Tag Archives: top management consulting

TNF #063: It’s all a matter of trust

Welcome Professionals…

…trust is the essence of the trusted advisor that we all strive to be.

Building trust is typically a arduous long-term process. It requires high quality work, a good amount of generosity towards your client and at least one moment of truth. We need to put a real investment of work, time, money and attention into our client relationships in order to make them trustful. But is this all worth it? Aren’t we better off with a quick transaction where we receive the value right away? When is the time we get something in return?

The true value of trustful relationships usually shows under pressure. When the client has to make a high performance achievements under high time pressure. Then, there is definitely no time left for a benchmarking of different service providers, chasing the best offer, negogiating for the best price. Our client will turn to the trusted advisor. This is the time when we can benefit most from a trustful relationship. On the one hand there is less pushback on our premium fees. On the other hand it is a great time to learn and grow together with our client as we get jobs beyond our core expertise.

Although the usual checks and balances might get by-passed, we must not let it slip. We need to make sure that we deliver high quality work that complies with our professional standards also under these high pressure conditions. Otherwise we may loose the trust again. In fact, keeping our high standards under these circumstances is a chance to deepen the trust even further.

Now, as we approach the end of the year, it is a perfect timing to spot these opportunities. Our clients face their yearly targets. They may struggle to get there. And they count on you!

I trust you will help them!

Malte

Thursday Night Flight is brought to you by Malte Müller Professionals. Sharing best practices for top management consultants on topics like communication, client handling, problem solving, appearance, and fitness. Check out www.mm-professionals.com for more material and free resources!

TNF #062: Online presence

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Welcome Professionals…

…lately I have been talking with a friend about the use of networking platforms like LinkedIn. “Does it make sense to present myself on LinkedIn, even if I am not looking for a job?”, she was asking. “Are you kidding me?” was my reply.

Well, since you as readers of this blog are mostly members of our LinkedIn group “Trusted Advisor – Success for Consultants”, it might be obvious to you, why you would need some online presence. LinkedIn and some other networking tools are quite useful, not just for job seekers. But I am not advertising social media here.

My point is: If you are in a client serving business, you need an online presence. People that are about to meet you or that are even about to do business with you will look you up in the internet. They will enter your name to Google or LinkedIn or other search engines. And you want to be in control of what they see. You want to be the master of your online presence. You always want to have a professional appearance, also on the web.

Everything you put out there in the internet has to comply with professional standards. Not everything has to be about business, but your private stuff has to be posted sober-minded. Then, you want to make sure that your own crafted web image ranks high enough when someone looks you up. Since LinkedIn is the largest business network, it makes sense to use it since Google will display all LinkedIn hits for your name on the first search page. Maybe it is also useful to craft your own personal website.

Whatever you do, you want to do it the professional way. There are many tips & tricks out there on how to pimp your social media profile. Typing “optimize LinkedIn profile” into Google or YouTube will yield some quite helpful links. However, I see so many people getting the basics wrong. It all starts with correct spelling of the current position. Why do so many people misspell the word “management”? Typos in their own job title are the kind of sloppiness that is driving me crazy.

Stay professional,

Malte

TNF #060: Praise and stand out

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Welcome Professionals…

…when is the last time you praised one of your team members? When is the last time that you have been praised for your work?

It has become quite common to use compliments and praise only to sugar-coat the assignment of additional work or constructive criticism. In fact, many people believe that criticism comes across as more constructive when wrapped in some compliments.

Try to stand out! Praise your team member for something that he or she did well. Does not have to be an extraordinarily heroic achievement. Just something that served well to make progress. Go to the person and hand over the praise with eye contact and a smile. Then walk away. Refrain the habit to pass on the next task.

This simple action is so unusual that it has a big motivational effect. It leaves the receiver with astonishment: “I can’t believe she walked over here just to tell me that!”

You will see, praising your team members like this will also be a lot of fun for you!

Try it!

