Andrew Sobel has nearly 30 years of management consulting experience—the last 13 years as the president of Andrew Sobel Advisors. Sobel has written several books about building and maintaining client relationships, including Clients for Life and Making Rain. His latest, All for One: 10 Strategies for Building Trusted Client Partnerships was released earlier this month and can be purchased at book stores or on Amazon.com. Sobel sat down with Consulting's One on One to discuss his strategies for building client partnerships.
Consulting: Why this book right now?
Sobel: Basically there were two points of view that made me realize I had to write this book; the first point of view over the last three or four years came from client executives. I do a lot of interviews with C-level executives about their use of advisers, and clients were basically saying they are consolidating their use of consulting firms. A lot of clients are moving away from using dozens of firms to just four or five preferred firms. The second thing clients were saying was that they wanted more value for their money, very simply put. I did a survey about this about two years ago and this came up with clients and consultants as the No. 1 issue. So, that's from the client side.
Consulting: What about from the consulting perspective?
Sobel: In talking to CEOs of consulting firms, everyone was saying to me that we need to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. We need to make the pieces work better together. That's how we're going to add more value. We've got great ideas circulating around our organization, but how do we mobilize the right people, ideas, and resources into each of our relationships? That's how we can make our mark. Even a firm that has 1,000 professionals is going to have a lot of stuff going on all over the world. The question is how do you figure out how to collaboratively bring that to every client relationship. And, what can we learn from the very long-term relationships out there? One good example is Booz Allen Hamilton, which has worked with the U.S. Navy for 70 continuous years. That relationship is highly valued by both sides, and many firms are asking how do they get more of those types of long-term relationships; what's the formula here? That really became the focus of the book—the whole idea of a trusted partner. Being a single trusted advisor is a starting point, but you want to be a trusted partner, not just a trusted advisor.
Consulting: What steps would a firm need to take to help make that happen?
Sobel: The book goes through 10 strategies. I identified five strategies that are more the responsibility of the individual partner, and five that are more the responsibility of the firm. The first thing I think people have to do if they want to build more trusted partnerships is get bolder and better at what I call 'agenda setting' in the C-suite. And this goes way beyond just understanding your client. This is more about building a deep client view about their situation and industry and being able to connect with them. One big firm I worked with had a partner spend almost full time for one year walking the halls with a fortune 100 company it believed had to be its client. One year—most companies would never make that investment. He built such a deep understanding of their organization that at the end of the year they sold a $20 million project for that company. A lot of my clients say they want to build CEO relationships, but they really haven't understood how to do that. I coach people to think about how do you really engage the CEO on their agenda.
Consulting: So, how do consultants and firms do it?
Sobel: You need to galvanize the attention of senior execs to push the agenda with points of view, showing how they're relevant to the clients' agenda. Consultants get so bogged down with day-to-day work they don't really get their heads out of the sand. The other thing consulting firms have to do is re-invent account planning. Consultants are very analytical, and a lot of the big firms have developed 'account planning processes' with 25-page PowerPoint templates where they do a thorough analysis and say: 'Here are all the services we offer, here are all the needs the client has. Let's put Xs in the right boxes and lets go after them.' I have this expression that says no client plan survives contact with the client. Client planning is a dynamic process involving the client up front. It's no longer an exercise you do from your conference room.
Consulting: In the book, you talk a lot about adding value for the client…
Sobel: I do… I remember one CEO I interviewed said his own top team was vastly enhanced by working with this particular consulting firm. That was an unexpected benefit he didn't think he would get. That's powerful stuff. The point is simply that value is a complex tapestry. It's not just core value, the project benefits, but it's also personal value, knowledge transfer, building organizational capabilities and intangible value. Another way to bring value is with ideas. All clients say they want new ideas. Most consultants, I think, are sort of lazy about that one. They're so focused on the deliverables that they don't really spend serious time on bringing new ideas to clients. Some firms have actually created formalized techniques for bringing new ideas to the table.
Consulting: What are some of those techniques?
Sobel: One my clients uses what it calls the "Big Ideas" program. Every quarter, it brings the client three new ideas. This is a very bold statement, and it means you're on the line by saying it, but it's very powerful if you get your top clients to agree. Of course, you also have to say: 'if you're interested in any of these ideas, we'd like to talk to your people about how you'd implement.' Another client has the "10/10/10" program. On the 10th day of the month, at 10 a.m., everyone stops and writes down ideas for 10 minutes. The team leader collects those ideas, sorts through them and takes the best ones back to the client.
Consulting: You stress that in the book—differentiating your firm and your services to clients…
Sobel: Yes, and I think that is the next frontier. The challenge for most consulting firms going forward is how to deliver their services in a way that creates a more differentiated experience. The whole idea is how do you add value on the interactions with clients, not just the service. Maybe you took $1 billion in cost out, but in the future it's going to be the value you add in the actual interactions with the clients that will be the ultimate value in your service. The firms that are able to do that are the ones who will win over the long run.
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