Meet the MasterMinds: Tom
Stevenson on The Relationship Advantage
 Tom
Stevenson held management positions at IBM for more than
twenty years, and was vice president of sales and marketing
for several high-tech firms. He's now a consultant and with
co-author Sam Barcus, wrote The
Relationship Advantage: Become a Trusted Advisor and Create
Clients for Life.
MCNews talked to Stevenson about how consultants
can create enduring client relationships by getting back
to the basics that made firms so successful in the past.
* * * *
MCNews: How would you characterize an ideal
relationship--if there is such a thing--between a client
and a consultant?
Stevenson: The word that comes to mind is interdependent.
In an ideal relationship, the client and the consultant
focus on working together for the mutual satisfaction of
the client. The consultant transfers the necessary skills
and process to the client so they can truly collaborate.
By that I mean they're working together because they choose
to. They could just as easily choose to work apart, but
the relationship is so strong because of the focus and the
value that they become interdependent.
MCNews: So what's your view on the current
state of the typical client-consultant relationship?
Stevenson: The fact is that a lot of
trust has been broken. The corporate and accounting scandals
have tarnished consultants, bankers, and top executives
alike. As a result, client relationships with consultants
are not as strong as they were. They're more tenuous. Consultants
have to work harder to maintain relationships (and their
billing rates) because of the events of the last four or
five years.
I also noticed that, toward the end of the
boom in the 1990s, some consulting firms abandoned their
traditional pyramid approach: Instead of matching the level
of the consulting practitioner to the corresponding level
in the client organization, they brought in salespeople
or business development specialists to go out and close
business with clients. Most of these salespeople didn't
grow up in the firms and didn't have the firms' culture
and values. And that's dangerous.
That's exactly the plight of the corporate
sales force that I've been trying to address. So when I
saw consulting firms do it, I was really surprised because
consultants wrote the book on keeping those relationships
intact at all levels with the client. Abandoning that has
been doubly harmful because trust was damaged at the same
time that relationships were being handed off to closers
who were hired off the street.
I think many of these salespeople have since
been let go, and now consulting firms are trying to figure
out how to get back to the relationships they had before
they transitioned into the business development model. I
know not all consulting firms went in that direction but
I was surprised when I saw many consulting firms fall into
the corporate sales trap.
MCNews: By corporate sales trap do you mean putting a
salesperson between the consultant and the client?
Stevenson: That's exactly right. Think
about the corporate sales model. In the technology area,
for example, corporate sales force turnover is 35% to 40%
a year. At that rate, it doesn't take long to turn over
an entire sales force.
If relationships are based on trust that
is built over time and you're delegating the relationships
to salespeople, you're entrusting that function to the most
junior people in the firm in terms of their longevity. That's
why this approach has never worked.
As long as you keep handing relationship responsibility
off to the newest people in the firm, they will continue
to turn over because they can never really meet the expectations
of the senior practitioners have who should be doing that
job themselves.
MCNews: Is it your view that when these
business development people go into client organizations
instead of the partner or senior manager that clients see
them as pure salespeople rather than problem solvers?
Stevenson: That hits the nail on the
head. And even if they do have the inclination to be problem
solvers or problem finders, they don't have the history
with the firm and knowledge of its processes to do that.
They can't execute.
All they can do is make an appointment and
hope they can bring in someone else. And, as you know, that
first appointment is critical. If you use it just to set
the second appointment and you can't execute real-time in
front of clients, you're perceived as wasting their time.
MCNews: If a consultant does have the ideal,
interdependent relationship with a client, does that necessarily
translate to loyalty from that client?
Stevenson: Well, I think attaining that relationship
advantage with a client implies that you do have loyalty.
But that's not a free pass. I think it was Eastern Airlines
that said you have to earn your wings every day. You have
to keep the focus on the relationship or it will slip away
from you.
If you lose that focus or if the partner or senior manager
expresses less interest or shows up less frequently, I've
seen once loyal relationships fizzle. When weekly visits
become monthly and then yearly visits, clients may be disappointed.
