Consultancy

There is a common assumption that a business with eleven live opportunities needs less system than one with four hundred. In one important respect the opposite is true. Consonas is built for organisations of two to two hundred people, which is the whole of this trade except the firms that became something else.

With four hundred opportunities, individual failures average out. Some go quiet, some are chased late, and the aggregate still tells you what is happening. With eleven, each one is a meaningful fraction of the year, and a single opportunity that quietly went cold because nobody rang in March is a material commercial event.

The other difference is timescale. A consultancy sale takes months. Someone enquires in January, goes silent in February, reappears in April having spoken to two competitors, and decides in June. Six weeks of silence is completely normal, which means the ordinary instinct for whether something is alive stops working, because dead and waiting feel identical.

Which is what the stage history is actually for

Not aggregate reporting. With eleven items you do not need statistics, you need to be able to read each one and know how long it has been where it is compared with the ones that eventually closed.

That is the number memory cannot supply. Everyone in a consultancy believes they know the state of every deal, and everyone is wrong about at least one, usually the one that has been quiet longest because it has stopped being mentioned in conversation.

And the follow up that is nine months away

The most valuable pipeline in a consultancy is frequently the people who said not this year and meant it. They are qualified, they know you, and they have a real reason that will expire.

Almost no one contacts them, because nine months is longer than any good intention survives. A task with a date is the whole solution, it is unglamorous, and for a small consultancy it is probably the single highest return thing in this product.

Not delivery tooling

No billing from recorded time, no resource planning, no document assembly, and an acceptance by typed name rather than a drawn signature. If billing by recorded time is the core of your business, buy something built for it.

Not a proposal writer

There are quotations on Standard and above, built from a catalogue, with a link a client can open. That is not proposal writing, and most consultancies write proposals in a word processor, which is a reasonable thing to keep doing.

The honest test for whether you need this

Has anything been forgotten this year? A prospect who said try me in six months and was never contacted. A proposal that went quiet and no one chased. A sponsor who moved and you did not follow.

If none of those has happened, your memory is doing the job and a spreadsheet may genuinely be enough. If two of them have, the cost is already being paid, and it is considerably larger than the software.

Put in every live opportunity, including the ones you are embarrassed by

Especially those. A pipeline containing only the deals someone is proud of tells you nothing you did not already know, and the quiet ones are the entire reason to have one.

This usually produces the first real number a consultancy has had: how many live opportunities there actually are. It is nearly always either more than anyone thought, because nothing was ever formally lost, or fewer, because half of what people were counting was a conversation.

Then add a dated task for everybody who said not this year

This is the highest return ninety minutes available to a small consultancy and almost no one does it. Go back through the last two years and find everybody who said the timing was wrong, and put in a task for when they said to come back.

They are qualified, they know you, and they had a real reason that will expire. The only thing between you and that conversation is a date, and a date is free.

Record the sponsor separately from the client

The person whose budget it is and the person who wants the work are often different, and a consultancy that records only one of them loses the account when either moves.

Connections carry dates, so when your sponsor changes employer you get both facts: the account is at risk, and somebody with a good opinion of your work has just arrived somewhere new with the authority to hire a consultant.

Keep the proposals you lost

With the price, the competitor if you know it, and the reason. A consultancy loses few enough proposals that ten close reasons read together are a strategy document rather than a statistic, and deleting them destroys the only dataset a small firm has about its own market.

Build one saved view and nothing else

Anything that has not moved in a month. In a nine month sales cycle that is not an alarm, it is a prompt to decide deliberately whether to chase, and deciding deliberately rather than forgetting is the whole difference.

January: a conversation at a conference, which is not yet anything

An operations director at a food manufacturer says, at the end of a session you spoke at, that their second site has a planning problem and they have been meaning to get someone in. You exchange details. Nothing has been sold and there is nothing to forecast.

What goes in is small: the person, their employer, the connection between them with a start date, and a note saying where you met and what they said the problem was, in their words rather than yours. Their words matter later, because in September somebody will ask you what they originally wanted and the honest answer is usually not what you proposed.

What it costs to skip this: nothing visible, which is exactly why it is skipped. The badge goes in a pocket, the pocket goes in a wash, and in April when they email you there is no record of the January conversation to read before you reply.

March: the scoping call, and a second name you were not expecting

The call happens. The operations director brings their finance business partner, who says very little and asks one question about how the saving would be measured. That question is the whole sale and it came from someone who was not on the invitation.

Now there is an opportunity, at the scoping stage, with a likelihood attached. There are two relationships against it rather than one: the person who wants the work, and the person whose budget it is. Consultancies routinely record only the first, because the first is the one who is pleasant to talk to.

The cost of recording one name is not felt in March. It is felt in August, when the operations director stops replying and the only route back into the account is a person whose name nobody wrote down.

May: a proposal, and the two facts worth keeping are the ones people delete

Three weeks of work goes out as a document written in a word processor, because that is where proposals get written and there is no reason to change that. The stage moves to proposal. The document goes against the record as a file, along with the price you quoted and the scope you offered.

