The Consultant's Handbook: A Practical Guide to Delivering High-value and Differentiated Services in a Competitive Marketplace

CHAPTER FOURMANAGING CLIENT MEETINGS

The ability to engage with clients in an efficient and accurate manner is important to the success of any consulting assignment.

Much of our engagement with clients takes place in the form of meetings. Meetings may concern the discussion of new opportunities, the joint formulation of approaches and strategies, the reporting of progress during project delivery and a wide range of other themes. The approach and style with which consultants engage has a great impact on the client experience. This was highlighted by a senior marketing executive working in the airline industry.

We work with a number of consulting firms and marketing agencies. Each firm brings its own specialist focus area; however, our experience of working with them can be quite different. When we issue a brief some firms come and meet with us and ask questions about the brief. We provide our answers and then the consultants return to their office to work on it. Four days later they call us and set up another meeting to ask additional, more detailed questions. We collaborate in this way, but it takes about three iterations and perhaps two weeks before they are able to deliver a draft that is appealing and close to what we want. Other firms can be quite different. Their people come in extremely well prepared. They ask us very good questions related to the brief, sometimes questions that we had not even considered ourselves. Then after just one meeting they are able to submit ...