In Chapter 4 I introduced the consultants’ engagement process. This process focuses on an individual engagement – that is, a single consulting project with a start and an end. There is another way to look at consulting, and that is from the viewpoint of the relationships between consultants and their clients. Engagements come and go, whereas a relationship can continue for the whole of a consultant’s career. Relationships are essential to client-centric consulting, as without a relationship you will not understand the client’s issues and needs.
Many people entering the consulting profession are surprised about quite how much consultants talk about and apparently value relationships. Yet consultants rarely discuss why relationships are valuable to them, which relationships should be developed and how relationships should be developed. It is taken for granted that this is understood. This chapter provides an introduction to this critical part of the consultants’ world.
Having a wide set of relationships is essential to your success as a consultant. Consulting is reliant on relationships. It is great to develop powerful insights, tools and methods, as these encapsulate your expertise, but without relationships you will never be accepted or engaged with as a consultant. Occasionally, a major consultancy will look to recruit a specialist or a guru in some field or another who can raise the consultancy’s capabilities in that specific field, but consultancies only need a small pool of gurus. What consultancies really value, and what they have a much bigger appetite for, are people with broad networks of productive and reliable business relationships.
Relationships are the fuel that nourishes a consulting business. Experienced consultants understand the value of relationships, and at times can seem obsessive about them. This fervent attention is not overkill, and in this section I describe the value of strong personal connections in order to encourage all consultants to invest time in developing a broad and productive network of relationships.
In the boom times, relationships assist consultants and consultancies to maximise their revenues. In the difficult periods, relationships are central to keeping consultants busy. Relationships help in identifying opportunities, selling engagements, maximising fees, reducing the cost of sales, as well as the efficient management of and reducing the risk from live engagements. If there is a magic potion that makes consulting work, it is relationships. I advise most new consultants to worry more about their relationships than their service lines. Service lines can be enhanced over time, relationships are essential to getting going as a consultant.
The starting point for all consulting engagements is the identification of possible consulting opportunities. As discussed in Chapter 2, the opportunity derives from an unfulfilled customer need. To know that a customer has an unfulfilled need usually requires you to be in dialogue with a customer, and you are much more likely to be in dialogue with a customer you have a relationship with. You avoid all the problems of cold selling when you have a positive relationship with a client, as you can ring them up anytime and simply ask how things are and if there is anything to discuss. There are different ways of phrasing these questions depending on the nature and depth of the relationship, but however you ask, one of the primary advantages of existing relationships is the ability to develop and maintain awareness of client opportunities. Better still, when you have really good relationships, some clients will actively come and find you to discuss potential engagements.
Consulting opportunities do not often arise as an immediate urgent request. It does happen, but in my experience only a small minority of engagements start this way. Few clients wake up in the morning with a sudden desperate need for a consultant. Opportunities develop over time. Relationships enable you to maintain an ongoing dialogue with clients, so you can be involved as opportunities unfold and consolidate from vague ideas into clear concepts.
You can find work without established relationships, but it is much harder. It is possible to predict and recognise some needs by general observation or knowledge of a market. For instance, a financial compliance consultant will know that banks have new compliance needs every time there are changes in the financial regulations. But even so, a general understanding of a need is not the same as knowing if an individual customer has a specific requirement for assistance, and it still leaves the challenge of making a cold call to a client.
Positive relationships significantly ease selling. When you have a strong relationship you are more likely to understand a client better. Even in what are meant to be open competitive situations, such as tenders, the consulting organisation with a better client relationship has a significant advantage over a company with no relationship. The established consultant has access to hints and peripheral pieces of information, which when combined enable a proposal to be better targeted at client needs. When an established consultancy loses a tender to a competitor without an existing relationship, it is usually because the established consultancy has either previously delivered a suboptimal engagement or, more often, has become complacent.
