Jan 2013 Inside Tech Services
Written by:  Jodi Cicci
 
For a consulting firm to be successful, it’s important to have a solid reputation—to be referenceable by all or a majority of your customers. Running a consulting firm can be a challenge, because your assets (the consultants) are expensive, and many consulting firms do not have an overabundance of recurring-revenue type of engagements. So how can a small consulting firm launch and survive in this economy? By consistently delivering on quality and heightening your referenceability, you will create a virtual sales team out of your customers.

Consulting firms are hired to provide expertise and guidance in solving challenges within an organization or business unit. Typically, consulting engagements start with an information-gathering session, wherein the consultants come to understand the particulars of the organizational problem(s) that need solving. If you don’t do your homework first, gaining a complete picture of the customer’s situation and environment, you will shortchange yourself in your ability to provide appropriate recommendations.

Throughout the discovery session, demonstrate your knowledge by confirming their approaches with experiences you’ve had with your own company’s previous customers. This gives the customer confidence in your knowledge level and your understanding of their particular uniqueness. Avoid the trap of jumping to conclusions without listening and gathering all of the facts first.

Once you’ve gathered your background information and learned about the challenges within the organization, the next step of the project is to evaluate the solution options. Options are an important initial step, but you must remember that the customer hired you to solve the problem—and not just to provide options. Determine which of the options you would recommend as a fit within the customer environment, and explain why. Clearly clarifying why you are making a specific recommendation is key, as it continues to demonstrate your knowledge and experience while helping the customer to understand exactly how the recommendation can help.

Review the options, and make your recommendation after all options are discussed. Customers ultimately have the final say. Even though you are making one specific recommendation, you still should expound upon the other possible options so that the customer can easily make the final decision (which ideally would match your recommendation).

Though you have arrived at the recommendation stage, this is not the final piece of the engagement. The customer has received the guidance they sought, but now they need an implementation plan—and this is your next task. Consulting is not equivalent to augmenting their staff; your final piece of the job is to work with the customer on an implementation plan that will allow them to be self-efficiently successful.

Give the customer a workable plan by which they can implement your recommendations, considering their resources, their time availability, and the type of organizational changes you’ve suggested. Your role may shift to acting as a temporary employee by assisting in the implementation of your plan, but the end goal should be self-sufficiency. Customers who are self-sufficient can then work with you again in the future—to build on your earlier recommendations because they know you are a trusted partner and advisor.

Finally, make sure you walk the talk and follow best practices yourself. Perform a project wrap-up or lessons-learned discussion to gain valuable feedback from the customer’s experience. Listening to your customers means that you are continually improving your own service offerings and aligning your organization to the needs of your customers. Customer testimonials and success stories are golden nuggets that can be gleaned at the end of your engagement; it’s important to keep this in mind throughout the process.

Avoid the Negatives

There are negatives to avoid in customer referenceability. Make sure that your offerings can be adjusted to meet the specific needs of each customer. A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work in the consulting world. After working in an SEI Level 4 organization (CMM) for many years under the U.S. federal government, I saw the company attempt to apply the same type of controls and processes to a startup commercial branch. The results? Terrible. Adjusting your approach requires your team to be flexible. They must understand how to reduce scope without reducing quality.

Another “negative” is understanding when to say “no” to an opportunity. There might come a time when a customer will want to change the project scope so drastically that the engagement becomes something that your organization cannot deliver effectively. This can become a difficult decision, as consulting firms require revenue to pay for their assets (the consultants). But at the end of the day, a positive customer experience regardless of the revenue is better than a short-term gain of money with a customer that can damage your reputation. A focus on just “winning the deal” can often result in little value-add. Positive, fulfilled customers will become your virtual sales team. They will to mention your name and refer you to their partners, vendors, and customers.

So you have a system in place for your sales tracking (CRM), project management and time tracking (PSA), and accounting (ERP) along with one or more marketing communication systems, contract tracking systems, document storage and asset management solutions. Maybe you have a single software solution or maybe you have invested in individual systems with integrations, either human re-keying or software data exchanges. In any case, you arrived at your solution through due diligence, system requirement reviews, business model alignment, and the all important system deployment and adoption cycle. The last thing you may be thinking about is looking to upgrade or replace what is already established.

Knowing when to look at software solutions instead of forcing your current systems to accommodate your changing business is an important decision.  Here are a few stories about our experiences.

When TOP Step Consulting was just getting started it was decided to use NetSuite OpenAir solution to cover sales tracking, contract management, contact management, and account management.  The volume of data did not warrant additional tools.  A few data entries and updates daily or weekly kept our solution up to date with key reports available for data analysis. Contact exports to our email system worked fine to keep our customers informed and involved with everyday user community information. Re-key of finance data into our QuickBooks solution was simple. Customization was done to track types of opportunities, sources of opportunities, and other account management activities such as how the contact was met and what interest they may have in our offerings. Life was simple.

Then we began to grow and mature as a business adding new offerings to meet our customers needs including outsourced Administration and Release Management.   This required us to set up a Help Desk to centralize our knowledge and ensure we delivered a high quality user experience. With demand growing, our simple email communication and tracking wasn’t sufficient to gather metrics for ticket logs, keeping track of vendor enhancements submitted, and other general information to ensure our team kept up with our customer’s business changes as well. We made the decision to get a support ticketing system and put that in place which has helped us grow that part of our business much quicker than we anticipated.

Then we moved into higher growth pattern. With more volume comes all types of challenges.  Our simple data entry model with field customization to keep track of account items, contact information, contract status, and so on became very cumbersome. Items started to quickly fall out of date that were not a high priority so reports became unreliable. Our solution: split our account management and pipeline management into a CRM. By expanding into another system, we had to go through requirements, deployment, and adoption but it saved time on data entry forced into a system not really meant for that type of data or volume. It also allowed us to grow our sales team and perform account reviews more easily as a company.

Decisions made right?  New technology and technology improvements will continue and often entice you to question your solutions.  We attended a conference recently which revealed more robust and feature rich ticketing solutions that immediately got our team excited. This raised he question – should we move off our current tool or not? At the moment the answer is no but the reasons have nothing to do with the technology. The key is knowing if we really need to move to another tool. What is deficient in the current system? Any features missing that would expedite our abilities to solve the problem quicker or communicate quicker to our customers? What about historical data – this would need to be migrated. How difficult would this be? And the bottom line question of ‘does this save the company any money in the long run?’

I find customers benefit from having some basic questions to use in deciding ‘is it time to upgrade’? Here is list of 7 questions I ask before making these decisions:

1. Are we losing the ability to keep key information up to date for our reports?
2. Are we adequately able to communicate with our customers and know their account status?
3. Are we able to gather metrics from our services delivery solution to improve on our contract estimating, pricing, and delivery of the solution?
4. Have we reached any system limitations with the amount of data or active records we can track?
5. Can we data mine our historical information to extract information for analysis such as customer patterns, solution offerings, opportunity sources, and so forth?
6. Are we spending more time on administrating the system than spent expanding the company?
7. Have we forced any of our current systems to track data that is not a natural fit to the solution?

If you’ve answered yes to any of the questions above, it may be worth looking into solutions for one or more of your process areas. There are a lot of solutions in the market place and just as many integration solutions to make your company productive and empowered to face the growth you are working to achieve!