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Outsider insider client intimacy
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Question – what is it critical that a consultant understand during a project?
Answer – the client
Key action points
We consultancies are indeed often hired to improve a client’s business performance, especially in an outsource or contractor role.
However, we must also recognise that the politics of consultancy reflect internal corporate politics. Those people who thrive in a corporate environment do so because they are politicians, astute at understanding the different needs and drives of the people who can advance their careers. They ensure that they stay close to the people who can help them the most, and they ensure that they give them what they want.
The same rules apply to consultancies serving these organisations. If we want profitable repeat business, we have to become “Outsider Insiders”, the consultants who are best known and best valued as advancing our clients’ interests, which may have very little to do with the ostensible objectives of the project in hand. Hidden agendas could include:
- impressing external stakeholders, and helping persuade them to take a desired action by making it safer and easier to do so
- getting a complex issue aired among the management team so that a consensus can be formed
- having an objective third party say what the project sponsor wants them to say – the unpalatable or unpopular truth
- helping them build an empire or slow its decline – to gain more resources than they would otherwise be allocated – or to get promoted or avoid demotion / dismissal
An “Outsider Insider” is, in short, a safe pair of hands who can be relied upon to:
- understand what the client team as a whole really wants to get out of the project, according to an agenda it will never commit to writing
- to deliver against both the overt and the covert agenda
So, when we are pitching for and delivering projects we must keep talking about successful business outcomes, but we must also be listening out continuously for what the real agenda is all about and, of course, different people within the client matrix will have different agendas, some of which will be mutually incompatible.
So, whatever our tools appear to be doing, the way we use them is to prise out of the client team which findings / conclusions / recommendations are politically acceptable.
To whatever conclusions our project takes us, we must make sure that the big hitters within the client organisation are right there beside us at all times.
Our project outcomes must be politically acceptable to our client sponsors. The fundamental rule of consultancy is NEVER SURPRISE those who matter.
So the tools we recommend in this package are fundamentally stakeholder analysis tools, whatever their overt appearance. For a consultancy, this class of tools is fundamental to our survival and growth.
Becoming an “Outsider Insider”
In our version at least, the process to become an “Outsider Insider” has four steps – its own 4Ps – and we must cycle this process over as many iterations as we can manage.
- Prospecting
- Pitching
- Project delivery
- Partnering
- Prospecting
This first stage of the process is about understanding the client’s pain points, which may differ from stakeholder to stakeholder.
The sooner each key stakeholder realises that we recognise their agenda, the faster we will get through the door.
- What keeps them awake at night?
- What will allow them to sleep easily at least for a while?
In this process, we use three approaches – the “Problem Detection System”, the rather subtler “Business Standout” process, and the probing “Client Laddering”.
When you use them, remember that what you are mostly doing is conducting an early-stage client stakeholder analysis. You are looking for hot buttons to press when it comes to making the pitch, without resorting to saying “Let’s cut to the chase, what do you really want here?” which , of course, you often cannot do in any sort of recognisable way.
- Pitching
The are three main stages to any pitching process:
- The briefing
- Proposal development
- Pitch delivery
When a client signals that s/he is willing to discuss a project with you, the pitching process has effectively begun.
Throughout the rest of the process, the client will be asking him or herself “Is it safe to confide this project to these people? Will they deliver what I want, and will they impress the people I need to impress?”
So, it is not about being clever and outsmarting the client management team. It is about looking and feeling like we fit in.
Firstly, we must always make sure that we emphasise what a competent set of people our clients are. Nobody hires a consultant to make them look stupid. We must never succumb to our need to look cleverer than our clients (and how often do we hear consultants exult over the ‘errors’ their clients made prior to their arrival on the scene?). Clients will not appreciate this.
We must also emphasise that whatever we will recommend at the end of the project will be just a painless tweak that will, nonetheless, deliver excellent results. Most top management teams are desperately trying to control the forces of chaos inside and outside of their organisations, and the last thing they want to do is to pursue a high-risk strategy (except under desperate circumstances)
So, as part of the pitching process, we recommend a formula for persuading clients that we are the best people for the job.
Broadly speaking, it has the following components:
- you (the client team) have done an excellent job
- here are the areas which are going well and which must not be disrupted
- however, there is one area that needs fixing
- the problems this troublesome area is causing you are ……
- these problems can be addressed in 3 ways
- this is why each of these 3 ways could work
- this is why we are the best consultancy for the job
- Project delivery
As part of the pitching process, we will have defined what the potential solutions will be. Our responsibility throughout the project itself is to ensure that our findings, conclusions and recommendations are delivered within the agreed framework, with credible supporting evidence.
Successful consultancy projects are usually very narrowly focused on key potential solutions and somewhat light on supporting data, compared with, say, the modus operandi of a market research agency. The only data consultancies need are those that are necessary to the delivery of results within the agreed framework, and to allow the consultancy and the client team to select from the pre-defined range of options that are politically acceptable to the client organisation.
For this stage in the process, we follow a formula for working back from the agreed outcome options to what data are required to enable the team to select between these options.
- Partnering
Obviously, past project performance will be key to our being considered and selected for new projects. However, we must go further than that. We must persuade the client team that:
- we will never take any individual within the team for granted
- we will not get lazy, and we will deliver the next project certainly as effectively as the last, and preferably even more effectively
Most clients would prefer to hire their “Outsider Insider” consultancies again for future projects because we have proven to be a safe pair of hands who deliver no surprises and politically acceptable results, however they also assume that we consultancies become complacent over time, reduce our commitment to them in favour of impressing new clients, and increase our prices. We must therefore persuade the client team that we are as hungry for the next project as for the last, and that we will deliver it every bit as well. If we can do this, we are very much on the inside track for future work.
The tool we recommend using here is the “Key Client Review” process, whereby we demonstrate to the client team that we are fully committed to their individual objectives and that we will ensure that we will meet them even better next time. The best time to run such a process is immediately after the end of a project, whether it was successful or otherwise. Apart from anything else, we are demonstrating due deference to the client team, and gaining a new and in-depth opportunity to understand the hidden agenda within the client organisation.
Imagine achieving so much more for so much less.
We can help you in two ways - we have a mass of smart strategic brand marketing tools, processes and workshop techniques for you to use, and a mass of smart brand marketing agencies as members across the world with niche knowledge and experience to support you thereafter.
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Related answers
Client Laddering tool
Client Problem Detection System
Client Review Process
Client Stakeholder Analysis
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