Malte

TNF #059: Billability by referrals

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Welcome Professionals…

…This week I talked to a self-employed consultant. He works by himself, in his own one-man-company. He told me that he had sold and executed 800 full consulting days within 4 years. That’s quite an incredible billability for a consulant who does all by himself.

The average size of a project is about 30 days, so he cannot count on long running assignments. On the other hand, he cannot afford much time for acquisition because he has to deliver on his ongoing projects. So how did he do it?

He gets referrals to new clients by his core network. He says he knows about 10 clients really well. Meaning that he really knows what is on top of mind for each of the 10 people. He knows their job challenges as well as their personal and private matters. He supports them, whenever they need a quick helping hand, some advice, or an emotional bystander. What he gets in return is referrals to new clients. So many that he is fully booked. All the time.

Can you also count on ten strong relationships? People who would refer you to your next client? Hopefully so!

Malte

TNF #058: Looking intelligent

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Welcome Professionals…

…have you ever tried to look more intelligent than you actually are in front of a client? I fell guilty of this. Many times in the past and sometimes today.

It is tempting. As top management consultants we want to appear capable of solving our clients problems and intelligence is certainly an important trait in successful problem solving. We must demonstrate our intelligence in order to achieve credibility we may think.

The problem lies in the demonstration, not in the intelligence itself.

There is nothing wrong with applying intelligence in a client meeting. Laying out an approach that has been well thought through, sharing creative ideas, applying deep and structured thinking to understand the real issue – all of this is constructively adding to our credibility.

The moment we cross a fine line and try to show off our intelligence is when the trouble begins. When we use smart vocabulary, try not to be surprised because we knew it all before, jump to solutions, and generally try to look intelligent in front of our client, it hurts the relationship. It destroys trust!

Why? Because of a combination of two things. First, we seem to take ourselves more important than we should. But the attention should be centered on the client in order to build trust. Second, the client may feel uncomfortable by consciously or unconsciously sensing that we are faking something.

Instead, we should not be afraid of looking stupid sometimes.

Malte

TNF #057: Result = Activity x Competence

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Welcome Professionals…

…at the moment I am conducting a lot of interviews with senior sales executives. This is very insightful for me as I am trying to dissect their success factors and understand the main value levers.

One sales leader that I met this week said, he is operating on a very simple formula:

Result = Activity x Competence

My guess is that many of us hold empirical evidence that this simple formula is true for consulting projects. The more experience and thus competence you have in the assignment subject, the better you will manage your W/L-balance. Less experience can be compensated to a certain extent by more activity. Of course, to achieve the highest value that our clients deserve, we all strive to deliver highest compentence in combination with focused hard work.

I am personally very much in favour of simple and actionable frameworks. And I think you as top management consultants will join me in this preference. This formula is really pretty simple and certainly not enough to explain the world of sales to a rookie. However, it may serve as a good reminder on what really counts – and this well beyond the sales business.

Interesting enough, these two multipliers have different dimensions in time. Competence is a long term achievement, while activity can be allocated immediately through prioritization and effort.

Both competence and activity can accumulate over time, but only if we consciously steer the process. If we only dive into an urgent and important project by allocating lots of activity, it will not necessarily raise our competence. We must step back, revisit our actions and learn from them. The same with activity. If we follow unconnected projects, activity invested will never accumulate. We must have an overarching program, a broader goal to invest our activity in order to make it count.

Hopefully, I have not made things more complicated. Just remember:

Result = Activity x Competence

Happy frameworking,

Malte

TNF #055: Persistence is key

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Welcome Professionals…

…I was reminded of the importance of persistence this week. For a time of 2 weeks, I had to interrupt my daily workout due to a cold. When I started again, I was surprised how weak my muscels had become only due to this break of 2 weeks.

It is so important that we keep our positive habits consistently. We need to keep our routines of practicing and continuously improving our skills. The moment we stop, the skill level will degrade rapidly.

