The Best Consultants are The Pied Piper - They Lead and Pull, and Don’t Push

In my last role before starting Sophity, I managed a team of program managers who are responsible for working with clients to evolve and mature their programs that leveraged our companies products. While my team of program managers were not sales people in the traditional sense, they were in a role, that if executed effectively, would likely lead to an increase in our company’s product sales. They were aware of this impact and were compensated for it. Needless to say, there was a lot of pressure on the team to contribute and to ensure all of their clients renewed their SaaS subscription (product) and even grew their spend on the SaaS product year after year.

As their manager, I would often probe to understand what risks they saw and how they were going to mitigate those risks. I’d also looked to understand how each program manager was going to ensure renewals and drive growth within the account.

Unfortunately, many of the program managers didn’t quite understand their role as the Pied Piper in this dynamic. Many thought they needed to push their customers to take certain actions: “I know what they need to do, and I have told them, but they just aren’t doing it. I am pushing as hard as I can.”

What’s wrong with this approach? I can see a few issues:

• First, power begets power. If you push someone, they are going to push you back. Our clients, as inexperienced or ignorant on the subject they may be, don’t always see themselves that way (and, frankly, many of them are not - they know as much or more than you), and will take offense when you push them to do something before they feel you really understand their world, their constraints, the political environment, or anything else that will affect the path forward.
• Second, the best way to get someone to do something is to have them come up with it on their own and buy into it as the right thing to do. Pushing your ideas and agenda on your client flies directly in the face of that philosophy, and it is rare that it will succeed. You need to, in the words of Peter Block (I use this quote often), “help your customer ask and answer their own questions,” not give them the answer to the question you just asked or think they should be asking.
• Third, you run the risk of alienating your client because “you don’t understand our situation; we aren’t like all of your other clients.” Let’s face it, as consultants, we often see different clients making the same mistakes as others with whom we have worked. Its easy to assume that “this client” is “just like the last client” and simply prescribe the same solution. Could you imagine your doctor doing that? The thing is, though, there is always something different with this client than the last. It maybe a subtle nuance that, ultimately, has very little to do with your recommended solution, or it could be quite significant and game changing. Its your job to figure that out in the process of consulting. (Patrick Lencioni wrote Getting Naked on this very topic, and it is worth the read.)

So what do you do? You start by understanding as much as you can about your client. The first things you are likely to learn are the symptoms of the problem (framed as the problem) from the customer’s perspective. Dig deeper to learn the root cause of the problem and anything else you can.

As you learn more about the client’s situation, you can draw on previous experiences and offer up potential solutions. You should not simply share the one you think is best, share those that you think are the most viable and talk with your client about the pros and cons of each - which will succeed and which will fail at this organization and why. (Knowing “why” is critical as you work with your client to find the best solution.) Use your powers of influence to help the client see the value and risks associated with each option you presented, and be open to the client suggesting other options based on what they have learned from you. At the end of the day, your job is to facilitate a solution and help the client commit to solving it. As Patrick Lencioni says in Getting Naked, “don’t fall in love with your work and ideas and push your clients to do it your way.” Be the Pied Piper - lead them through a process and help them buy in to a solution that will work best for them. You will win their respect and credibility in the process, allowing you to expand your relationship with them over time.

Effective Consulting and Project Management Requires a Strong Sense of Urgency

I recently had the “pleasure,” for the first time in my career, to be the customer rather than the vendor. It was an interesting role for me, and a challenging one for my service provider. Why? Because I hold myself and my team to a certain standard when it comes to communications, project management, and consulting. One of the hardest thing to do when you are a service provider is to “out service the service provider” you are servicing, and I have to say, I was not out serviced at all.

I hired the PS team of a leading PSA provider to assist me in configuring their solution. The project was to take 8 weeks - end to end from requirements to go live. It required a one-person team from the vendor’s side and 5 people on my side, including me. In reality, it took 6 months of painful interactions with their project manager (PM) and multiple calls into the account manager and PS director raising concerns that, ultimately, were never addressed.

