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.

Using S.M.A.R.T Goals to Add Value Every Day

In an earlier post, I discussed the importance of not just working hard but adding value. The lesson of the roofing contractor mistaking hard work with value and assuming he earned the right to his fee simply because he worked hard is one with revisiting. As I mentioned in that post, work every day to ensure you are adding value to yourself, your firm, and your customers. Otherwise, you will fall short of your goals and have a hard time extending your relationships with your customers over time.

So how do you do that? In my experience, a good place to start is to set measurable goals for the initiatives on your plate. As a consultant, it is your job to ensure you know what the goals are for “this” project. It is also my experience, though, that many people struggle to set truly measurable goals that meet the need and deliver value. You need to develop your goal setting skills so that you can drive that discussion and assist your clients in defining measurable goals you can all get behind.

So what is a measurable goal? Personally, I like the S.M.A.R.T model for goal definition:

S = Specific
M = Measurable
A = Achievable
R = Realistic
T = Timely

If you do a Google Search for the term “SMART Goals”, you will see that there are approximately 35 million items returned in the search results. So I suspect I am not alone in my preference to use the S.M.A.R.T. Goals model.

So what does this mean? Well, the worst example if a goal I have seen lately was a goal that a Sales Rep defined with a client. The client was working to build an application security program, and we were working with individual contributors and managers who knew the importance of application security. They needed executive support to truly build and evolve a program, though, since doing so required access to human and capital resources.

The goal that was presented to me in my first meeting with this client was “CIO Awareness.” That’s it...nothing more. In reaction to this, I somewhat apologetically asked, “How do I know when I am done?” The folks in the room, including the Sales Rep who worked with the client to define the goal, all just sat there staring blankly at me. So I cut to the chase. “Guys, with all due respect,” I said, “this isn’t a goal, its a theme. I agree that making your executives aware is important for the success of the program, but aware of what?  How will we do that, and by when. Really, how do we know we have successfully informed the CIO of what we need to inform him to drive the desired results of getting more headcount and budget for the program? Also, how do we know how much headcount and budget we need so that we can make the right business case to the CIO. This goal needs work.”

Fortunately for me, everyone in the room agreed, and we set out to craft truly S.M.A.R.T. goals.

So what does a S.M.A.R.T. goal look like? In the example above, do you think that “CIO Awareness” is specific? Measurable? Achievable? Realistic? Timely? I think not. What if the goal was something like this:

“Deliver Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) to our CIO starting next quarter in which we focus on educating the CIO on the outcomes of the current program in terms of risk identified through scanning our applications, risk reduction through educating the development teams, and remaining risk to be addressed. Provide estimates of headcount and budget to further reduce risk to meet with corporate Application Security Policy, and gain approval of additional headcount and budget spending by the end of the year.”

In this example, we have clearly indicated what information we need to share with the CIO to make him aware of the current program, risk inherent in the corporation, and what is needed to reduce risk to an acceptable level. We have specified the forum in which we will communicate this information, and we have also defined the specific outcome (gaining approval for more headcount and funding) that we are striving to achieve and a timeline (by the end of the year) in which we must achieve the approval.

I think we have covered S-Specific, M-Measurable, and T-Timely.

What about A-Achievable and R-Realistic? Well, that is up to the team defining the goal to determine. One approach to assessing whether the goal is achievable is to brainstorm on all the things that could go wrong that would affect your ability to achieve the goal. Then assess the likelihood of those things happening. For instance, you may realize that the CIO is known for not showing up for meetings called by his subordinates' subordinates. So, can you increase the chances of the CIO showing up by having your boss set up and attend the meetings? Is there a better forum other than a meeting to communicate what is needed and get his feedback? Can his assistant help ensure he shows up? What can you do to ensure the goal is achievable?

Likewise, look that the time component - is it realistic to gain the CIOs approval for additional headcount and budget by the end of the year, or is more time needed? How many QBRs will you hold with the CIO before the end of the year? Will you have collected enough data to present a sound business case in that timeframe? Will you have enough touch points with the CIO to make your case effectively? When are budgets approved - what are the chances you have missed your opportunity if you wait until that end of the year? It may very well be that the goal is achievable but not realistic in the time you have given yourself...so be realistic about what you can really do.

Setting S.M.A.R.T. goals and developing a plan to achieve the goal allows you to evaluate each day if you have taken steps that bring you closer to achieving the goals that deliver the value necessary. You can take this step with your customers (as described above), with your manager (setting a goal around a promotion and knowing what you need to do to get there), and with yourself (developing a new skill, finding work/life balance, losing weight, etc.)

Focus on developing goal setting skills and significantly increase your ability to deliver value.

Top Consulting Skills: Ability to Understand, in Detail, the Current State

Things are not always what they seem, and the best consultants assume that many things are not at all as they seem. The current state is often a matter of perception. To complicate things further, each stakeholder often has a completely different perception from one another.