Relationships do not ease sales just because a client is more likely to buy from and support someone they like, but also because the client wants to minimise risk. Consultancy is inherently ambiguous and subject to elaboration as an engagement progresses. Until the end of the engagement, a client is not precisely sure of what they will get and how good it will be. This is a situation in which trust is critically important. It is far more comfortable for a client to agree to purchase imprecisely specified service from someone they know rather than from a stranger.
Relationships can assist in approaching a client with a cold sale, which the client has not directly sought, or may not initially even realise they want. Cold selling in consultancy is problematic, and the usual response to an attempt to cold sell consultancy is complete client rejection, or possibly no response at all! If you have a good relationship, a client will at least listen to alternative consulting services they may not have previously thought about. In other words, a long-term relationship can give you the ability to sell the services you have, rather than what a client initially may be considering. This could include creating demand for innovative service lines. However, care is needed as this risks veering away from client-centric consulting and should only be pursued if it is appropriate for the client.
A client is significantly more likely to be willing to take a risk with a consultant with whom they have a good relationship, based on previous positive consulting interactions. In these situations, the client is more likely to be willing to try out new service lines which have no track record, and is more likely to be open to radical advice. Such openness does not only affect the ability to sell to a client, but will affect the whole engagement process.
Greater familiarity between a client and a consultant can enable the more rapid delivery of value-adding advice, and can ease change and implementation of consulting recommendations. A consultant with an established relationship in a client organisation will find it easier to gain consensus and acceptance of their findings. The consultant is more likely to have open access to information and data – especially less tangible information like feelings and emotions, which may be withheld from someone with a lesser relationship. The consultant will find it easier to engage with the client and gain access to resources, and the client will feel more relaxed in arranging meetings with more senior managers and executives. Generally, the consultant is more likely to be listened to and to be trusted.
Strong relationships are also beneficial for the consultant’s risk reduction. The consultant is more likely to have better information with which to avoid problems. Also a client is less likely to become annoyed if an engagement does not meet their expectations and more likely to resolve issues by open dialogue with the consultant.
Having a set of deep relationships is a valuable asset for a consultant. Without any relationships a consultant will struggle to win or deliver any consulting engagements. However, I want to end this section by mentioning a few relationship traps to avoid. The first risk is that if relationships are very strong and long lasting, there is a hazard that consultants can take a client for granted, become complacent and even lazy. We all make assumptions about people with whom we have strong relationships and this can lead us to lose our client-centric viewpoint and simply assume the client will continue to deliver opportunities to us. New consultancies often are brought into a client, when the client becomes fed up with a deteriorating level of service from an existing consultant. A common situation is when a consultant who has regularly worked with a client, rather than seeking to add value, starts to milk the client for as much as possible.
Additionally, it can be increasingly hard to take a truly independent and impartial line of advice with a client with whom you have a very strong relationship. Becoming too close to a client can start to bias advice in favour of the individual client manager, rather than for the benefit of the whole client organisation.
A consultant who develops a very strong relationship with a client can find that they are working with the client for an extended period of time. This tendency needs to be avoided. Working only with one client tends to blunt your consulting edge, but also it is a commercial risk for your consulting business. All clients eventually terminate consultants, and if you have only worked with one client for years and years your ability to find other work and the freshness and usefulness of your network of relationships outside this client is limited. As a consultant you do not need to, or probably want to, work with every possible client, but you need more than one. A handful of clients or more, as opposed to a single client, will keep your skills more current and reduce your commercial risk.
The general principle that good relationships, if appropriately used, are of enormous value to a consultant is easy to accept. Look at any of the major consultancy companies and the best paid and most senior staff are often the ones with the most productive relationships. However, the general idea is harder to put in practice than it may initially appear. It is one thing to want a great network, it is quite another to have a set of truly productive relationships. It is not enough to know people, you must convert a personal connection into useful information and opportunities.
A consultant should seek a wide network of relationships. The ideal relationship is strong enough for a client to trust you and share information and problems openly with you, but even relatively shallow associations can be helpful. I have been involved in many pieces of work that have started with a fairly tenuous link with the client: it was sufficient for the client to know about me and to start a conversation with me about whether I could help them. Irrespective of how deep the relationship is, it must be made to work. A productive relationship is not a passive connection between people – it is an active communications channel.
