consultant – David Bailey

5 February 2020

Don’t be scared of “sales”!

A very high proportion of consultants has either come up through the ranks or joined from industry. They are subject matter experts, industry experts, team leaders, programme managers and the like, and we and our clients love them for it! Often, however, they are blinkered on the topic of sales, feel uncomfortable when asked to sell our firms’ services and shy away from sales activity, preferring to disappear into valuable client delivery activity, knowledge management or internal training. Why?

The clue is in the first sentence of this post – very few people in consulting firms have come from professional sales backgrounds and whilst IT Services firms tend to have some people with sales training, even these feel more comfortable in a product or solution “features and benefits” world. Professional Services and much of IT Services sales is around “concepts” – there’s nothing to hold, show or point to without creating it from prior client deliverables or accelerator tools, for example.

Sales training is useful in order to make consultants familiar with the “methodology” of sales but, in itself, can create a mechanical process. Adding sales targets to this environment can serve to increase the feeling of discomfort, leading to high stress levels and likely failure. What to do?

More fundamental than the mechanical tools associated with sales is the mindset. I’ve encountered many, many consultants, including at Partner level, who believe that sales is not part of their job description, that trying to sell to a client would damage their trusted advisor relationship and/or that sales is about responding to inbound requests from client organisations. Hmmmm! I can almost smell the fear!

There are many ways to address this but I often find that appealing to the ethical standpoint that all quality consultants have is the best way forward. Would we try to sell something to a client that isn’t in their organisation’s best interests? Would we try to sell them something that we’re not truly capable of delivering? Of course not! Good, so that creates a list of things (that we don’t need to write down!) that we’re not going to raise with them. So let’s look at what we are going to raise.

Whether we’re focusing on a new business sales campaign or expanding an existing account, understanding the relevant issues that the client or potential client is, or may be, facing is a good start point. We can do that, it’s called research and is part of what consultants are trained to do! Then we match these against our firms’ capabilities and identify which issues we’re able to help to address, using combinations of our capabilities – again, standard consulting stuff known as analysis. Next, we develop our proposition, how we can use our bundle of capabilities to focus on the client problem and produce a solution – otherwise known as design.

OK, so we have our head sorted out and we’ve used our core consultant training to develop something that we can go and talk to a client or potential client about – and it’s not just “something”, it’s something that’s in the client’s interests and something that we are capable of delivering. It suddenly isn’t so “scary” after all, is it?!

Now to put the mechanical sales training to good use!

26 October 2017

Are you managing your bench?

Is your bench empty? Unlikely, but would you want it to be anyway? Do you know how populated it is?

When I spend time with services firms, conversation inevitably gets round to profitability and then I start asking about gross margin. Two times out of three, I find that gross margin isn’t understood well and, in particular, the costs of employed delivery resources are not split between chargeable and non-chargeable time. When investigated, the cost of non-chargeable time is often an eye-watering surprise for the firm’s leadership team! Worse, how this non-chargeable time is being spent isn’t understood properly.

We’re running people businesses. If we don’t understand how our people are spending their time then we’re in “cobbler’s children” territory!

When we prepare a budget, we set utilisation levels for each grade of consultant from Partner down to Analyst (Note: how “utilisation” is calculated varies from one firm’s definition to another and is a topic of great debate!). On an ongoing basis, we then need to manage our resources so that the budgeted utilisation level is achieved or even exceeded slightly from time to time….but do we do this?

Step one, therefore, is about assigning our “home team” onto chargeable client work to target utilisation levels. If we’re struggling to do this then we don’t have a high enough level of business overall and so are overstaffed, the work we’re selling isn’t matching with the intended skills mix that we’ve resourced up for, resourcing isn’t controlled tightly enough and delivery is biased too heavily in the direction of associates, or we don’t have sufficient confidence in individual consultants. Whatever the reason, it needs to be identified and addressed.

Step two is to make use of the non-chargeable time. When we do the budgeting exercise, we rarely do anything other than identify the headcount requirement to deliver the volume and types of work that we’re planning to sell and calculate a budgeted cost of employed consultants and external third parties (associates, partner firms etc) associated with this. In addition, we should look at the amount of non-chargeable time that we’ve built our budget around and the skills linked to this and build a plan to use this effectively for the good of both the firm and the consultants.

Topics such as training requirements mostly get picked up via personal development plans – the timing of delivery of training is planned in to fit with periods of expected lower chargeability where possible and I rarely see big issues in this area. I often see Business Development and Proposition Development-related activities, however, being left loose and then suddenly jumped on as useful things to be doing “immediately” whenever the leadership team realises that the bench is looking a bit big and people need to be given something to do. Why?

Most firms these days have resourcing, or wider Professional Services Automation systems, installed and they insert forward client project resourcing needs into them. This is great, and facilitates forward revenue and gross margin projections, especially if weighted “hot Prospects” are shown as well. Many of these systems also allow for different categories of “project” to be entered as well and we can use these to schedule a predicted workload of different non-chargeable activities, even split into types such as Market Research, Marketing, Account Management and Proposition Development. Resourcing discussions can then include debates around the importance of the individual non-chargeable activities as well as client assignments – I accept that the non-chargeable activities will regularly be the ones to “give” in order to satisfy client demand but at least we will know what we’re moving around and we’ll understand the impact on the “list of useful things to do”.

