Author: Malcolm Sleath

Why consultants leave money on the table – and what to do about it

One of the things that comes up when we talk with directors and managers in consulting firms is that they are not getting as much work from existing clients as they think they could.
Sometimes they call it ‘leaving money on the table’.
It’s money that would feed the bottom line with minimal selling costs and help to fund the growth of the business.
They’ve got consultants embedded with clients, so the opportunities to develop business are there, so what is going wrong?
In this video Takuya and Malcolm discuss why it happens and what you can do about it.

Let us know if the approach described might be of interest to you.

Discover how we transform the way your consultants develop business from day one

Fix a call at a time to suit you

Why consultants aren’t developing new business

In a previous video, management psychologist Nick Shannon highlighted that personality type does not predict success in sales, especially in high-value, complex services like consultancy.

Success in business development requires consultants to know what to do, how to do it, and have the desire to engage in it. Despite the potential for most consultants to actively participate in sales, many do not.

This can be attributed to two main restraining forces in the form of misconceptions about business development and selling.

Firstly, consultants often resist selling because they do not want to be perceived as stereotypical salespeople, whom they view as pushy and intrusive. This negative perception stems from their experiences with poor sales practices.

Good selling, in contrast, feels like a normal, unnoticeable conversation, but bad selling stands out and leaves a lasting negative impression. This leads consultants to avoid sales to maintain their professional image.

Secondly, consultants misunderstand what effective selling entails, especially within existing client relationships. They often equate selling with pitching, which can feel disruptive and risk damaging the trust they have built with clients.

For instance, abruptly switching to a sales pitch can undermine the transparency and trust in a well-established relationship.

To address these issues, it is crucial to clarify for consultants what a business development conversation should look like in a professional setting. Demonstrating effective sales techniques and helping them experience positive business development interactions can reduce these restraining forces.

Future videos will focus on what consultants should do to prepare for these conversations and guiding them on what to do during them.

Discover how we transform the way your consultants develop business from day one

Fix a call at a time to suit you

Personality and Selling Consulting

If consultants played more a proactive role in selling, consultancies could grow faster and be more profitable.

I strongly believe that anyone who can work with a client in a consulting relationship can develop new business by holding the right kind of conversation.

But the consultant must know what to do, how to do it, and they must want to do it.

In future videos I will cover these issues, but right now the question is, am I right? Do consultants really have what it takes to be effective in selling consultancy?

Or must they have a special kind of personality to succeed?

That’s what this video is about.

To help us answer this question, we consulted Nick Shannon of Management Psychology.

Discover how we transform the way your consultants develop business from day one

Fix a call at a time to suit you

Slow down! Build trust faster.

This is a very simple way of demonstrating that you understand your client. And that you are genuinely interested in what they have to say.

Some consultants treat clients as if they are just a source of problems to solve.

Consultants are expected to be on the ball all the time. They probably went through a gruelling testing process to get the job in the first place. They had to show that they could absorb information quickly and respond rapidly.

So, it’s not surprising that this can spill over into the way they relate to clients.

A client meeting can seem like an exciting test. How quickly can you get on top of the problems and come up with a credible solution? And then present it in a compelling way.

But hold on a minute. How do clients really judge whether they can trust a consultant?

I mean trust to the point where they will spill the tea, give you the lowdown, and talk about the kind of stuff you’d wish you’d known before you started the project.

If you think back to the last time you went to someone for serious advice, I doubt that you wanted them to jump down your throat with an immediate answer. Even if it turned out that it was the right answer.

You probably wanted to feel that you were understood. That you were being treated as an individual, and that the person you were speaking to was on your side, had got your back.

Now the good news is that to create that feeling in a client, you don’t have to have a personality transplant and present yourself as a caring person.

Just a few simple behaviour changes will get you a long way. So, don’t just say, “I understand” or “I get it.” And then ask the next question. Demonstrate that you understand and get it.

You could say, “What I understand from what you are saying is …” Or you could say, “Have I got this right? Are you saying …?”

And don’t forget to listen for what is just below the surface. How about if you say, “From what you said, I get the impression that …”

It’s all about getting into the habit of using particular words and phrases like this so that they come naturally, and you automatically demonstrate you have taken on board what the client has been saying.

By showing the client that you have heard them, by going out of your way to offer a little summary of what you have understood so far, you will reassure the client that they have been heard.

