to ask this a slightly different way, “who in my company might be my Rainmaker?” Here are different elements you should be looking for inside your organization, or who you should be immediately hiring for if you need a Rainmaker on your team.

First, a Rainmaker is laser-focused on just one thing for your business—revenue. They are looking for it in every nook and cranny. They are making sure you have enough sales opportunities. They are also working to make sure those opportunities close, close quickly and close at a high rate. They are looking into your customer base for hidden sources of revenue and thinking about creating new sources of revenue. They are planning how to optimize every single revenue opportunity every day, week and month of the year.

Rainmakers Should Be Data-Driven

A Rainmaker is savvy enough to help you set attainable goals that are aligned with your business objectives, resources and investments.

Once those goals are set, they’re able to leverage data (marketing, sales and customer) to evaluate whether you’ll be able to hit those goals and more importantly, what has to happen to ensure you hit your goals.

This probably means setting up additional dashboards and scorecards to track key marketing, sales and customer metrics every single week.

Rainmakers Should Be Relying On A System

Another aspect of the Rainmaker role is that they lean into processes and systems. We’ve already identified that what’s missing from most companies’ revenue generation efforts is a system. This means your Rainmaker has to bring, create or leverage a system to help the company hit its revenue goals.

Just like the Visionary and the Integrator lean into EOS, the Rainmaker should lean into a system like RGS™.

The Revenue Generation System (RGS) enables Rainmakers to execute more efficiently and effectively on the company’s strategy. They are guiding the strategy and execution of the company’s revenue generation in the six key areas: process, strategy, tactics, campaigns, technology and resources.  

When fine-tuned, RGS enables Rainmakers and their revenue teams to not only achieve the revenue target but produce consistent and predictable results. That enables the C-suite to better drive the other areas of the business that depend on revenue and profit to move forward. 

Hitting the revenue target enables manufacturing to buy that new machine, HR to hire that new employee and the R&D team to develop new products and services. Without this predictability, the company treads water, delaying progress on the annual plan.

The Rainmaker Should Be Technologically-Savvy

Generating revenue has become uber complex today. There are so many moving parts required to get sales, marketing and customer service to create experiences that prospects and new customers love.

Some might argue it's impossible to do this without technology.

Your Rainmaker needs to be able to champion the use of marketing automation tools, CRM and sales enablement tools, and customer service tools. This integrated technology stack needs to be a foundational part of what makes up your Revenue Generation Machine. Your Rainmaker should be the architect of that tech stack if they want to drive repeatable, scalable and predictable revenue growth every single month.

What Does The Rainmaker Do?

Just so we’re clear, this role isn’t head of sales. It might sound sales-focused based on the name we’re using for this role, but your Rainmaker has a much wider set of responsibilities.

Rainmakers carry the weight of the pressure to grow the company. To a sales leader, growth is much more narrow. They focus on driving the sales team to hit the monthly quota. To a Rainmaker, growth is much more strategic. They are looking at revenue generation from high above, deciding what process, strategy, tactics, campaigns, technology and resources are needed to build a revenue generation machine that will carry the company into the future.

They have to make sure the company’s Big Story is so compelling everyone wants to talk to you about it. They have to make sure the sales process is producing such a remarkable experience that your prospects are talking about it. They have to make sure your content is thought leadership level and interesting enough that people are sharing it across their organizations. They have to make sure that all your customers are raving fans of your business and happy to write a review, do a reference call or participate in a video.

Your Rainmaker is responsible for tight alignment between marketing, sales and customer service. This way, the stories being shared and the process being executed are perfectly orchestrated to create an experience that shortens the sales cycle, increases the close rate, drives up average order size and supports month over month revenue growth.

It's a big, strategic and important role that until recently was unaccounted for in most organizations.

Whether you practice EOS, Scaling Up, or some other methodology for running your company, take a new strategic look at your organization and find a place for that missing role—the Rainmaker. Once installed, settled in and focused on revenue, you’ll find your company is now finally positioned to grow at a pace and to the level you always imagined.