You also learn, in passing, that they are speaking to a larger firm. Write that down. In a business with few opportunities the identity of the people you lose to is not a statistic, it is a description of your market, and ten of those read together in two years will tell you something you cannot currently see.

June and July: silence, and the instinct that stops working

Six weeks pass. Nothing arrives. In a nine month cycle this feels exactly like a deal that has died and exactly like a deal that is waiting for a board meeting, because those two states are indistinguishable from the outside.

The stage history is the only thing that separates them. This one has been at proposal for six weeks. The two that closed last year sat at proposal for nine and eleven weeks respectively. So this is not late yet, and the correct action is a deliberate decision to wait instead of an anxious call that signals you have nothing else on.

September: the money moves before the person does

The operations director rings to say the capital budget has gone to a line replacement and there is nothing left this year, but the new year starts in April and they want to do this then. Every consultancy has had this call and almost none of them do the next bit.

The opportunity is closed, with a reason that says deferred to the next budget year rather than lost. A task is dated for February, which is when the budget is being argued about rather than when it is being spent, and the task carries what to say: the measure the finance business partner asked about in March.

October: an order arrives from somewhere else entirely

The finance business partner has moved to a different manufacturer and needs the same piece of work, now, having watched you handle their colleague honestly in September. They email you directly. The connection to the old employer ends with a date and a new one begins.

None of that was a sales activity. It was the consequence of writing down a second name in March, which took one minute and no judgement, and of a system where connections carry dates so the old client record still shows who was there.

What the same nine months cost without any of it

The January conversation is not in anything. The March call produces one name. The proposal is a document in a folder named after the client, with the price in it and no record of the competitor. The silence in June produces a call made out of anxiety in week three, which is answered politely and moves nothing.

The September deferral is a good intention that survives about a fortnight. April arrives, no one rings, and the work is done by the larger firm. The finance business partner's move is invisible, because their name was never held anywhere. It reads as bad luck and it was five minutes of typing spread across nine months.

The budget holder above your sponsor

Your sponsor wants the work. Someone above them signs for it, often without meeting you, on the basis of a summary your sponsor writes. That summary is the actual proposal and you do not get to write it.

Hold that person as a relationship connected to the same organisation, even when you have never spoken to them, with a note of what they care about as reported by your sponsor. When the deferral call comes in September, the question of whose priority displaced yours has a name attached to it rather than being weather.

Procurement, who arrives after you have already won

In organisations above a certain size the decision to hire you and the ability to pay you are separated by a supplier onboarding process nobody mentioned. Insurance certificates, a signed set of terms, a supplier portal with its own login, sometimes a framework you must be on to be paid at all. Public sector work of any size is advertised through Contracts Finder and Find a Tender, and being on neither is one reason an opportunity never reached you in the first place.

This is where a won opportunity sits for six weeks doing nothing, and it is invisible in most consultancies because it does not feel like selling. Record procurement as a relationship with the organisation, keep the certificates and the signed terms as files against the record, and put a task on the date each one expires. An insurance certificate that lapsed is the most avoidable reason in this trade for an invoice to go unpaid.

The incumbent, who is usually a larger firm and occasionally you

Almost every consultancy opportunity has somebody already there: a larger firm on a framework, an interim who does some of this, or an internal team who believe it is their job. They are a party to the decision whether or not they are in the room.

Record the name where you know it, on the opportunity and again in the close reason. The pattern that emerges over ten opportunities is the useful thing, and it is frequently not the pattern the firm believes about itself.

The people who will have to live with the recommendation

The operations team, the site managers, the staff whose process you are about to change. They are not buyers and they cannot say yes, but any one of them can say this has been tried before, and in a nine month cycle that sentence has time to work.

You do not need a record for each of them. You need a note on the organisation saying who objected and what they said, because the second engagement at the same client begins with that objection and arriving with an answer to it is the difference between a repeat and a polite decline.

The referrer, who is the cheapest route into this trade and the least recorded

An accountant, a solicitor, a past client, somebody you shared a stage with. Consultancies are grateful to referrers in conversation and have no idea which ones actually produce work, because gratitude is not a record.

Connect the referrer to the relationship they introduced. Do it every time, including for the ones that go nowhere, because the value of the connection is entirely in being able to count it later. A firm that can name the three people who introduced most of its work can do something deliberate about them, and a firm that cannot buys advertising instead.

The associate you have not booked yet, and the partner firm you bid alongside

Both are on your side of the table and both can lose you the work. The associate whose availability you assumed and who took a longer engagement elsewhere. The partner firm whose section of the joint proposal arrives late or contradicts yours on price.

Hold them as their own relationship types, connected to the opportunities and engagements they are proposed for rather than only to the ones they worked on. A proposal that names an associate is a commitment, and the difference between a commitment and a hope is whether anybody asked them before the document went out.