It’s all in the timing

We recently ran some round table sessions in London with marketers from some of the world’s leading consulting firms, examining some of the more surprising results that emerge from our annual survey of consulting firms’ clients.

Every year we ask clients to rate firms’ quality and estimate the value added by their work. Puzzlingly, we’ve noticed that sometimes clients describe quality as poor, yet say the value added by the consulting firm was worth many times the fees paid for them. Eh? Surely value equals quality divided by price? Well, no, and lots of our research points to a highly complex relationship between the two.

The picture below shows how clients’ opinions are distributed; it’s greenest where the most responses fall, and reddest where the fewest are. Although it’s reddest in the top left—poor quality, high value—there are still clients there, despite logic telling us they shouldn’t be.

We’ve spent many an hour mulling this one over to find an explanation: Is it the type of work? Is it the Bananarama hypothesis in action? (Who knew their 1982 hit would one day be used to explain value in the consulting market?)

An interesting idea came out in one of our round table sessions: That it’s all in the timing—that the phase of the project, or the passage of time since the work completed is likely to play a large part in the way clients answer.

At the outset, consulting projects can be pretty exciting (my non-consulting friends don’t believe me, but I maintain it can be true). We’re going to change the world! We’ll disrupt X and become market leaders! We’re going to solve all our problems with a whizz-bang system! At that stage, clients may well think the consultants are great at helping the ideas flow, sharpening thinking, and instilling the discipline needed for the long road ahead.

All consultants know only too well that goodwill can evaporate pretty quickly when it gets down to the nitty gritty. In the middle of the project, when you’re up against unforeseen complications, budget overruns, endless change requests, spending far too much time in a room with the same people and eating takeaway for the fourth time in a week—well, this is when you don’t want your clients filling in a survey like ours.

But at the end, once it’s all done and that new product or system really is making a difference—that’s when our high value, low quality paradox starts to make sense. A client may look back on the mad scramble in the middle and decide that the quality of the project wasn’t great, but they may also have their latest set of financial results showing an uplift in profits. Slightly painful memories are still fairly fresh a year later, but clients are also more likely to have hard data proving the project was a success.