Client behaviour

By Fiona Czerniawska

“What would I advise a consulting firm to do? Spend more time on relationship development. We have a very, very good account manager: he sleeps, eats, and breathes our industry; he meets with us once a month just to have coffee and talk about the state of the business – it isn't a sales call, just something he thinks is important to do. And the people he brings with him are just the same.”

By Edward Haigh

I wrote a piece about the UK consulting market recently (Mind the (closing) gap) in which I suggested that UK clients were a cynical bunch when it came to their views about consultants. I may have got that a bit wrong.

By Fiona Czerniawska

They’re a hard-bitten, cynical bunch of executives in the UK.

Many are ex-consultants, familiar with what they think of as the tricks of the trade. If they don’t have direct experience of working with a firm, they assume that quality will be average at best and that the value generated during the course of a consulting engagement will be no more and no less than the fees charged. True, once they’ve worked with you, they tend to be a bit more positive, but there’s a stubborn minority (just under 10% of the market) who think quality is poor or very poor.