The growing role of thought leadership

The idea that what a consulting firm thinks might be a greater influence on clients than what is has actually done might seem like a preposterous one, but that's one of the more striking findings of our research over the last few months.

We asked procurement managers (whose opinion is important because they influence the firms that are approached either as an alternative to the "incumbent" or for projects for which there is no known supplier) about the extent to which different things influence decisions to use a firm that hasn't been used before. Thought leadership featured above case studies in their responses. In fact it featured above just about everything other than requests or recommendations from people in the business who've used the firm before (in another job).

It also featured much more prominently than reports from independent analysts (like Gartner). But only for management consulting. Where technology consulting is concerned, analysts seemed to be meeting a need quite successfully - their reports are considerably more influential than thought leadership and only slightly less influential than case studies. In other words, there's something about what analysts like Gartner are doing that's not really helping clients to work out what consulting firm to use. Magic quadrants (and the like) appear to play a very useful role where technology is concerned - which might be because technology is considered more of a commodity than consulting, or because so much more is spent on it (or both) - but they're not working for consulting.

That's arguably why, for so long, the focus of procurement departments has been on price: in the absence of any meaningful ways to tell the difference between one firm or another, price became a useful mechanism. But as procurement has evolved, more sophisticated approaches have become important and thought leadership appears to have filled the void. It's certainly a better mechanism because it tell you a lot about the extent to which a firm is committed to a particular topic, the depth of its expertise and its ability to take the intellectual lead. It's not perfect by any means (it doesn't, for example, tell you how good a firm is at implementation, and it doesn't tell you much about the individuals you're going to get working on your project - even if it does tell you about the knowledge to which they have access) but it might just be the best thing there is.

What would be better? To be absolutely honest we're not completely sure yet. But we're working on it.