Monday 5th Nov, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
How much do you have to discount your consulting fee rates for if you want to have an impact on buying behaviour? 5%? 10%? 20%?
Research we carried out five years ago suggested that small price cuts make no difference, except perhaps to the procurement manager who has the lonely and thankless task of demanding a price reduction just at the point when they’re going to sign the contract. Five-percent is neither here nor there to most end-users of consulting services, because their purchase decisions are based on other, more important factors. How credible is the firm they’ve chosen in this particular area? What’s its depth of expertise, or its track record of success? What’s the client-consultant chemistry like? Can they all work together in practice?
Wednesday 28th Feb, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Everyone thinks they know everything about pricing in consulting. “Segmenting the consulting industry is very simple,” a senior French consultant once told me, with one of those quintessential gallic shrugs. “There are very expensive firms, less expensive firms, and cheap firms.”
That attitude might have been just about defensible 10 years ago, but it would be difficult to justify today. True, clients’ overall sense of the importance of price, relative to other factors they take into account when deciding which consulting firm to use, hasn’t changed much. In our most recent survey of around 3,000 senior executives in six major consulting markets around the world, 6% said this was the attribute that mattered most, up from 5% in 2017. Last year, price came out as the 9th most important attribute; this year it’s moved up to 8th. Those changes are within the margin for error: What we see in our surveys and hear from clients we speak to, is that price is a qualifier, a guide to whether a firm has understood the scope and scale of a project, and a reassurance that they’re not being ripped off. While there’s clearly a minority of clients to whom price is genuinely critical, most think about price only to be able to put it on one side in order to focus on more important aspects: ‘Innovation and the ability to implement’ top this year’s list.
Thursday 11th Jan, 2018
By Edward Haigh.
In the depths of the financial crisis, organisations looked at their consulting expenditure and started asking the obvious question: What, exactly, are we getting for our money?
Thursday 17th Nov, 2016
By Fiona Czerniawska.
“One firm” has always been the Holy Grail of the consulting industry.
And small wonder. Consultants are a tricky lot. They don’t like being told what to do, or being made to march to a single tune. Everyone’s an expert in their field, however small and unprofitable. Those with the loudest voices get the biggest budgets. Like our ever-expanding universe, everything is flying apart, driven by some massive centrifugal, cultural force.
Thursday 14th Jul, 2016
By Fiona Czerniawska
Every time we do some research into what clients are looking for when choosing between consulting firms, they tell us that price is fairly low down their list of considerations. Every time we tell that to a consulting firm we get laughed at: fee rates, they tell us, are crucial.
Thursday 26th May, 2016
By Edward Haigh.
Value = quality divided by price, right?
Possibly, but not according to our data. At least not always. Our survey of clients (to which we had over 9,000 responses) reveals their views about value to be far more complex than you might imagine. Before we go any further we should be clear that we asked them to describe value in relation to the fees they pay. Our question was: Do you get more than you pay in fees (if so how much more), about the same as you pay in fees, or less than you pay in fees?
Thursday 5th May, 2016
By Fiona Czeniawska
Consultants love the idea of client loyalty: the notion that someone will come back to them time and time again, and will use them in preference to any other firm. In consulting heaven, clients are monogamous.
What a shame, then, that that’s so rarely the case.
Tuesday 19th Apr, 2016
By Julie Ahadi.
I used to enjoy sleep. And then I had a baby. Much like the heyday era of consulting, when an abundance of cheque-happy clients and high fees was the norm, I used to roll around in bed of a Saturday morning thinking ‘there’s plenty more where that came from’. Not only has my window of opportunity for a relatively easy life closed, but I am now conditioned not to be able to sleep, even if I am permitted to.*
And to some extent, I’m the problem – I’ve created an adorable baby Frankenstein. At some point along this magical journey, my daughter may just (may just, mind you) have mistaken my kindness for weakness. The moment she’d call; I’d jump. And she got used to it. And so did I. And it really didn’t need to come to this – I’d read all the books, listened to (far too many) people’s helpful advice and yet here I am – me and my eyebags. But, like so many sleep deprived, busy mums (and there are plenty busier than me), I soldier on.
Thursday 9th Jul, 2015
I was recently on a plane with a big group of Italian tourists. We all duly read our magazines, ate our peanuts and landed safely – to a huge round of applause and whooping for joy from the Italian tour party. It is perhaps this delight in simply staying alive which explains the sanguine nature of the Italian response to yet another year of a consulting market which is not growing at all.
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