Often times, a consultant is brought on board by a senior manager or executive who has determined that there is a challenge that needs to be addressed that can’t be addressed internally. The business may lack the time, the expertise, or both, to solve the issue. So here you are.

The first thing most consultants will do is to speak with the executive to understand why they were brought on board. What is the problem from the executive’s perspective? What has she done to try to address the problem? What has work? Has not worked? Why?

While the executive may be a wealth of information and she will often speak with authority on the problem, simply listening to the executive and then driving to a solution would be a mistake. In all relationships, somewhere between “my truth” and “your truth” is “the truth.” This means that the consultant needs to talk to many stakeholders to get different perspectives. He must learn where there is alignment and misalignment. Where is there agreement and disagreement?

So, first, the consultant must find out who the most affected stakeholders are and talk to each of them in detail. As he speaks with each stakeholder, he should ask “who else will be affected by whatever decision we make on this matter?” The answer will present an additional list of stakeholders with whom the consultant should speak. In other words, don’t get a list of interview candidates from your sponsor, meet them, and call it a day. Look for additional perceptions that may be critical to formulating the right assessment of the current state.

The consultant needs to learn from multiple stakeholders at different levels in the organization:

1. What are the motivations of each stakeholder? How do those motivations shape the stakeholder’s point of view?
2. What is believed to be the problem? How is each affected by the problem?
3. What symptoms are presenting themselves in support of the problem statement?
4. What have they tried to solve the problem? What has worked? Not worked?

Individuals can be motivated in a lot of different ways. Some will be motivated by a successful outcome - finding the best way to resolve the issue and drive forward successfully. Others are motivated by fear. “If I talk to these guys, will I loose my job or sense of autonomy or ownership of the solution?” Knowing how one is motivated allows you to frame questions in a way that allows the stakeholder to be the most receptive and to apply judgement to the information you are gathering.

Additionally, many of us will often confuse the symptom with the problem. Is the problem that we have too many meetings making it hard to get work done, or is the crazy meeting schedule a symptom of some other problem, such as a lack of clear direction, lack of clear decision making ground rules, or lack of sufficient resources.

Getting to the heart of the current state is a critical first step in the consultative process. Do not get consumed with solving the problem at this point. Just stay focused on understanding what’s going on. You will get to problem resolution later.

Consultants ARE sales people

While I did work in a stand-alone, boutique consulting firm for a time, most of my career has been in embedded services organizations within software companies. In these organizations, the companies typically have a dedicated, product sales team who is also expected and compensated to sell professional services (PS). The Services Practice Manager and some senior consultants often support the Product Salesperson to sell PS. Let’s face it, selling product and selling services are different, even for a “consultative” salesperson. Products have features and functionality that can be more easily compared to competitive solutions. Products can be demonstrated, they can be touched, and the value can be illustrated visually in the sale process. OK, its not quite that simple, but the fact is, when you buy PS, you are buying access to people. You can’t illustrate the value of PS by demoing a person. Or can you?

I believe that while consultants are not salespeople in the traditional manner - they don’t carry a bag and are not paid on a commission basis, they are salespeople. (I am not speaking about partners in stand-alone consulting practices, by the way.) The way we sell as consultants is through being a solid consultant and demonstrating what we know and our approach to the consultative process..

Whether its in a pre-sales capacity, supporting the product sales team, or in post-sales delivery, consultants need to sell the prospect or customer on the fact that she knows the space and has the expertise needed by the customer to meet their needs and objectives. One way we do this is by joining the product sales team in pre-sales meetings to understand the customer’s pain, learn about their success criteria, and start discussing a model that can be used to ease that customer’s pain and drive to full attainment of their success criteria. We build credibility during pre-sales that should drive the deal and set up a successful engagement. What we do in pre-sales is very similar to what we do in post sales: We ask insightful questions, listening (a lot), and provide some amount of consulting throughout the conversations, giving the customer a strong impression that we can help.

We, essentially, provide a demonstration of our model and approach as well as highlighting the specific skills of our consultants through this process. The customer is most likely speaking to multiple organizations and will determine which consulting team is best equipped to help them meet their objectives through their people, process, and technology.

Inevitably, potential customers do not view the consultant who sells as a salesperson. This works to our favor, of course. For right or wrong, there are often negative connotations of “salespeople” and, even though the consultant is on the call to help scope and close a deal, we are viewed as subject matter experts, not salespeople. If we play our cards right, we will foster a strong, trusting relationship with the the customer, and the customer will be willing to share concerns, pain, and needs with us in a way they won’t with someone in a traditional selling role.

“Selling” doesn’t end when the ink is dry on the contract, though. Once we start a project, we will get introduced to new stakeholders - folks who were not part of the pre-sales process, who don’t know us. We need to convince them that we can do the job, that we can help them meet their objectives - we are back to "selling." Then the consulting begins. Throughout the engagement, we learn, we listen, and we advise. In the words of Peter Block, we “help our customers ask and answer their own questions,” and we show the customer a vision for a better and less painful future. Throughout the engagement you will, at a minimum, be selling your ideas and your vision for their future.