When you slow down a little to make time for this, they will feel less need to keep repeating the same stuff again and again, and you may well get to where you want to go in a shorter time.

Why would they do that?

Thoughtful young consultant

As a coach I get to act as a sounding board when people with expertise want to test out a proposition for their clients. It can get complicated when there is more than one stakeholder.

When there is one proposition and several stakeholders, it’s easy to slip into focusing on the proposition instead of thinking about the interests of the individuals to be influenced.

One of the most powerful questions I can ask is, “Why would they do that?” What usually emerges is that there is not just one proposition, but several: one for each of the stakeholders.

At first this sounds complicated, but it invariably turns out that it is easier to develop several straightforward influencing strategies than one complicated one which overloads individual stakeholders with information they don’t care about.

What is your experience?

If you would like an informal chat about how you position your practice, why not book a free session with me.

Just go to 12boxes.com/discovery and choose the discovery call and a day and time to suit you.

Let’s speak soon.

What to do when the client picks the wrong solution

You may have experienced this. You’ve had a preliminary chat with the client and go to see them with a solution in mind. When you get there, you find they have made their mind up to adopt a solution that you think is completely unsuitable. You are thinking screwdriver; they are thinking hammer.

So what do you say when the client has picked the wrong solution?

This is about why you shouldn’t immediately challenge the client, what you should do instead, and how you should go about it.

Why shouldn’t you challenge your client? The first thing I am going to do is contradict myself and say sometimes you can. It’s what I call the lifesaving ‘no’. If the client respects your authority, you might be able to say, “That’s not a good idea”, and they will accept it.

But most of the time you shouldn’t. This is because you are up against the motivator of consistency. Once people have said they are going to do something, they tend to feel that they should do it and if they don’t, they feel they lose face. So, if you directly challenge them, you are immediately establishing a conflict between your opinion and their emotion.

A similar thing happens if you ask, “Why did you decide on that solution?” The ‘Why word, has many uses, but in this situation, it is an invitation to your client to justify their decision. And you might well end up by reinforcing exactly the opposite of what you want – again because of their need to be consistent.

What I am going to suggest is that you find a way to focus on interests, rather than positions. The hammer is a position – and so, incidentally, is your screwdriver.

An interest is about what the person is trying to achieve with the hammer or the screwdriver. And you express this as what we call a WOST – a way of, so that. So, expressing the hammer or the screwdriver as a WOST might be a ‘way of fixing two pieces of wood together, so that they don’t come apart’.

So, how do you do get to the point where you can express your client’s position as an interest? Well, this is yet another use for an open question about the past beginning with the word ‘how’.

You can start by saying something like, “I’m interested in your thoughts on this. Can I ask, how did you arrive at the decision to use a hammer? What was in your mind at the time?”

By getting your client to do a bit of time travel, and retrace their steps you should find there is a point where you can say, “Oh I see, so what you were looking for, it’s a way of fixing two bits of wood together so they won’t come apart. Is that right?”

If you can get your client to agree to that, you are still allowing them to be consistent with their original intention.

And most people want to be seen as reasonable people, so you can now say, “So you would be prepared to speak about other ways of doing that.”

And then off you go with a conversation that is based on a shared understanding of the interests of your client.

Now I can’t guarantee that this will work, but it is a serious alternative to challenging your client’s entrenched view and ending up by getting them more committed than they were to start with.

It’s much more difficult if your client has already been speaking to other people about their preferred solution. This is why it’s almost impossible to be successful in submitting a non-compliant response to a request for a proposal.

Incidentally, if you have ever been successful in doing that, I would like to hear about it, because I generally discourage people from trying it, and I’d like to be proved wrong.

To summarise

  • avoid challenging your client, otherwise they might dig themselves in firmer
  • explore how they came to their view. Focus on the story, not getting them to justify it
    and from the story, work out the interest, the way of so that
  • Once they have agreed it, exploit their desire to be reasonable in discussing options
    And hopefully they will come to see that your screwdriver is really the tool for the job.

Thanks for inspiration to: Robert Cialdini, Elizabeth Stokoe, Roger Fisher and William Ury (who wrote “Getting to Yes”) and my clients.

If you would like an informal chat about how you position your practice, why not book a free session with me.

Just go to 12boxes.com/discovery and choose the discovery call and a day and time to suit you.

Let’s speak soon.