This is not only true for physical sports, but also for creative thinking, slide writing, story telling, networking, giving speeches and so on and on. Persistence is key!

Wishing you a great and persistent week

Malte

TNF #054: Let go

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Welcome Professionals…

…this week a friend told me about his new concept of letting go. He is a very successful salesman. He has sold all sorts of things in his life, machines, clothes, ideas – at the moment he is selling luxury travel.

Sometimes, he told me, he is getting stuck with a potential buyer. He offers everything the customer is asking for, ticks all boxes, but still cannot get to a close. When he recognizes that he might be chasing the deal too hard, he decides to actively let go of the potential customer. He tells himself that it does not matter if the person buys today, tomorrow, or never. He makes a farewell statement and let’s the customer alone. Surprisingly, this is the moment when quite many of these customers actually buy.

Well, I don’t know if this works for me. I am going to try it with my potential clients. Maybe I can tell you later about this.

What I do know is something very similar. To let go is the same concept that works with my brain when thinking about a concept. When I am chasing ideas like my friend is chasing deals. When I turn away a bit frustrated and tell myself that this actually does not matter much, I am let go. I do something else – and there it is. The idea comes to my mind. The trick is about relaxing the brain.

It can be best achieved by pursuing an activity that does not require much brain power. Best results I get when doing some physical workout or going for a walk. Checking the media creates too much sensual overflow. But really letting loose can be a very powerful tool in a profession where creativity counts.

Let (‘s) go

Malte

TNF #053: Getting close to perfect

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Welcome Professionals…

…we all aim to create perfect results for our clients. But as we know, there is actually nothing perfect in business life. We can only get close to perfect, but we will never get there in one step. In fact, to come close to perfect, it needs many iterations.

After doing the best we can and approaching a topic from multiple perspectives, we can only get better by involving some other critical minds. Ideally, we have a team of direct reports who are not too shy to speak up, or we have well-meaning colleagues, and we certainly need a trustful relationship to our boss or other senior advisors. For everything that we produce ourselves, we will have a certain bias then let’s us overlook some faults and shortcomings. This is just human.

We need to be open to share our thoughts and material with our colleagues before we take it to the client. While it hurts sometimes to get criticized, this is the only way to make good material really excellent.

Best consultants are not afraid to fail in front of their peers. They are not embarressed to aks questions. They take risks within the team in order to shine in front of the client.

Hoping you will shine

Malte

TNF #052: Anniversary issue

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Welcome Professionals…

…to the anniversary issue of Thursday Night Flight! As you can tell by the number in the title, this is the 52nd edition of the best practice blog for top management consultants. This means we have been once aroung the year with it together – week by week. Thank you so much for joining me and all the feedback I received from you. (Mostly in private, though).

When I come home on a Thursday night, I sit down, finish my writing and publish the next post. Quite often, I have collected only some raw ideas during the week and need to formulate the article right before the deadline. The deadline is a good thing, though. It pushes me to get something done each week.

A friend of mine once said: “Why don’t you skip an issue this week? You don’t have to write every week, you are your own boss, nobody expects you to do this every single week.” I guess he is right. Of course, I would like to believe that my audience expects me to write something each week. That there are readers out there who wait eagerly for each issue of the blog. But Google Analytics tells me that most of you look at the blog only from time to time. That’s okay and I hope you like it from time to time.

I actually do it because I promised it to myself. I said I would do it. So I do. Eventually the blog is called “Thursday Night Flight” and not “every other Thursday or whatever”.

You know what? This discipline and consistency feels great. Making the weekly publishing a habit and sticking to the plan is a reward in itself. Each single week it is a rather small step, but looking back on 52 issues around the year makes me feel a little bit proud.

BTW, today is my 40th birthday, which also fits well with the title of this post. Forgive me for being a bit sentimental here. I feel extremely grateful for the last 40 years. Looking forward to more to come.

Stick with me through the next year of Thursday Night Flight!

Malte