Looking for growth in the French consulting market?

As we travel around the world talking to consultants about their local consulting markets, our primary aim is to give people the facts; to tell them what our research tells us about what's going on, without couching any of it in language designed to please them.

Inevitably, though, we try to find positives and negatives to talk about. After all, the best recipe for future success combines equal measures of hope and fear. But the truth is that good news is sometimes only relative: we're asking people to draw comfort from the the fact that some aspect of the consulting market is simply not as bad in their country as it is elsewhere. And there's one country that leaps to our aid more than any other when we do. "You should count yourselves lucky," we tell people. "At least you're not in France."

That's not true in every respect. Where overall levels of growth are concerned, for example, people should count themselves lucky they're not in the Netherlands. The French consulting market - as we reveal in our new report, which has just been published - may have contracted by 2.5 per cent between 2011 and 2012 but during the same period the Dutch market contracted by 3.5 per cent. And across the Benelux region as a whole the outlook for the future is also significantly gloomier than it is in France. But where France really stands out is in the attitude of organisations towards the use of consultants.

Outside of France, 24 per cent of respondents to our survey said that their organisation has an official view that greater spend with consulting firms is acceptable. In France just nine per cent of people said the same thing. On the other hand, outside of France 14 per cent said that their organisation had an official edict that consulting spend should be reduced, while in France 22 per cent said the same thing. Differences narrow when you take into account informal views in either direction, but the point stands nevertheless: it's not easy to find growth in the French consulting market.

Firms that do manage to grow will be picking their sectors carefully (the difference in the growth rates of the energy and resources sector and the public sector was a whopping 23 per cent between 2011 and 2012), and although the differences between consulting services are less marked, they'll know that, for instance, operational efficiency work is likely to reap greater dividends than HR and change management work for the forseeable future.

But the skill that's likely to afford a firm the greatest chance of success in France is the ability to focus. That was one of the greatest areas of consensus amongst approximately 100 clients (senior, end users of consulting services) and 30 consulting leaders in the country and it's what explains the difference between firms that are struggling and those, like Paris-based Solucom, which are doing remarkably well. Solucom has picked out one of the most important trends in the French consulting market at the moment - transformation - and gone after it in an highly organised way, spending heavily on business development and account management; targetting a very clear offering at very carefully selected clients.

Focus, then. It might not be where French consulting firms lead right now (that honour probably goes to the Germans), but the good news is they're almost certainly better in this respect than others. You should see the Italians...