If we plan and manage the use of our resources properly for both chargeable and non-chargeable activity, we’ll achieve higher consultant utilisation, increased opportunities for additional sales, a more likely achievement of internal development plans and more satisfied employees who know that they’re always doing something useful.

3 August 20173 August 2017

Account management should come from the heart!

We all know the saying that it’s easier to sell to an existing client than a new one. How many firms, however, truly act in accordance with this?

I witnessed a classic situation a few years ago when the Managing Partner of a consultancy client of mine asked me to spend some time looking at the forward revenue profile of the firm and investigate anything that seemed strange. Amongst a number of other things, I noticed that a particular client, with fees for a current project amounting to well over £1m, had no forward opportunities marked against it so I decided to ask some questions.

The current assignment was going well and was due to complete in the next few weeks. Benefits for the client were coming through ahead of target and the client was happy. Delivery of the assignment, therefore, was not an issue. The issue, of course, was that the entire team devoted to the client was focused on purely the job at hand and was neither using the assignment itself nor spending time outside of the assignment to uncover further opportunities or even expand their network of Executive contacts within the client organisation. Thankfully, we had just enough time to work on this and a client organisation that was open to having wider discussions – a few months later, a new assignment commenced in a different division of the client. Phew!

I regularly come across situations like this, in all sizes of professional services firm. But why? Most firms deliver sales training of varying kinds to their consultants, especially from Managing Consultant to Director levels. Shouldn’t this be enough?

To understand this, we need to go back to why people enter the professional services industry in the first place. They like problem solving, they want variety in their job, they want to make a difference to a business, to government, to society. Nowhere in the list is selling work – sales is “a dirty word” and an uncomfortable place to be pushed into – delivery is so much more satisfying, and a safer place to be, for most consultants.

Surely this is illogical, especially within existing client organisations. Take the example given above – the client was happy and receiving benefit. In such situations, it is in the interests of the client if we can open up conversations about where else our consulting firm can help – if we help in other areas too, they’ll gain even more benefit and be even happier! What’s not to like?

Sales training courses focus almost exclusively on tools and techniques – that’s fine and will increase the chances of success. In our industry, however, we need to recognise that the vast majority of consultants will not be involved in new business sales beyond proposal writing and delivering their part of a beauty parade presentation – opening up “new new” opportunities will always fall to the few rather than the many.

All consultants do have a responsibility, however, to make existing clients happy and to deliver benefit for them – accordingly, they should be involved in the development and implementation of account plans for existing accounts and, crucially, they may need to go through a mindset shift to understand that doing this is in the client’s interests. If they truly believe this then their actions in this area will become more natural and “from the heart”, leading to more opportunities, increased fee income for the professional services firm, stronger client relationships and increased client value!

30 March 201730 March 2017

People are your greatest asset but….?

The largest cost item in any professional services firm’s P&L account is people. Boards/Executive Partners worry about this cost and delay recruitment, preferring to run with the variable (higher!) cost of Associates until they’re sure that the forward revenue stream for a particular type of person is truly there. Then, once consultants are recruited and have been taken through some form of induction, they often disappear into the inner workings of the firm, only to reappear on the Partners’ radars at six monthly or annual appraisal rounds unless they’ve been resourced onto an assignment that has active Partner involvement.

Why is this? I would argue that the Partners are understandably focused, on a day-to-day basis, on their clients since without them noone gets fed. Without the people, however, there is not only noone to feed but also noone to deliver the great results for our clients that we desire. We need to get the balance right.

Each firm has requirements of its people (e.g. deliver the client result, keep personal utilisation high, write white papers) but its people also have requirements of the firm (e.g. pay me the going rate, give me a career path, give me interesting and stimulating assignments, create an environment in which I can expand my business and personal network). It’s tempting (and old school!) to say that Operations should be on top of most of the first area and HR on top of the second but, if we’re honest with ourselves, we know that this is not correct.

Mechanical aspects, largely the ones that suit the firm’s requirements, can often be met these days by correct use of end-to-end professional services automation and HR management systems – modern, cloud-based solutions that are reasonably well priced and powerful in what they can deliver. Knowledge of utilisation levels, both backward and projected forward, is relatively simple, keeping detailed skill sets up to date and that fit with personal development plans is doable and resourcing people onto the right projects is a lot quicker and easier than the steam driven approaches of the past. For me, these systems are a no-brainer, allowing Partners to lift their focus out of the weeds.

Addressing the people’s requirements of the firm will come back to reward that firm in many ways. Whether you subscribe to models such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (the original five stage model or the expanded version) or not, such models do, as a minimum, tend to give a helpful checklist of topics that every firm should consider and decide on its approach. Yes, basic needs are met by paying people the going rate, establishing an office environment that people want to go to when not on client site, having equal opportunities policies etc., and these are topics to review occasionally. Higher level needs are harder to address and require a culture of continual support. When we get it right, our people feel that they belong, they exude confidence and they choose to go the extra mile for both the client and the firm – this is when the magic happens!