Reinventing your value proposition

What do you think clients see as the most important value-add of consultants? Or put another way, what are clients really buying when they purchase consulting services?

Different clients use consultants for different reasons—and it depends very much on the level they sit at in their organisation. At the top level, what they're looking for more and more is something beyond just additional manpower; they don't just want people to come and run meetings and create nice slides. We're seeing the end of the ‘PowerPoint consultant’. To win work now, you have to be a lot more results-oriented and put ‘skin in the game’.

When clients talk about results, increasingly what they are really looking for are sustainable results. My key clients made it clear that they don't want to pay for consultants to come in and just suggest short-term cost-cutting measures. Instead, they want help with setting up their pricing or operating model in a way that can boost performance over the next five years.

Is that true for all clients? Presumably different clients will think about value in different ways, so how do you figure out what value means to the specific client you’re dealing with?

Different clients have different interests, but these differences are much more dependent on a company's individual circumstances than they are on market or sector. For example, clients who are in a crisis situation are going to be much more focused on the short-term, and won't have the leeway to think about sustainability; in those types of situation, you often need to be able to demonstrate immediate results just to be able to work on the next phase of the project.

A lot depends on the personal story of the stakeholder you're selling to. If you're working with a young guy who just arrived in the job and needs to cement his position, then you probably have to prioritise delivering short-term results. Whereas if you're working with a CXO who has a long track record behind her, you might be able to focus more on sustainability. But in either scenario, the key is being results-oriented—and figuring out exactly what that means for your client.

If clients are thinking about value in a more sustainable way, does that change what they’re going to want from their consulting partners?

Clients are no longer willing to spend money on PowerPoint decks and on evaluating scenarios on paper. Our new identity as ‘Capgemini Invent’ is our answer to that change—to show clients that we are able to think, invent and innovate. We've decided that we need to make sure we have the implementation capabilities to deploy MVPs and go rapidly to a value demonstration.

We were recently working with a client who had spent a year working with a strategy boutique and had asked us to come in and implement that strategy. After working with the client for six months he told us that he should have skipped the strategic piece: ‘I lost a year making PowerPoint decks and Excel spreadsheets, weighing the pros and cons. When in fact the only way I could have actually known if I was right or wrong would have been to just do it sooner.’ If you implement quickly and then apply lessons learned to refine your approach, you can end up far ahead of where you would be if you spent all your time developing a strategy upfront.

How important has the new ‘Capgemini Invent’ branding—and the acquisition over the last few years of agencies like Idean and Fahrenheit212—been to Capgemini’s ability to respond to these new client demands?

Adding Idean and Fahrenheit to our ecosystem was absolutely key, but it wasn't enough on its own. What consultants really need to do is apply the same kind of recommendations we give our clients. We keep telling clients that the key for success is to work in cross-functional teams, to break down the boundaries between marketing and operations and IT and finance and so on. It's the same story in consulting: the types of challenge that we're tackling for our clients these days require a multidisciplinary approach.

We've combined a number of different capabilities under the Invent umbrella. Fahrenheit gives us the ability to innovate, which is crucial if you want to create new products or services. Then, Idean provides design capability to create an attractive user experience. We've also added strong technology expertise as well as data capability, since understanding and interpreting data is critical in knowing where you are and where you want to go. And of course, to make that all work together you need management consulting skills and strategy and transformation expertise.

How receptive have clients been to that new positioning? How easy has it been to make them understand what you’re now able to offer them?

Some clients immediately understand this new model of delivering consulting services; it really depends on their level of digital experience. Those who've tried to design and build digital products or services before, whether they succeeded or failed, can see how it answers all of the challenges they've run into. By contrast, clients without as much digital experience—or even other stakeholders within the same client organisation—can still be attached to the old ‘best of breed’ approach, where you get a consulting firm to do your strategy, a design agency to do your UX, and so on. They haven't yet realised that delivering projects this way takes five times longer than if you just put those people together from the start.

This new approach to delivering value can create a challenge for clients' procurement functions. Stakeholders are looking for consulting firms to have skin in the game, but then they go to their procurement teams and the conversation often goes back to man-days and daily rates; a lot of procurement specialists are wary of big success fees or exploring ways to share project risk and rewards.

Is there anything you think these clients could be doing to maximise the value of their consulting projects?

A lot of clients could get a lot more value out of their consulting partners if they shifted their mindsets. For example, there's a lot of SAP S/4 HANA work going on right now, and some truly massive projects being launched. But too often, clients are approaching this as a question of how they replace system A with system B, when they should really be thinking in terms of the actual end-point they want to get to: i.e., how do they reduce inventory or boost supply chain performance. Some clients are still asking their consultants to deliver an IT system, when more mature ones are asking them to deliver and commit on business performance.

Our clients are becoming increasingly globalised—but the process of becoming a connected, global organisation can sometimes be difficult. If you want to create synergies or develop shared services, then you are going to have global vs. local debates. That's precisely why you still need transformation consulting skills: so that you can align clients around where the real value for them is, and make sure that you thread a path between different people's interests and make sure everyone feels they've got a good deal from the process.

Do you think the new model—where you combine all of these capabilities in one place—has created any completely new ways for consultants to add value?

Over the last few years, we've increasingly seen that value can be found at the intersections between sectors. Barriers between sectors are becoming increasingly blurred and are now more or less non-existent in some cases. This creates some fantastic opportunities to work with clients on things outside their core business; telco companies are creating banks; high tech companies are making cars. And these types of projects are a particularly good opportunity for consultants to add value, as they often require hybrid teams with cross-sector expertise: If a client is entering a completely new sector, then they're unlikely to have the relevant know-how in-house, and so they will need to turn to consultants.

When you’re working on that type of project—when you’re doing something new that goes outside a client’s core business—it must be difficult to find metrics that they’re comfortable with that you can use to prove you’ve delivered value. How do you try to resolve that?

I don't think there's a single answer to the question of how you measure value. When we start a project, we make sure that we have some lengthy discussions with the client about the value dimensions. Some of those are obvious: how much did we grow revenue, how many new clients did we help acquire, how big were the cost reductions we generated, and so on. But there are also more subtle metrics. For example, if we're doing a big transformation piece, we can look at how many people within the business have been transformed because of the project.

If you focus on delivering sustainable value for clients, then you need to find ways of proving that to them. For example, how many digital leaders have you created by the end of a project? Because if your consultants have used a first project to help them embed capability, then when it comes to the second project they'll be able to do more of it on their own, and you can move into helping them in other areas. It's not sustainable to be selling the exact same consulting projects to clients year after year.

So what do you think the next big challenge for consulting firms will be when it comes to meeting client expectations of value?

Increasingly, more and more of the value that a firm can deliver for a client is going to be tied into their global reach. Almost all clients love working with start-ups so they can do really innovative things. But while it's very easy to do something like that in one location on a small scale, it's very difficult to scale it up and roll it out across multiple regions. So, to add value, consultants have to do two things. Firstly, they have to be able to introduce clients to small companies with unique propositions; and secondly, they need to show the client how they can take something like that and make it work not just with five people in a test environment but with 200,000 internal users or with several million external customers.

Increasingly, we see clients saying, ‘My issue isn't about implementing something in Paris or in London—I can do that myself if I need to. My challenge is that I want to deploy it in 25 countries including in Asia, South America, Australasia.’ Delivering value in that kind of scenario requires global reach along with new ways of working. We have to show to our clients that we can make things happen quickly at a large scale: they don't want it to take five years to roll out a global solution. They want to be able to pilot it in Berlin in June and go global by the end of the year.