Like me, you’re no doubt reeling from the revelation that Beatrix Potter’s “The Tale of Mrs Tittlemouse” is actually a diatribe against consultants. According to the FT, she eventually narrows the door so that Mr Jackson, a toad, cannot get in, a strategy Greg Dyke, former Director General of the BBC, says is the ideal way to deal with consultants.

Internal consultants have a chequered history: one minute they are on the up, eager recipients of corporate largesse; the next they are on the down, seen as a luxury the organisation can no longer afford. Lacking the brand and independence of external resources, they have widely been seen as the “poor manager’s consultant”, the people you use only when you don’t have the money for the real thing.

Recessions are extraordinarily effective tools for sorting winners from losers. Just as with retailers on the High Street, we’re seeing signs that the consulting firms with weaker business models are starting to sink to the bottom, leaving their more robust rivals bobbing around in the still choppy waters.

But a problem for one set of firms is unquestionably an opportunity for another. Recessions also give us a glimpse into the future, showing us which business models are likely to perform best.

Forget trying to sell. You will be more successful if you can help your customers buy from you instead.

Traditional sales logic says you must first identify a customer need, secondly assess your capability to deliver against that need and thirdly offer a compelling commercial proposition. Now there is nothing inherently wrong with this logic, but a customer often has other questions on their mind before they will finally decide to ‘buy’.

For example;

Recessions are supposedly great times for innovation. Companies, their backs against the economic wall, are forced to be creative; those that rise to this challenge emerge stronger once the recovery comes.

Is the same true of consulting?

It should be. Long and deep recessions like this one create the need for new ways of managing. Post-recession, buyers of consulting want different services: the recession has changed them and they want it to have changed their suppliers as well.

So why does innovation always seem to be such a challenge for consulting firms?

People have been advising each other since the dawn of time, but it was only in the early twentieth century that they felt the need to band together into firms. The shift was a testimony to the broadening role of the consultants and the size of organisations they were dealing with: individuals were no longer enough. But almost a century later, freelance consultants now occupy as much as 20% of the market.

I’ve recently spent some time looking at the thought leadership produced by a selection of global consulting firms and, to be quite frank, I now need a bit of a lie down.

There is a huge variety in terms of what consulting firms like to badge as thought leadership, ranging from truly thought provoking essays on the global economy, through to thinly disguised case studies. This has led me to question what we really mean by thought leadership – is there a definition out there that consulting firms can agree upon?

During my corporate career I have had the relatively unique experience of operating as a Buyer, User, Approver and Supplier of consultancy services – so I have acquired quite a good insight into the buying decision process. Over the years I have seen many different scenarios play out and there are a number of factors which impact the decision to award or not award business to a particular firm. Here are 10 of the more common ways a consultancy firm can come unstuck when bidding into a large organisation;

I often hear my procurement friends and colleagues bemoan the fact that ‘consultancy projects suddenly appear out of nowhere and require them to perform superhuman acts to finalise/formalise the associated contract before the work begins the next morning’. Whilst I appreciate that many organisations have a tendency to engage their procurement function late in the day, this does not mean that the ‘need’ to engage a consultant has been made on the spur of the moment.