Food for thought: A consultative approach

Report by Robert Fonteijn

The pressure is on for skills-led businesses to create durable competitive advantage. They must become more than suppliers of products or boxed services. They need to learn what drives their clients' customers and become expert advisers to their clients. Elevation Learning has developed 'best of breed' methods of how to do this.

As its name implies, Consultancy Skills Training was set up primarily as a training provider for consultants. However, we have increasingly found that demand for our courses came not only from traditional consultants, but from mainstream product companies that needed to add a service element to their portfolios.

Typically, these companies are supplying enabling products, from computers to software to telephone exchanges, where the value derived by the customer depends to a great extent on how well the product is used. These types of product only really fly, or deliver their potential value, when they have been selected with a great deal of care and knowledge about the context in which they will be used. For this to happen, the supplier has to learn to understand the customer's business, the needs of the customer's customers. In effect, our clients were asking us to teach them to become consultants, and how to add a customer-intimate business to their existing business.

By taking a consultative approach to your customer's business you become a legitimate thinking partner. You are delivering in the first instance, not products but knowledge to the client. Your front-line approach to the client is not the capabilities or features that your products have, but your own skills in helping your clients deploy those products to extract the maxim-um competitive advantage from them. As a result you become more intimate with your client, deliver more value, and sell more products.

There are two sound reasons for adopting such an approach to the market. One is offensive: by positioning oneself higher up in the food chain, rather than just selling stuff, you provide a more valuable - and therefore higher margin - service. Or it can be defensive: established consultancy firms have powerful positions at or near the top of the food chain. By the time a software or equipment supplier is involved, it can be too late to have any decisive influence on the project, and the consultancies are taking more and more of this part of the foodchain for themselves anyway. Also, a consultative strategy enables you to use your knowledge assets (your people) to greater effect.

However, our clients also found that trying to simply acquire skills - for example by training people or hiring consultants - didn't work either. Training was immensely popular with individuals, who couldn't wait to get back to the workplace and try out their new consultancy skills. But the organisations they went back to were still essentially product-led rather than skills-led businesses, whose management and sales forces were not able or willing to make the shift to selling consultancy.

A number of years ago, Elevation Learning decided to wrap its own organisation around what our customers wanted, rather than around our training products. Now we help our customers do the same.

Often this requires changes in the organisation. In particular it demands a shift in power from the top to the bottom of the organisation: traditionally, top management knows the customers and made the strategic decisions, while people at the bottom shifted the products. In a skills-led business, the people at the top realise that they are too far from the customers to have day-to-day input: it is those who are nearest the customers that own the relationships and have the knowledge to figure out what is best for individual customers. This is a cultural shift that cannot be made by training alone. Also, changes often need to be made in defining sales channels and reward systems for the sales function.

From our experience of working with clients, Elevation Learning has developed two roadmaps that can help clients become genuinely skills-led. The first roadmap (bottom left) is a top-down process. The second roadmap (above) is a bottom-up process. Whether to use one of these roadmaps rather than the other depends mainly on the culture of the organisation, clarity of vision, peoples' capabilities and available time.