Relationships form networks, and generally the larger the network the better – that is assuming the relationships are positive! The advantage of a large network is that you do not only have access to your own relationships, but many people will allow you to access their relationships as well. There are online tools, social networking sites and so on, which allow you to see how big your network is and to expand it actively. However, whilst such online tools can be useful in creating links, having a link with someone you have never communicated with may be a potential relationship, but it is not yet a relationship.
A network of relationships will develop automatically as you go through your working life. The successful consultant does not just let relationships occur, but actively seeks and manages relationships. The consultant should identify people who could be valuable to have relationships with and targets them. Sometimes this requires the deliberate engineering of situations in which you can introduce yourself and talk to potential clients, which can seem initially awkward, but most professional people accept that everyone needs to build a network. The aim of every conversation with someone in your network should be to ensure the door is open to future conversations.
Having started a relationship the consultant manages and maintains it. Managing a network can be as simple as maintaining a list of people you have relationships with and periodically contacting them. There are some old friends who you may not speak to for 20 years, but when you meet them you will carry on as if there was no break. But your network of professional relationships is not like this. It needs active engagement with people for connections to be kept fresh. Stale relationships with individuals you have had no interaction with for many years are much less powerful. It is easy to forget to keep in touch with some people you should have maintained a relationship with and regret it.
Potential clients are an important aspect of any network of relationships, but you should not just focus on clients and potential clients. Firstly, there are other consultants. Of course, at one level other consultants are competitors, but for every time I have lost a piece of work to another consultant in my personal network I have probably won several. Consultants need other consultants and can help each other out all the time. As well as sharing opportunities, consultants are a great source of information and advice. Secondly, there are people who may never be clients, but have an influence on clients. There are managers and staff who do not control consulting budgets, but are respected by and influential with clients. The classic person who is underestimated, but hugely valuable, is a senior manager’s PA or secretary. The PA never buys consultancy, but whether or not you get a meeting with a manager, and whether it is soon or in the distant future, is often at the discretion of a PA. Treat them with the respect they deserve. Thirdly, there may be people who can be sources of useful information. For example, if you consult in a specific sector it is helpful to know people you can discuss trends and issues with in the sector. They may never directly gain you any work, but your up-to-date pertinent knowledge will be an asset.
Although you have to target your efforts on to the most valuable parts of your network, as no one can meaningfully keep in touch with everyone, essentially all contacts are good contacts. However, do not confuse a large contacts list of people with whom you have a tenuous link with a set of powerful relationships. Having someone’s business card can be useful, but it is not the same as being able to call someone whenever you want to discuss something or to propose engagements. My belief is that a relatively compact set of strong relationships is more valuable to a consultant than hundreds of vague contacts.
Consulting companies often value the large network of relationships they have. However, relationships are not owned or controlled by the company directly, but by individuals in the company. No amount of contact databases, business management or customer relationship management systems is going to change the fact that relationships are owned by individual consultants. If those consultants leave, at least part of the relationship leaves as well.
Brand specialists will talk about a consumer’s relationship with a brand, and it is possible to think in terms of a client’s relationship with a consulting brand. However, I do not think clients have deep relationships with professional brands such as consultancies – unless the client is a former employee of the consultancy. Clients have an experience of a consultancy, which if positive will influence them to buy again, but this is different from a relationship between individuals. As there are many consultancy companies with strong brands, relying on the brand to sell is risky. A competing consultant with a strong personal relationship is always going to win over a competitor relying on a relationship purely with a brand.
A strong relationship can give you access to all sorts of useful information and opportunities, but do not take relationships for granted. No one has exclusive ownership of a relationship. Some people have better relationships than others at a particular point in time, but that is only true for that moment. Relationships are not static and they change with experience, all the time.
