By Fiona Czerniawska.
We’ve done a variety of research recently that has, in passing, highlighted a gap between the proportion of clients who say they rate a consulting firm highly or that a given firm would be their #1 choice, and the percentage who say they’ve used that firm in recent years. Which seems counterintuitive: Surely you use the firm you think is best?
There are several possible reasons for this. The gap between respect and use is often high for the Big Four firms, so audit restrictions must play a role: You can’t use Deloitte/EY/KPMG/PwC (delete where applicable) because Deloitte/EY/KPMG/PwC (delete where applicable) is your auditor. Another factor is quite clearly price—McKinsey often suffers from the widest gap between respect and use, and the other major strategy firms are not far behind. Procurement rules may also be having an impact here: preferred supplier lists and centralised decision-making may mean that even senior executives can’t always pick the firm they want.
The real question is whether this matters. Although I say the strategy firms “suffer” from a bigger gap than most other types of firm, I suspect these firms won’t be entirely unhappy with the notion that they’re aspirational brands, that people would hire them if only they could afford them. It creates a sense of exclusivity that would appeal to many people’s egos, consultants’, and clients’. But it surely can’t be a good thing overall: What it means in practice is that there are a lot of clients who are using firms that aren’t, for whatever reason, their first choice. They may (and our evidence suggests they do) think the firm they’re currently working with does high quality work, but there’s still another firm out there that would have done it better, haunting the project like Banquo’s ghost. It’s unfair on the firm they’re using, which will always be measured against an impossible standard probably more informed by fantasy than fact. But anecdotally, from speaking to clients, we know that the situation also creates broader, chronic dissatisfaction. While there’s another consulting firm that could do better, the firm that’s working with the client can never be the best.
What’s to be done? Well, McKinsey et al. are as unlikely to choose to be less exclusive as those apocryphal turkeys are to vote for Christmas. Audit regulations are being tightened, making it even harder to buy audit and consulting services from the same firm. And the whole rationale behind more formal procurement processes is that client organisations will benefit from using a small number of prequalified firms instead of allowing individual executives to pick and choose on a personal whim.
Perhaps the solution lies in something a bit more small-scale and practical. When you win your next piece of work, why don’t you ask your client which firm they would have chosen to work with, in a perfect world, and—crucially—why? No one likes to feel second-best, but getting clients to articulate what the gap is between the firm they’ve actually chosen and that they would have preferred might help you understand how to be their first choice the next time.
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