The most important piece of marketing collateral you’ll ever produce

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.

Any self-respecting consultant could be forgiven for running away to a market where consulting is held in higher esteem (we recommend the Nordics at the moment). But that would be to ignore the fact that the UK is one of the biggest consulting markets in the world and is one of the fastest growing among developed economies (around 5% in 2013). So what can consulting firms do to counteract the prevailing scepticism?

Our new study of perceptions of the consulting industry in the UK sheds light, not only on what people think, but why they think it.  Among the clients you’re working with at the moment (in our study we refer to them as ‘direct clients’), the two factors most likely to influence what they think about you are the quality of your people (no surprise there) and the results you deliver. 60% of them say that the results delivered have a ‘significant impact’ on their perception of a given firm, compared to – for example – the 36% who point to overall reputation. People and results also have an impact on the people who are not your current clients but may know by reputation or see you around their organisation (your ‘indirect clients’). But both are dwarfed by the whopping 73% of people who say that your deliverables (your final report and/or presentation) have a big impact. Intuitively, that sounds right. We know that the recommendation from one manager to another is one of the most powerful ways for a consulting firm to build its reputation: to see a firm in action elsewhere in their organisation has the same effect – if your colleague has bought this firm then you can do too.

Reports and presentations aren’t commonly regarded as thought leadership, but our research suggests they’re actually far more influential in terms of influencing people’s views. What firms need to do now is invest in them just as they’ve invested in thought leadership, to ensure that their output is appealing, different, relevant and even entertaining, to be the kind of material, in effect, which clients want to pass on to their colleagues and which their colleagues want to read. We’ve known for some time that the most important audience for thought leadership is not the people you send it to but who they forward it on to. The same applies to the output of consulting projects.