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Consultant thinking: Are you an effective farmer?
The consultancy profession is cyclical. About every ten years we hit a rough patch – and arguably we are in one of the roughest right now. So how can consultants get through such rough and tough times successfully?
Looking back over a long career in consulting, and having seen three of these patches in the early 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, I can see that there was a common thread running through them that enabled us to succeed: we focused on our clients and worked continually with them to weather the storms. This usually involved selling more work to them – a win:win.
Back in the 1980s I was a senior consultant with one of the big practices and worked very closely with my clients helping them to keep their costs under control, particularly IT costs. When I moved to another practice, all my clients followed me. At the time, I did not realise that this was ‘farming’. But now, with the benefit of some additional years and some focused training, I can look back and understand what was happening.
Winding the clock on to the early 2000s, post the millennium-bug IT frenzy, I was a director of a growing independent consultancy practice. We knew that 75% to 85% of our work came from our existing clients, so we focused on our government S-CAT contracts and on a known group of our other existing clients. We invested in our selling-on skills, which also meant that our ‘cold’ sales skills were sharpened as well. Everyone attended a two day residential course which involved elevator pitches, meeting planning, sales propositions and role plays, both one to one and in front of the whole group, all geared to providing a safe environment within which to practice these ‘farming’ skills.
We maintained our sales performance, whilst other firms around us were struggling.
And now? The economy is in a pretty rough patch, but wise consulting firms are investing in their staff to preserve and develop their client relationships.
So if I could give one simple message, based on my own experience, it is this: “in both good times and bad, keep your client-focused skills sharp; it is always a win:win and worthwhile.”.