Clients usually have multiple relationships with different people in a consultancy. This should be encouraged, as different types and styles of relationship suit different situations. A client may enjoy the interaction with the business development or sales manager, but the client usually knows when it comes to added value they need to be talking to the expert and not the salesperson. The salesperson is an important doorkeeper and a route to the right experts at the right time. If a consultancy allows an individual manager to ‘own’ a relationship completely, then if that manager leaves the firm, the relationship goes with them.
How do you develop productive relationships? Just being known about is better than being anonymous, but it is not the same as having a relationship. Every time you interact with someone, you modify your relationship. Productive relationships are not given away and nor are they a gift, they are something you develop and earn. Relationships are created by your behaviour and the perceptions of this behaviour of the person you are interacting with. A relationship builds from the way you communicate and your client’s experience of interacting with you. Let’s consider the way you should interact with a potential client you are meeting for the first time, and then how this should be managed in the longer term.
The starting point for a relationship is the first impression. First impression count and the very initial interaction will colour your relationship with clients. You can overcome a poor first impression, but it is hard work. It is much easier to start with a great first impression. This first impression will develop before you have even opened your mouth, and will be influenced by factors like how you enter the room and how you look. If your first interaction is not face-to-face, you will make an impression by how you sound on the phone or how your email or letter looks. If you are meeting a potential new client for the first time, it is worth considering what first impression you want to give and how you will give it.
Relationships are affected significantly by how you communicate. Communication is a two-way process, and as important as what you say is how you are perceived by the other party. You are much more likely to develop a positive relationship with someone you show attention to and listen to, and someone to whom you give the impression of warmth, friendliness and positivity. Do not be in a rush to impress new clients with what you know, but help them to warm to you by giving them attention and listening to what they say. You need both to care about what they say, but also to appear as if you care. Showing respect and that you value the other person’s words are essential for good relationship building.
You want to appear sincere and genuine to a potential client. You are trying to create a level of trust. One approach that can help to do this is what communication specialists call self-disclosure. Self-disclosure is telling the other party something about yourself of a personal nature. It does not have to be deep or secret, but by sharing aspects of our lives we grow relationships. There are many social and cultural norms to be adhered to, but sharing and showing a little vulnerability helps people to warm to each other. Watch a great salesperson and often they exhibit self-disclosure. An example may be saying something like, ‘Oh well, I am worried about my children’s exam results.’ Don’t go too far, as revealing too much inappropriate personal information is unsettling and off-putting.
You must adapt to the situation and judge what is appropriate to which occasion. If a client has asked you in for a general conversation for the first time, a little social chit chat is helpful to break down any barriers. If a client has an urgent pressing issue and is under significant pressure, then avoid the chit chat and move straight into listening to their business problems.
Once you have met a client, communication still plays a critical role in developing relationships. As a relationship deepens you should find that your conversations are becoming more varied and covering a wider range of topics, including personal topics. Generally if your conversations are not becoming more varied, you are probably not developing a good relationship. Similarly, the frequency of interaction should increase. This seems obvious when considering a simple example. You probably have a weaker relationship with someone you discuss printer toner cartridges with every six months, than with someone you discuss all your stationery requirements with every month but with whom you also chat about family, sport and the weather. As a relationship develops, so should the content and frequency of your conversations.
There are social rules we all adhere to in having any form of interaction. These are culturally specific and will vary depending on the depth and length of your association. Relationships are greatly affected by the way the parties understand and share the same conventions and follow the rules. If, as a consultant, you are going to work in different cultures, one valuable skill is observing and adopting the local rules of interaction.
Another factor that will influence your relationships with clients over time is the consistency of your communications. There must be a degree of stability in the way you communicate and the content of your communications. Communications can change over time, but the change needs to be gradual. There must also be consistency between what you say and what you do. People are expert at noticing differences between our pronouncements and our actions. As well as consistency, a client needs to feel you have some commitment to a relationship and that what you say will be backed up by experience. Inconsistency and a perceived lack of commitment to your words will result in clients feeling you are inauthentic and untrustworthy. Sincerity and trustworthiness are important for consultants.