As a consultant becomes more senior, she is expected to help drive follow-on PS and product sales. Again, we are not “the” salesperson, but we are trusted advisors who work with our customers more closely than a salesperson ever really could. We have the ability to not only ensure “this pain” is addressed, we have the ability to learn about other pain the customer has that “we are able to address” through our products or services.

A colleague of mine, who once worked for a Big 4 consultancy, shared with me that his previous firm offered a training program they called something like, “Helping Your Customers Buy.” Notice that the word “sell” is no where in the title of this class. This is because, for many consultants, being perceived as a salesperson is seen as a negative. The message of this training, though, is that if you knew your customer has pain that you can address, why would you not talk with them about that, even if it means they have to sign another Product Order Form or Statement of Work?

Think about it, when you are not feeling well, and you go to see your doctor, the doctor works to diagnose the source of the pain you are feeling. If he identifies another health issue while investigating the pain you had when you came in, he doesn’t refrain from saying something simply because the new issue is not the pain you came in to discuss and/or because it could cost more money to get the health issue resolved. Rather your doctor speaks with you about what he found, the concern and/or risk, and what next steps he recommends. You, of course, have the right to a second opinion, or to ignore the problem, but knowledge is power - the doctor knows this - and you now have new information to help you improve your overall health.

So how do you “sell” without “selling”? It is actually easier than it seems in my opinion and experience. Years ago, one of my company’s customers was struggling. They were using all aspects of the product they purchased - 100% utilization, but they did not feel like they were really getting value from their spend with us. They were questioning whether they should renew the contract. (Think of the guy at the gym who goes faithfully but is not losing the weight he wants to lose.)

The Account Manager (salesperson) suggested that they meet with Professional Services to see if there was anything we could do to help them get value. They knew they should be getting value, and they were open to talking with us. The Rep asked me to join a call with the customer. We had a preliminary conversation about what they were doing and why they thought they weren’t able to get value. I asked a lot of questions and learned a lot. I felt strongly that if one of my consultants could work with them for 2-3 weeks, we could develop a "path to value" for them. They agreed, and we got started with  a three-week, billable services engagement designed to find that path.

In the first few days, the consultant realized that many of the things they were doing with our product were redundant and not adding value. Her first recommendation was to turn off a slew of things they were doing with us - a scary thought for a SaaS company that makes money on consumption of the product. Still, she knew it was the right thing to do. The customer complied, consumption went down, and the customer instantly trusted the consultant to do right by them.

Over the next week or two, the consultant identified a number of things they weren’t doing with our product that they really should do. She made recommendations and help them set up those things. Unfortunately, they didn’t buy enough of our stuff to do everything that she was recommending. The end result was that the customer called their Rep and bought more of our stuff - more than doubling their spend with us. The consultant was not in “selling” mode at any point in her work. She was acting as a highly-skilled consultant, understanding what they needed, and advising them of how to meet their needs. Success!!

So, worry less about whether you are “selling” and worry more about listening to your customers, understand where they have pain you can address, and help them buy when that is the right thing for them to reduce their pain.

Reminder: So, Why Do You Hate Submitting Your Time Sheets - A Survey

World-Class PSO is an organization that is passionate about building World-Class Professional Services Organizations. We believe that time tracking and professional services automation (PSA) are critical components of building such organizations, but we recognize that the current tools on the market fall short of meeting the needs of busy, often traveling, consultants and hourly contractors. This impacts the quality of data and the ability for practice managers to make data driven business decisions. 

We are conducting a survey to better understand why consultants and hourly contractors struggle to get their time sheets submitted on time and/or accurately. If you are one who is required to submit time sheets as part of your job, your response would be appreciated. 

This 21-question survey will take less than 10 minutes to complete (it took us 4), and all respondents who complete the survey will receive a $10 iTunes Gift Certificate through email. 

Click here to take survey

Thanks in advance for your participation! 
The Team at World-Class PSO 

So, Why Do You Hate to Submit Your Time Sheets?

World-Class PSO is an organization that is passionate about building World-Class Professional Services Organizations. We believe that time tracking and professional services automation (PSA) are critical components of building such organizations, but we recognize that the current tools on the market fall short of meeting the needs of busy, often traveling, consultants and hourly contractors. This impacts the quality of data and the ability for practice managers to make data driven business decisions. 

We are conducting a survey to better understand why consultants and hourly contractors struggle to get their time sheets submitted on time and/or accurately. If you are one who is required to submit time sheets as part of your job, your response would be appreciated. 

This 21-question survey will take less than 10 minutes to complete (it took us 4), and all respondents who complete the survey will receive a $10 iTunes Gift Certificate through email. 

Click here to take survey

Thanks in advance for your participation! 
The Team at World-Class PSO