In technical consulting it is critical that your team create a sustainable pipeline for growth alongside delivering excellence to clients. How do I help technical consultants be high performers and client centric? Below is a recent programme delivery undertaken over a four month period for a client.
My client is going through a challenging transition, with increased competition in their marketplace they have been in the fortunate position to have work come to them. Now they are facing increased competition as their services are encroached on by specialists and management consultants. My client wanted to support their teams to place the client at the centre of all they do, gain confidence in having sales conversations and adding best practice process that could be deployed by any of the teams. There was also a need to address some of the challenges of a fast growing team, many of who have recently joined the world of consultancy for the first time or were taking on more people leadership activities and managing more complex workloads of their own.
I worked with two syndicate groups, Directors and Managers. Both groups had four half day workshops over four months. The Directors also all accessed 5x initial 1-2-1 coaching sessions that have now continued on for 10 months.
Initial discovery calls were held with both Managers and Directors to gain insights from delegates on the challenges the leadership team were seeing. Lesson plans were then created for a series of half day workshops for each group. The lesson plans were then updated throughout based on group and organisational feedback. The workshops focused on the following topics;
- Exploring how to best create leads and opportunities
- Mapping out an ideal sales process, building on existing activity and industry best practice
- Creating a checklist of questions for client discovery calls
- Value based pricing methodology
- Mapping out a best practice proposal process including storyboarding
- Exploring the opportunities for Key Client Management including segmentation and creating a template for a simple live client document formed from industry best practice tailored to the organisation
- High performance tools; including prioritisation, delegation, coaching, negotiation, mindsets, use of LinkedIn, pitching and presenting with confidence and many more tailored to the needs of the team as the programme developed
The workshops were a mixture of training, group discussion and sharing the teams own best practice and practical work including small breakout groups. All the sessions included pre-work to support thinking in advance and post session follow-up. Each workshop also started with reflection on the implementation of previous sessions and lessons learned.
Directors 121s were undertaken monthly with a range of coaching discussions undertaken to support individual performance. Outcomes of the coaching sessions also then fed into the workshops where there was an opportunity for wider group learning and discussion.
Added value was provided by attending and helping facilitate the clients annual conference and creating a number of processes to dovetail into the organisations existing systems so that best practice could be quickly implemented.
Benefits of this approach included;
- Highly client centric and bespoke programme for the organisation
- Giving confidence to consultants and ‘ready to go’ tools to support their performance
- Highly individual and client centric approach to getting the best out of people and teams
- Wrap-around advice, guidance and input as required by the Directors and Managers to meet their day-to-day challenges
- Deployment of tried and tested tools to support performance of the teams
- Pre and post engagement preparation and follow-up to support different learning styles and the embedding of the training
- Tying into and embedding the material in organisational systems and processes
What did clients say?
I enjoyed the workshop and found it very useful. It put in a structured approach to the proposal process. It also added valuable detail and complementarity to what we usually do. Account segmentation and key client management were new and valuable topics for me.
A short note of thanks. These sessions with you have been amongst my highlights of the last three months. Always so specifically helpful and inspirational.
EMPOWERED2 