MCNews: Besides having an interdependent client relationship
and delivering work as promised, what other factors drive
client loyalty?
Stevenson: Presence. There's a tremendous
impact when you show up at the right time and you show up
consistently. Too often, once you start a project, the
partner or senior manager fades into the background. You've
got to deliver the work, but you've got to continue to deliver
it through the lips of the people who got it started. That
way, the client sees that there's consistency in the handling
of the relationship and knows that person is always going
to be there which leads to the promise of more work in the
future.
Of course, you can't just make appointments
with clients purely to develop the relationship. If you
show up without a focus on a specific client issue--without
a client agenda--I think the trust meter starts to run backward
on you.
MCNews: Are there two or three innovative
relationship strategies that you think help build client
loyalty?
Stevenson: Continue to use the pyramid approach so that
you keep all the different levels covered in the client's
organization. And deliver on time. One other thing: I've
noticed that consultants are particularly good at meeting
the client on neutral ground by participating in community
organizations and events.
When partners or consultants participate
in the March of Dimes or work on the Olympics or chair committees
for non-profits, that brings them together with clients,
executives and potential clients. To me that is the best
referral mechanism for consulting work. It's a strategy
that corporate people don't employ and generally don't know
how to employ.
MCNews: Why don't corporate salespeople do more in community
activities?
Stevenson: I think they choose not
to because they're not around very long. It's also because
of the productivity stress on salespeople. If they're not
making sales calls or sitting at their computers entering
data into their sales information systems, they're perceived
as being time wasters.
It seems consultants by their very nature
are involved in community work all the time. In many firms,
consultants are given incentives to participate in such
events. The idea is to meet more people and build your own
network.
If something comes from it, that's fine, but
if it doesn't you've done something that's worthwhile anyway.
Getting business is not the primary reason for doing it.
If you say I'm going to volunteer in a specific organization
because these three people work there and I want to get
business from them, it often doesn't work.
MCNews: When you work with consultants
or clients to help them gain the relationship advantage,
what one thing do you see that needs immediate improvement?
Stevenson: I think it's the ability
to truly focus on the person who needs the help. There's
a lot of lip service paid to that, but it's easy to lose
focus.
What's out of whack is this incredible
focus on oneself and one's need to talk about how great
one is and how many of these problems one has solved before.
Instead, consultants should go back to the fundamentals
of doing research, understanding the client you're talking
to, understanding the client's customers, suppliers, and
issues and probing to find out if there's mutual ground
where you can meet to solve a problem.
Consultants have gotten away from that and
have become a little smug. When you meet a client, if all
you're doing is talking about yourself, even if the client
is giving you time because you're highly recommended, that
translates to arrogance.
So I work with people immediately around that
perception of arrogance and say look, you've got to focus
on that person and you can't do it unless you invest the
time to learn about her or him before you meet. And then
the guiding principle once you're with the client is this:
it's not what you say; it's what you ask. That's what's
going to get it started, and I find that's broken everywhere.
That's why we hammer so hard on research.
When you talk to clients and you've really done your homework,
you can feel that there's a different level of engagement
because of the quality of the questions that you're asking.
If you haven't invested any time or if this is one you're
sliding by on without research, you either ask superficial
questions or you revert to talking about yourself. Those
are the only two options you have.
MCNews: If you could give our readers one
piece of advice, what would it be?
Stevenson: I would say to keep the
integrity of the consulting business as pure as it can be.
Because of the trust that's been broken, people look at
you differently these days than they did five years ago.
We've been through a bloodbath, but clients need somebody
to help them, and that's where consultants come in. But
I think they've got to be very careful to go back to their
roots and approach clients with all of the tools and process
that created trust in the past. Because I sense it's a little
haywire right now.
MCNews: Thanks very much for your time.
If you want to find out more about Tom Stevenson,
email him at TomS@austin.rr.com.
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