So where did my service provider go wrong? First of all, the PSO’s delivery model is fundamentally flawed and shows a lack of knowledge and awareness of how to effectively roll out a software solution. Requirements were gathered but not documented, meeting notes were never captured or distributed, and UAT was scheduled to begin before any stub or real data was in the system - there was nothing to test. Additionally, the solution had no documentation to train us on how to use it, and the sample UAT test plan we were provided was based on an older version of the user interface and couldn’t be followed.

I have worked for enough early-staged software companies to know that documentation is always an after thought, but this company has been around since the 1990s. They aren’t “early-stage.” And the product team can't be blamed for the sample test plan.

That said, one thing a PS team can do is “prop up” the product and hide some of the worts. Let’s face it, no product is perfect and even later-stage companies are trying to change the tires on the car as they drive 75 MPH down the highway, The PS team we were working with, however, only made things worse.

We should be talking, however, about the importance of displaying a strong sense of urgency on your projects. While not all of my complaints about the experience I had with this specific customer are the fault of the PSO, I expected a stronger PS presence to help us through our issues, keep us on track, and assist us in dealing with some pretty obvious product constraints that they knew all to well.

I will be the first to admit that we were not a model customer. My company had a very meeting intensive culture, and finding time on all stakeholders’ calendars for important meetings with our vendor was very difficult. Additionally, many of the stakeholders, myself included, had intense travel schedules (I was physically in the office for 3 out of 12 weeks in the middle of the project), and we never named an “administrator” for deeper product training before we started requirements and implementation.

With that said, the PM downplayed the need for the administrator when I explained that we had to hire for the role. He said we could easily get started...it wouldn’t be a problem. However, when I started to complain about progress, he pulled out the “you haven’t assigned an administrator yet” card as the reason for the delays. He was right, actually, but my response to him was that he should have pushed me harder and made me perfectly clear of the risk I was taking on without assigning the administrator upfront. He showed no sense of urgency on the need for the administrator, so I did not address it urgently.

Additionally, he would send email that wouldn’t be seen due to travel schedules and conduct no follow up. Weeks would go by, and I would become aware of lack of progress. I would reach out to him, and he would simply send me the email he had sent to me 3 weeks earlier.

When I questioned him, he would simply say that he was waiting for my response. When I questioned his boss, his boss pointed the finger back at me for not replying. In my organization, the program and project managers knew not to sit back and wait. If you need something from the client and you aren’t getting the response you need, try other communication channels, stakeholders, and/or escalation paths. Don’t sit around and wait.

While it feels good to vent about the mess that was our PSA configuration, I am not writing about it to make me feel better. Rather, I am writing about it to illustrate the effect the PM and consulting team’s sense of urgency, or lack there of can have on a project. As you start your next project, keep these points in mind:

1. Your job is to help customers get value, not the other way around. If the client isn’t doing what is needed, you need to call them out and make them aware of the implications.
2. You need to recognize that if the client could do it themselves, they wouldn’t need you. The inability to “DIY” depends on a lot of factors. Some customers will have the skills and expertise, but lack the time. Others will have the time, but lack the skills and expertise, and still others will lack skills, expertise, and time. Understanding which constraints exist is important to your ability to understand how to approach your customer.
3. The worst thing you can do is sit back and wait for your customer. if you don’t get the response you need in a reasonable amount of time, reach out again. Try a different method: If you sent an email, reach out via the phone; if you called, follow up with an email. If all else fails, escalate. Reach out to your boss or your client’s boss to get the attention you need.
4. Find out up front the best methods of communication for each person and what constraints they see coming that will impact the project. Develop plans to mitigate the impact of these issues.
5. Send regular status reports and notes to ensure everyone understands where you are in the plan, where you are falling behind, what is on the critical path, and what is needed to get back or stay on track.

I can assure you that if our vendor’s PM did any of these things on our project, it would have been more successful. Instead, the cost overruns for them and the lack of value for us equalled a number I certainly don’t want to calculate, but I am sure it is significant, and I, for one, am not likely to look at their solution in the future.