So far, I have focused on communication aspects of a relationship, and these are crucial to developing and maintaining relationships. To some extent relationships are about communication, but they are also about experience. Your relationships will be influenced significantly by your client’s experience of working with you and their expectations of future engagements. If you consistently deliver great work and are enjoyable to work with, your relationship will tend to deepen. You must seek to inspire confidence and build trust in your work. This can be achieved by consistency, appropriate levels of openness and your responsiveness to your client needs.
One challenge with relationships is that it is difficult to maintain the same standards all the time. Everyone sometimes lets their quality level deteriorate a little, or lets their guard down and says something that should not have been said. You must minimise these situations. It is an unfortunate aspect of human beings that we are more intolerant of a few mistakes than ready to give credit for positive interactions. It is extremely easy to make one minor mistake, such as an inappropriate comment in a staff canteen that is overheard by a client or member of client staff. Such mistakes can cause tremendous collateral damage. Relationships are not constant – ideally they get better, but they can get worse!
Do not despair if something goes wrong and damages your relationship, because relationships are malleable. If you do make a mistake and it will be found out, then you must be the first person to admit it. It is a funny thing, but being open about mistakes quickly can actually improve relationships. No one is perfect, and everyone knows this. Admitting to mistakes can be a painful process, but if it is done well it can, in the longer run, improve the situation. Most people respond well to a full apology and open admission of a mistake, as long as it is not repeated.
Your aim should be to develop a relationship which increases your credibility and trust with the client over time. Every time you do something that enhances these, you are strengthening your relationship. Every time you do something that reduces these, you are weakening your relationship.
The fundamental reason why long-term relationships are possible is because as a consultant you are providing what the client perceives as a valuable service. But consulting is not a service that can be provided without the involvement of the client – it is a highly interactive service. Therefore to have a long-term relationship not only requires activity from your side, but also that the client behaves in an appropriate fashion and actively engages with you. You should seek out clients who are willing to develop a relationship with you, and avoid those who will not.
There are many characteristics of a good client. Obviously a good client must be willing and able to buy your service. They also have to need your services. There is little point investing effort in developing a deep relationship with someone who will never have any need for your services.
Similarly, there are practical reasons which make some clients better than others. This includes providing the necessary resources, giving access to the right data, and making any decisions quickly and on time. Good clients are responsive to invoices and pay them within agreed payment schedules. Good clients also make appropriate demands upon consultants. Such demands can be high, given the level of consulting fees and the often lofty promises made by consultants, but in the end they need to be realistic and achievable. Good clients limit changes or additions to the engagement. Consulting engagements are often unclear at the start, and it is inherent that as the engagement progresses and understanding increases then areas where misunderstanding existed are found, or new issues arise. The client does need to be reasonable about how much modification can be absorbed in an existing engagement’s scope. A good client organisation has a degree of consensus about your work, and you do not find yourself constantly given contradictory instructions by different members of client staff. These factors are looked at again in Chapter 12.
Beyond these practical characteristics, good clients are people you can have productive relationships with. It is useful to remember that a relationship is a two-way association. Although as a consultant you are the person selling the service, and therefore you are the person who needs the relationship more, clients need and want relationships with people who can assist them productively and add value to them. By developing a relationship with a client, and giving a client access to your network, you are not only increasing your opportunity of future revenue streams – you are also adding value to the client.
In your work as a consultant there will be times when you have to work with clients you do not develop a long-term bond with. But over your career the most useful clients will typically be the ones who you develop a strong relationship with. Such clients do not develop a relationship because you choose to develop one with them, but because they simultaneously choose to develop a relationship with you. Seek out a variety of relationships and do not expect every productive interaction to lead to you gaining a new friend. Some doors are open, some can be opened, and some stay closed. Choose the clients who open their door and allow you to develop a productive relationship with them.
Productive relationships are central to success as a consultant. They help in finding, winning and delivering work, and without such a network of relationships you will struggle as a consultant.