Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants

What Clients Like

In a 2007 survey, researchers for Global Services Media wanted to know the answers to these questions: What services are most highly used by clients? And what is their corresponding level of satisfaction?

The study focused on the 25 most popular management trends and tools, including Six Sigma, outsourcing, strategic planning, benchmarking, customer relationship management (CRM), growth strategy tools, and knowledge management, to name a few.

The services with the highest rate of use and client satisfaction turned out to be: strategic planning, CRM, and customer segmentation. According to the 1,221 survey respondents, services that haven't really caught on include corporate blogs and RFID.

Clients have tested the waters and used outside service providers to help with knowledge management and balanced scorecard initiatives, but client satisfaction remains low for those services.

The Best Firms to Work for in 2007

Researchers at Kennedy Information published their cut at the top management consulting firms to work for in 2007. For the second year, Bain & Company took the top spot, with The Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey rounding out the top three winners.

None of the top three firms' respondents reported traveling less or working fewer hours than colleagues at other firms. Instead, the top three firms scored well on compensation, career development, and firm culture.

Beyond the top three firms, the results aren't as clear cut. One firm, for example, saw their rankings drop from 2006 in essential areas such as firm culture, firm leadership, and job experience, but that firm moved up in the overall rankings for 2007. Go figure.

The message to recruiters from the study is clear: consultants gravitate to well-paying firms that offer challenging client work in a dynamic environment.

Closure

Clo-sure: a bringing to an end; conclusion

As a project winds down, consultants and clients make that final push to wrap up every detail and stay on schedule. It's common, though, particularly on longer projects, for that last burst of activity to fall short, and so the scheduled end date slips.

In spite of superb planning, some projects will take longer than expected. But you want to avoid a sloppy ending--at all costs. The best, first step to a crisp project ending is to talk to the client about closure from the outset. And then repeat at regular intervals.

You can take simple steps to create a mindset of closure, like scheduling the wrap-up meeting at the beginning of the project, keeping the project end date front and center with the client, setting the stage for how the client will move forward once you are gone, and pushing back on requests to revise the schedule.

Consultants often tolerate delays at the end of projects for the sake of client goodwill and future business development. The attitude is laudable, but this type of flexibility can sap your profitability and convey a message that you don't know how to close out an assignment.

Clients place high value on consultants' skill in facilitating tough decisions. When tough calls linger, don't be surprised to observe tension in the client relationship. Even minor undecided issues can cause delays, so make sure they don't creep up on you at the end.

It's hard work to keep a project on track. Recognize that many schedule delays are subtle expressions of resistance to change. Once you become complicit in that resistance, you're part of the problem, not the solution.

The Client's View

Over the years, I've asked my clients questions similar to this: "What's your take on what makes for an effective consulting relationship?"

As you'd expect, the answers are all over the map, and there's no science to my approach. But several key points come up over and over, regardless of industry, project type, or the client's position in the organization.

In this month's issue of The Guerrilla Consultant, I wrote about the answers that I hear most often from clients. Read this month's issue.

Let me know what you think.

Ideas

"Through our intelligent insights, we are proud to share perspectives on topical growth and value creation issues with a clear point of view, concisely and relatively jargon-free." -- Unnamed Consulting Firm

The world of consulting is bursting with "new" ideas--some of which are good and others that stink. In both cases, firms race to market touting their latest ideas to revive a slumping organization, or add that last piece of the strategic puzzle to "propel a company to greatness."

The biggest problem with good ideas is that everyone has them. Put five people from almost any company in a conference room with a white board and an assignment to fix something, and you'll get some good ideas. Ask most executives if they're aware of the latest ideas to bring more profit or growth to their businesses, and you're likely to see nods.

The challenge for consultants is to offer ideas that clients want to buy, not just the ones they can easily get from their own teams or the latest business bestseller. What clients really want to know is how they can use a good idea, when they can implement it, and what results they can expect.

You can tell a client to "leverage social networking technologies for consumer value creation," but unless you have a specific, directional plan of some kind--you're just blowing smoke, and your client knows it.

The best ideas are one part blue sky plus two parts healthy dose of reality. That's what clients want to hear from their consultants, and that's what they'll buy. A colleague once told me that every good idea eventually turns into a lot of hard work. Do some of that hard work before you present an idea to a client and watch your results soar.

