Thursday 27th Aug, 2015
By Alison Huntington What’s the difference between TMT and financial services clients? There are the obvious things: the jeans and lumberjack shirts versus the sharp suits; the seemingly impenetrable language of technology versus the dictionary of complex financial products; sunshine-soaked Silicon Valley versus the imposing skyscrapers of New York. But there are less obvious things, and the one we uncovered is that clients in these two sectors have very different opinions of the value added by consultants.
Monday 17th Aug, 2015
By Alison Huntington The headline of our Client Perception Study in the French consulting market is that 59% of clients are willing to pay more for the services of the leading consulting firms. Yes, you read that right. This news may come as a surprise – France is still a tough market, where every percentile of growth is fought for, tooth and nail. And they may wonder where all these clients are hiding. We can’t tell you that, but what is important to know is there are far more clients willing to pay more for some firm types, and far fewer for others.
Thursday 30th Jul, 2015
By Alison Huntington It’s always slightly creepy when you meet someone new and they say, “I’ve heard a lot about you.” Oh god, you think as a cold sweat forms on your brow, what on earth have you heard about me? Not the tale of that office Christmas party? Or could they have heard good things that you now need to live up to? The impression people form before meeting or working with you can help or hinder your relationship, and can take a fair amount of effort to change it.
Tuesday 19th May, 2015
By Fiona Czerniawska Last year, when we asked clients about the most important factors which influence their opinion about a given consulting firm, they told us it was the quality of people they encountered (no surprise there: consulting, as we keep saying, is the quintessential people business) and the results delivered (this was more of a surprise to some firms, though it really shouldn’t have been). The same two factors top the list when we look at this year’s data. But then we realised we’d been missing something obvious.
Tuesday 17th Mar, 2015
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.”
Thursday 3rd Jul, 2014
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.
Wednesday 21st May, 2014
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.
Wednesday 30th Apr, 2014
By Fiona Czerniawska Let’s have some fun. Let’s take two firms – I’m going to call them Firm A and Firm B, but regular readers of our blog can amuse themselves by trying to work out who’s who. They’re not selected at random, though: these firms have something important to tell us a lot about the US consulting market as a whole.
Tuesday 22nd Apr, 2014
By Fiona Czerniawska “We’ve got a new approach to cost-cutting,” I’ll always remember one bank telling us back at the start of the financial crisis. “We used to cut budgets for travel, biscuits in meetings and consulting in that order, but now we cut consulting first.”
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