Consulting Guidelines for High Impact Results
Consultants with a solid record of high impact results do not worry about getting additional customers, higher billing rates, and more projects. High impact results provide that and also partly eliminate the need for spending time-the consultant’s main currency-on sales and marketing. Results speak louder than words in today’s word-of-mouth interconnected world, & reputation quickly spreads. Design your execution upfront for high impact results and you will keep your schedule booked solid with much less effort. The key guidelines for high impact results for consultants are:
Be Relevant
Apply Winning Strategy
Measure Execution
Leverage Your Network
Be Relevant
Let’s start with relevancy. Imagine you have delivered your gig. Now look back and see who’s affected. If no one is affected, then there is no impact-& no relevancy. You may have implemented elegant solution with the least resources required in the shortest period of time. Yet if no one cares about the results, your efforts obviously failed to make the high impact required for sustained success. Relevancy is key. High impact results must be relevant to the stakeholders involved, & to be relevant they must also be delivered in a timely manner. Time is one of the critical factors for high impact results.
Ask these simple questions:
Who are the key stakeholders? What are their current key pains and desires?
Who is the project leader? What are his current key pains and desires?
Who are the relevant individual contributors? What are their current key pains and desires?
Who are the project’s key customers? What are their current key pains and desires?
Find out who all those people are and what they are after. Doing so will provide a much better understanding of what high impact results would look like.
Apply Winning Strategy
Relevance is about your customers; differentiation is about you. Many can figure out what’s relevant to customers but the path for actual delivery of the service can vary significantly. Customers care about your approach-your style-because it gives them a glimpse whether you are actually capable of delivering what you promise. They care whether your style fit their values and culture. If it is incompatible, they may not choose your services.
Eliminating competition requires you to position yourself uniquely. Ask yourself what’s unique about what you do and how you do it? Are your measurable results significantly higher than those of your competitors? Are your methods unmatched? Do you deliver your services much faster? Do you provide added value on top of core deliverables? Do you share the know-how freely? Do you guarantee results? Do you bill hourly or fixed fee? Are you dependent on the customer’s availability or can you operate independently? Quick note: Do not compete based on billing rate-being cheaper is a losing strategy.
What’s your strategy to be unique?
Measure Your Execution
Outlining relevant outcome and charting the path to it is one thing, delivering is another story. During an engagement, it is easy to get off track and even easier to lose sight of relevance. Distractions include logistics issues such as having a desk or internet connection, or curious employees that want to hang out with an outsider and hear new stories-or worse yet to tell theirs. It can be directly related to the delivery itself-change of scope or burning new questions by the stakeholders or other key people who are involved with the project. The distractions may be unrelated to the customer at all, for example, another customer calls you with urgent issue or a colleague asking for advice to solve his problem. Be prepared to handle all such situations.
The key to staying on track is first breaking the work into smaller pieces – chunking – putting them on the timeline, and then checking the progress. Divide your gig into three to five key deliverables. Usually it is mapped to the key scenarios of the gig. Scenarios are useful as they relate nicely to the customer’s concerns. Divide each deliverable into discrete action items you need to accomplish, map them to the timeline, add time buffers, and start executing one by one. Measure your delivery velocity daily based on the action items and remain constantly mindful of your timeline.
Another key is change. Things are not static, expect changes along the course of delivery. Priorities may change and original goals lose relevancy. Update key stakeholders appropriately. Measure your pace, test relevance.
Leverage Your Network
Expect the unexpected. Things will go wrong, new challenges may be introduced, new problems may arise you’ve never before solved, you run out of time-just to name a few unexpected things you should expect. There will be times when you’ll be clueless what to do next or how to do it-and then how to communicate it to stakeholders. Yet through all this you are still the one who needs to deliver the high impact results.
Your network to the rescue! If you don’t have one-start building it at once. Your network of trusted people should include not only technical people who would help you with specific technical questions such as “how to fix that?” or “how to configure that?” Make sure your network includes everyone who represent people you work with when on assignment: business managers, IT managers, high-ranking managers, mid-managers, finance people, and of course other consultants. Doing so allows you to reach out to your network with confidence when you hit the unknown.
The best way to build your network is during the delivery when you see new people in action. When you spot an insightful person who’s willing to share, make your move and offer to keep in touch beyond the project. You’re not the only one seeking to build their network, so he should jump on the offer. Occasionally ping him with helpful info or with quick question. My experience has shown that in many cases such connections become enduring relationships and dependable allies.
In summary:
Deliver results that are relevant to key people.
Define your winning strategy to help you stand out.
Measure your progress and relevancy throughout the delivery.
Set a goal of making new friends when on assignment to widen and strengthen your network.