Webcast--Strategic Interviewing: How to Land Top Talent

Few things make a bigger difference in the success of a firm than its people. And for decades, recruiters and hiring managers have relied on behavior-based interview strategies to find the right people. As a result, candidates have become quite savvy about what to expect in interviews, and it has become more challenging to evaluate their actual capabilities.

Given the high cost of poor hiring decisions and the competition for top talent, those responsible for hiring need more powerful evaluative tools to get a true picture of what each candidate has to offer.

In our upcoming webcast, Strategic Interviewing: How to Land Top Talent, we’ll cover essential strategies for understanding not just how candidates behave but, as importantly, how they think and how they would fit into your organization.

Using a combination of advanced behavioral questions and case study-based interviewing techniques, you’ll improve the odds of finding the right match for your firm, not someone who only shines in interviews.

Specifically, the program includes:

• How to use hypothesis-based interview techniques to evaluate candidates

• Review of a four-step candidate selection process, including advanced techniques for behavioral interviewing

• Why a case study interview is a powerful complement to a behavioral interview and how to conduct one

• How to create a candidate balance sheet for evaluating must-have characteristics

• Review of sample interview questions and case studies to include in any interview.

At the end of this program, you’ll have a market-tested framework for selecting candidates for any role in your firm.

Join us on November 19, 2007 at 1pm Eastern Time for this one hour, interactive webcast.

Registration and program details.

Managing a Dip

We’ve all experienced projects that are fun and exciting at the start, but then turn to drudgery. That’s when you might wonder if you are in a temporary slump, or you should give up. Seth Godin calls this “The Dip.” In the latest issue of Management Consulting News, we ask Godin how you know if a dip is worth working through.

Read our interview with Seth Godin.

Also in this issue, we’re featuring articles on selling a consulting business, recruiting in fast-growing firms, positioning your practice, how successful women build effective networks, and more.

And don’t miss the MCNews 12 Index of Professional Services, which tracks investor sentiment about the professional services industry.

Read this month’s issue of Management Consulting News.

P.S. The next session in our Path to Profit webcast series is Strategic Interviewing: How to Land Top Talent. We'll cover strategies for understanding how candidates behave in specific situations but, as importantly, how they really think and whether or not they would fit into your organization.

Compromise

It's not easy being a CEO these days--or any executive, for that matter. And in times of tumult, many CEOs turn to their consultants for counsel. But there's a move afoot that is changing how some senior executives get the help they need.

They're listening to their peers instead of to consultants. Why the shift?

According to some executives, consultants' advice is too abstract, and many consultants seem more concerned with extending their contracts than rocking the boat with controversial, forthright advice.

Earlier in my career, one of my colleagues believed his client's business was on a collision course with bankruptcy unless the client's executive team made a corporate course correction. The client disagreed, but offered a substantial, non-competitive contract to advise the company on implementing the strategy my colleague questioned.

Instead of shifting gears and taking the contract, my colleague declined and told the executive exactly why. As soon as consultants compromise their principles in exchange for a contract, it's the beginning of the end of the client relationship.

Few behaviors are more transparent than self-interest, and the act of trying to save a contract can lead to much bigger losses in the end. Knowing that a consultant has the courage to walk away from a lucrative project, which is rarely easy, is exactly what will keep clients coming back for more.

Clarity

"The client didn't implement the team's recommendations,"  complained one consultant.

It's always more interesting for you, and valuable for the client, if the client acts on your recommendations. After all, consultants are hired to get things done. But many of us have worked with clients who failed to implement the improvement programs they paid for.

Often, this failure to launch is attributed to poor timing, lack of budget, or shifting client priorities. But what might also be missing is a lack of clarity as to how the client should proceed. For any project, getting started is usually the hardest part.

Bringing clarity to those first halting steps can be the consultant's most important contribution to the client's success. As you create recommendations for clients, think about the challenge of transitioning from analysis to the implementation phase. For each recommendation, be clear with the client about its purpose, outcome, implication, risks, and remedies. Be explicit about the precise steps the client can take to convert recommendations into reality.

It's easy to blame a client for a lack of will when a consultant's recommendations are shuffled to the bottom of the list. But maybe the consultant is equally to blame. Nothing clears the hurdles of money, priorities, and politics better than complete and clear direction on how the client should proceed.

The real question is how many consultants are willing to light up the implementation path for their clients?