Tag Archives: prescription

TNF #034: Do you have a prescription?

Welcome Professionals…

…as top management consultants, we are selling cures to management problems. We are literally selling a project or mandate and in a figurative sense, we are selling our ideas, concepts, approaches and so on. Our client needs to buy into it. Our client needs to apply our product to make a change.

Someone made me aware of an interesting analogy. A physician is someone curing health problems. Just like a consultant, this professional also needs clients (called patients) to buy into his/her concepts and to apply solutions (called medicine) in order to make a change. The difference is, that in most cases, the medical practitioner does not even make the attempt to sell something.

prescription

Think of your own experience when consulting a physician. In most cases, he/she will listen to the problem, make a diagnosis and write a prescription. And – in most cases – the patient will accept it and thankfully apply it. Why is this the case? I came to the following observation:

  • The physician addresses a very important if not existential problem of the client which came to see him/her for this
  • The physician suggest’s in most cases only one solution
  • The physician acts with a natural authority

Wouldn’t it be great if we could move our clients by writing a prescription to them? What in our process do we have to change if we wanted to act with the same persuasiveness as a physician? The problem that we address? The argumentation on the solution? Our communication style?

Let’s think about this for a week!

Malte

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