Outside the comfort zone

By Fiona Czerniawska

At last he rose, and twitch'd his Mantle blue:
To morrow to fresh Woods, and Pastures new (John Milton, 1608–1674)

There’s comfort in the familiar - and nowhere is this more true than in consulting, where levels of repeat business (new work sold to existing clients) are typically between 70% and 80%. The fact that clients keep coming back for more is a testimony to the good work being done - and our research shows that around two-thirds of clients would describe the quality of consulting work as ‘high’ or ‘very high’ (only a small proportion are explicitly negative). But the obvious danger is that this situation makes firms vulnerable to sudden change and - at worst - complacent.  

However, I’ve been struck recently by other, perhaps less recognised, risks. The first is that consultants start to assume that all clients are like their clients, that they all behave in the same way, have the same attitudes, are influenced by the same factors, and so on.  A study we did a couple of years ago highlighted how wrong this is: looking at the opportunities for, and barriers to, cross-selling, we found that CFOs were far less likely to recommend a firm they’d worked with to HR directors (our hypothesis, simply put, was that CFOs regarded all consulting firms as specialists so couldn’t see why anyone else would want to use them, it wasn’t that they hated consultants… ). This assumption leads to a lot of wasted, missed opportunities as well as mistargeted messages.

But the second problem is perhaps the bigger one. The clearer a firm has historically been about its target market, the worse this is, so technology firms are especially guilty of focusing on CIOs, and strategy firms on chief strategy officers and CEOs. Yet, from speaking to clients, we know that transformation projects (the biggest single driver of growth in the consulting industry at present) aren’t bought by one person but several, many of whom are well outside their own comfort zone. CMOs are buying technology services; CIOs are buying strategy work; the list goes on. But still, when we listen to clients describing the way consulting firms pitch for transformation work, it sounds as though most firms continue to speak to an audience of one: the person or role they know best. On the consulting side we’ve encountered dismissiveness, ‘CIOs don’t buy from us, we’re outside their price range’ one strategy partner told us. No they don’t, but it’s not because you’re too expensive, we replied, it’s because you don’t take them seriously.  

There’s plenty of work going on outside the comfort blanket, but you won’t ever see it if you’re tucked up too cosily beneath it.