What impact does relationship have on clients’ willingness to recommend?

By Fiona Czerniawska

One of the things the consulting industry isn’t short of is myths. You have to be a small specialist or a big brand? Wrong! Clients’ number one buying criterion is price? Wrong! With increasing amounts of data now available about the industry, sacred cows are falling like ninepins.

So let’s take a bit of time out to examine one of the most firmly held beliefs: that clients who’ve worked for a firm in the past will tend to be biased towards buying its services. It’s a comfort blanket really: when you’ve lost a pitch to Firm X, you can blame it on the fact that the client used to work there, not on your own ineptitude. But it’s also a big driver of expenditure, justifying the millions of dollars consulting firms are pouring into their alumni programmes.So is it wrong?

The chart left looks at the proportion of people who were willing to recommend a firm (we surveyed about 3,000 senior executives earlier this year). On average, 40% of people were willing to recommend the firm they were telling us about. Not surprisingly, they were much less likely to do so, the less they had direct knowledge of the firm concerned, so only 23% were willing to recommend a firm based on general perceptions, presumably saying something along the lines of ‘I’ve not worked with them, but they look OK’. Once they’ve seen a firm at work in their organisation, even if they haven’t had direct contact with the consultants, that proportion goes up to 35%. But the big jump comes when they’ve worked with the firm, either recently or over a long period of time (49% and 57% would recommend the firm). Being an alum fits into this category: 52% of former consultants would be willing to recommend the firm they used to work for.

So alum are indeed more likely than average to recommend the firm they worked with. Sighs of relief from your alumni programme? Don’t be too hasty: 52% isn’t exactly an overwhelming proportion and it’s certainly low enough to raise questions about both whether this group deserves the attention it gets and whether the means being used to engage this audience are as effective as they could be.