A potential client asked me the other day, “what is the process to engage you”. It caught me off guard since I spend so much time trying to engage potential clients. Another current client told me a story of how he says he is an external consultant (rather than a high level leader) at seminars and industry events- because he wants to avoid the inevitable sales pitch and the arduous politeness he must repeat again and again. You, as the owner of the change, should have the head start in this relationship. And you should not be afraid to either ask or make the connection you need. When it comes to high level consulting the relationship is as crucial as the results; the connection as important as the delivery and the process.
The simple answer
Having met (more on this at the end of the post) we would have lunch, coffee and or attend a meeting together. I would have plenty of questions for you, some expected and some surprising. There would be plenty of time for me to listen, re-ask and provide immediate reaction. The same would be true for you- question, listen, re-question. That dialogic process creates possible outcomes, objectives, uncovers symptoms (not root causes just yet), gives hints to me of your style of leadership, the organizations history and the place you and the company fall in a growth timeline. It gives you an understanding of my perspective and approach and how that might mesh with you and your organization.
If there is a fit I would put our conversation into a written document with options that range from an introductory connection ( usually seminars or focus groups) to a retainer arrangement, possibly including the design of a change entity for your organization.
If the fit needs more fine tuning we switch from coffee to lunch, lunch to coffee or possibly to one of your internal meetings to extend the content for our give and take question and listen process.
What turns out to be more complicated
Meeting each other.
In this age of social media and thousands of “connections” you would think this would be easy. And it is if you are looking for a solution, for a big team, for a bigger consulting firm that wants to run your show. They have the resources to push their stuff (I chose not to use the word content) to the top of a Google list. An independent has to be savvy to get that to happen (I have done it a couple of times in other countries for “change management” and I do well with “horizontal change management”- but who searches that?).
I did a little exercise in trying to find myself. If it were my kids I would not be happy with the grade. Interesting though, a practitioner could find me pretty easily (in fact they have for clients in the past). So if you are veering away from the consultant (or firm) that spends a lot of time and overhead (which you will pay for) getting to the top of the search use the practitioner to practitioner techniques.
- Linked In questions are great for that- you can either ask a question yourself on your category or do a search in the answer category off of your Linked In home page.
- Join a Linked In group on the topic you are interested in and start a discussion or just troll for perspective.
- Change your search parameters to something narrower like “Organic Change Management”.
- Try Scribd or Issuu document searches on your topic. My “Corporate Change Management” paper held a top spot for quite awhile.
- Every independent that is passionate about their work has a blog, writes papers, and has a mix of profiles and information spread over the web, once you have an actual name you can get a good idea of their perspective and approach.
- Contact a peer that shows up in searches for the person and ask them what they think- an insiders recommendation.
In between these bullets I have tried to search for myself like a potential high level client. I am buried in the mix for the usual searches, my name works, but we are talking about out of the blue first here. A Google search for change management blogs did not instantly reveal me (nor for that matter did it actually reveal ANY change blogs- what is up with search these days?). I do show up if you get to Bloomberg’s Business Exchange, Technorati and Bing searches (might be time to change my allegiance).
This turns out to be a frustrating exercise for both client and consultant…and this is unexpected, not the way I thought I would end my post.
When I am looking for my own information on something I typically start at about the third page of search items. That is where interesting blog posts turn up, where exchanges about the topic appear (including the previously mentioned Q & A section on Linked In), where peer group listings reveal themselves- in other words where the information from the people who truly know some answers lies. If a consultant produces enough good content they will begin to rise to the top. You, as a client would be looking to find someone who has worked hard on their craft over time (which matches the content climb). We might be getting to an answer…
