Rain Making: The Professional’s Guide to Attracting New Clients by Ford Harding is written for anyone who wishes to bring in business, generate leads, and develop relationships that turn into profitable projects. In essence, this book—chock full of resources, research, and technique—is for anyone who wants to hone a marketing mentality, made accessible.

A proposal is nothing without prepared technical professionals, but preparedness takes a lot of legwork before even the RFP drops. Positioning in advance puts proposals at an advantage throughout the entire process.

Whether your firm has a formal Client Care Program or not, one way to enhance your client relationships and further your career is by thinking of yourself as a Client Care Manager.

When we speak, people can understand what we’re saying because we change the tone of our voice, raise an eyebrow, or take a pause. For a reader to understand what we’ve written, we need to change our tone. How do we do it? By using punctuation.

As we continue to adapt to the new paradigm, we must adjust to the limited ability to meet face to face, while remembering how important this activity is to creating a longstanding relationship. Here are six suggestions for pivoting and making the most of your business development efforts.

Written by entrepreneur and performance psychology expert Joshua Medcalf, Chop Wood, Carry Water is a short and easy read with great lessons and examples. “For me, it was much more effective to read and learn from the boy’s experiences than to just read about the lesson and what needs to be done to improve,” explains Daryl. “I like seeing the application and learning the ‘why’ behind the principle.”

From kick-off meeting to shortlist interview, winning proposals demand a specific, individual strategy.

We’ve all heard the adage “the best way to get somewhere is a straight line,” but author Rich Christiansen suggests otherwise. Christiansen is an entrepreneur who has founded or cofounded more than 30 businesses. Some of them were colossal failures, others were multi-million-dollar successes.

Julie Ertz, a member of the USWNT’s back-to-back World Cup-winning teams, shares her experiences from chasing her dream of being a professional soccer player, and the themes translate for all goal-pursuers – soccer and otherwise.

In the professional world, bad writing isn’t tolerated. It’s the difference between winning a project and being stuck scrambling for more work.