The Secret of The Good Consultant

Hold onto your hats as I’m about to reveal the Great Secret of The Good Consultant.  Ready?  Sure?  Trust.  Yup, that’s it.  But hold right there.  What looks like a mere 5 letter word is perhaps the most important weapon in the toolbox of The Good Consultant.

Allow me to explain.

In order to understand the importance of Trust in Consultancy, you need to first take a few steps in another persons shoes:  The Customer.  Ok, let’s roll the clock back a bit to the time before you or your company was engaged in the project with The Customer.  There will have been a meeting between The Customer and their colleagues where they were discussing business strategy and the technologies needed in order to achieve their business goals.  The first branch of Trust is set in place, between The Customer and The Business.  The Business is putting Trust in The Customer to deliver on a promise of the technologies needed to achieve the Businesses goals.

Then The Customer will have realised that the technologies needed to achieve the goals are complex and unknown to them.  What can they do?  Send staff on training courses?  That could take a long time for them to get up to speed and they can’t be spared from their day to day duties.

So what option is The Customer left with?  Who can they call on to assist them with implementing the technologies that they so badly require to meet The Businesses goals? As let’s be honest, no Customer implements technology for technologies sake, there’s always a business reason, especially in these economic times.  Well, in the Cisco world (it’s the one I know best), if The Customer doesn’t already have a partner, but they have decided that Cisco is the way forward for them, they’ll speak to Cisco.

The second branch of Trust is then in place, between The Customer and Cisco.  Cisco will listen to the customers requirements and put them in touch with the partner that they have the most Trust in to be the best fit for the customer and deliver the technologies needed to achieve the Businesses goals.  That’s the third branch of Trust.  So that’s three branches of Trust before The Good Consultant has even met with The Customer.

So off The Good Consultant goes to meet with The Customer to further discuss their issues and gather information needed to put together a proposal of how The Good Consultant believes the technology can be used in order to meet The Businesses goals.  The Customer agrees, an order is placed and the project then commences.

Let’s be clear now.  All The Customer has purchased from The Good Consultant is a promise.  The Promise to deliver a project, as agreed, to hit the Business goals.  The Customer needs The Good Consultant to do the work as they’re unable to complete the work themselves.  So, where is all the Trust?  That’s from The Customer to The Good Consultant to deliver on the promise.  If it all goes badly wrong, who’s going to be held accountable?  Yes, The Good Consultant will be red faced, but it’s The Customer who has the much longer term prospect of having the Business put Trust in them and failing to deliver.

There are future posts that I’m planning, discussing methods of gaining and holding Trust between The Good Consultant and various parties, not least The Customer.  Any comments that others would care to add either on the blog  (http://GoodConsultant.blogspot.com) or on Twitter (@HarrisonLeigh) would be greatly appreciated in shaping those posts.

Until then, keep working on keeping the Trust bulletproof ;-)

LH