Serving Not Selling: Why Management Consultants Shouldn't "Sell"

Management Consultants Earn Opportunities for Serving Clients, Selling Creates Problems

In 1997, I got into an elevator on the thirtieth floor of an office building in Chicago. I was in my second month at a large firm of management consultants, known for its strong organizational culture.

In my first week, I began working with David, a newly elected partner, on a proposal to a company in Columbus, IN. Our mission was to build the company’s strategy for innovation and growth. I was more excited by the proposal than anyone else on the team. It fueled a career-long fascination with building new businesses in established organizations, has led me from this consulting firm to IBM, and later to Change Logic.

When I entered the elevator, there was David. I immediately asked him, “Hi, did we win the business?” He looked at me gravely and replied, “No, but we do have the opportunity to serve.”

Management Consultants Should be Serving Not Selling

I’ve told this story many times over the years to illustrate how norms get passed on in strong organizational cultures. However, it makes some audiences laugh loudly. One sales leader told me: “You are getting paid to do a job; of course, you are selling something!” It sounds like a management consultant’s deceit, like saying “synergies,” when you mean “layoffs.” Others respond with a witty wink, “Yes, I’ll try to remember to say that next time!”

However, to me, this is neither a deceit nor just a choice of words; it is one of my values. A value is something that we believe to be good and true. In most human societies, cheating and lying are considered wrong and it is a breach of values to lie or cheat. Of course, there is still plenty of both going on, but we are discrete enough to hide or camouflage these behaviors because they are socially unacceptable. This, in turn, creates social pressure that suppresses the incidence of lying and cheating.

The same is true when we are talking about selling a project at my consulting firm, Change Logic. If a member of my team says that they want to “sell” a project to client, for me that is the same as saying, “I want to lie or cheat.” It is a breach of our values. We use the language of serving not selling as a representation of our fundamental beliefs. It is not a deceit or an optional choice of words; it is a value.

Selling Assumes Management Consultants Have the Answers

The value of disapproving lying and cheating is self-interested. We know that human society would struggle to operate without trust. We are still concerned about cheats, but we know that the consequences of offending the social norms are unacceptable to most people.

The same is true for the value of service over selling. It serves a purpose in my business. I have the privilege of advising CEOs and senior teams in many firms on how to manage significant issues related to the future of their organizations. My colleagues and I can play this role only because the client trusts that we are motivated by a desire to see them succeed. They do not have to second guess our advice by wondering: “Is this advice about selling me another project?”

Several years ago, I received an acquisition approach from a firm that builds technology products for other companies to take to market. They knew of our work on innovation strategy and saw an opportunity to move “upstream.” The next day I had breakfast with a client CEO. We had helped his insurance firm to build a new healthcare unit. I asked him what he thought of us expanding our capabilities so that we could offer more of a “turnkey” solution. He was firmly against this idea. “Andy, then you couldn’t be objective in your advice. What they do is available from lots of firms, what you do is rare, and I don’t want to lose it.”

Trust is hard to earn. Senior executives are battle hardened. They know that professional services firms are designed to build a “book of business” at client accounts. They use tactics like the “diagnostic” to find all the things that are wrong with a client’s organization that they can fix. Unsurprisingly, the problems identified during this “analysis” are often much greater than the client ever imagined. This softens up the client and convinces them to pay just a fraction of the value in consultant fees.

Once they have secured the new account, it is a matter of “land and expand.” Building relationships across the organization to secure new “mandates” and position the firm for long-term incumbency. Key to this strategy is a relentless focus on what the client cannot do, why they need help to achieve their goals.

These selling oriented practices erode trust. The consultant is on a self-oriented agenda of generating revenue.

Selling and Serving are Not the Same

Of course, I want more revenue for my company. I think my team does amazing work that benefits a wide range of clients seeking to ignite innovation to generate growth. However, if my relationship with my clients is motivated by selling a project, then my work becomes about driving my own success. If I put that objective ahead of my client’s interests, then I risk violating their trust in me and undermine my ability to do the work.

A counterpoint to this logic could be this: we make sure we sell the right things and so our interests are always aligned with those of our clients. The argument goes on, “You may not like the word selling, Andy, but it doesn’t really matter as long as I do not sell the client something that they do not want.”

This is a self-serving argument that betrays a lack of humility. It assumes you start with an answer to sell. That from the beginning of a relationship, a consultant already knows what the client needs, and just has to get them to “buy” it. It changes and distorts your choices as a consultant to have a ready-made solution to sell, because you are only listening to match the client’s needs with what you’ve got to sell.

The argument that selling and serving are the same is the conceit.

Serving Requires Management Consultants to be Humble

I try to start with the assumption that my clients are smarter than me, know their business better, and are fully capable of achieving good outcomes. I can help them go faster, do better, and be more motivated to succeed, but that doesn’t mean I know more.

This opens up rich possibilities for co-creation with clients, where they are owning the work from the beginning, shaping and designing solutions to important challenges. It also means that from the start of the relationship, you assume that one day it will end. Your clients will be more capable and not need an outside firm to support them. This focuses consultants on client impact - how are we leaving them more able to achieve the results they are seeking - rather than on how we can engineer situations to extend our mandate.

This sounds non-commercial logic. In fact, it is deeply commercial. I truly believe that the reason my firm is still in business after almost 20 it was founded is because of its values and how they inform behaviors. The value of serving, not selling, allows us to build long-term, trustful relationships with our clients that would be the envy of many much larger firms. Of course, we want to be commercially successful, but if we let that be our driver then we will lose our values and with it our license to serve.

It is easy to check my LinkedIn profile and see that I used to work for McKinsey. They have been embroiled in a series of ethical controversies. They articulated strong values, but it proved to be incredibly hard to sustain these at scale across a global organization. There is a difference between your espoused values (what you say) and your values-in-use (what you do).

You only know if you are living your espoused values when they come under pressure and there is a risk of you breaching them. If management consultants always think they are living their values, then it is likely they are not. An unexamined value is of no value at all.