Tomicide Solutions, Mar 2018

What Good Clients Can Expect Of Their IT Consultants

By Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan


Did you know that in Great Britain, men can urinate on cars parked in public places provided they aim at one of the rear wheels and put their right hands on the vehicle?

Yes, it's a rather convoluted process.

But not as convoluted as working with bad clients who may remind us of a line from the 70s Sex Pistols song, Anarchy in the UK...

"I don't know what I want but I know how to get it."

They make very specific tactical demands of how their IT consultants should do the very work which they're experts at, but more often than not without strategies of what they want to achieve.

Oh, let's make something clear here.

Although I use the terms "good clients" and "bad clients", "good" merely means that those clients that fall into your Perfect Client profile and you have a good fit to work together. And "bad" means they are not Perfect Clients and you don't have a good fit to work with them.

Nothing evil, nothing sinister. Except some sinister ministers in governments.

I have nothing against smokers, but as a lifetime non-smoker, I refuse to stay at a place where smokers congregate and I need an axe to cut the smoke. I can't stand the smoke. But I'm fine with smokers when they are in non-smoking mode and their breaths and clothes don't ooze smoke.

So, that's about good and bad.

Now imagine yourself that you're a non-smoker, which I hope either you already are or soon become both for your health' sake and being a good role model for your children.

The Consulting Predicament

Many IT consulting firms make the mistake of trying to be more profitable by working harder and longer, but without ever to evaluate some force multipliers in their operation and engagements.

In military lingo, force multiplication is a factor or factors that multiply your chances for victory.

Imagine you're a king and the neighbouring king wants to attack your kingdom to get your land and daughter.

There is a long canyon and the enemy's tanks are rolling into the canyon. Your army's tanks are waiting for them at the other end of the canyon.

So, there will be a tank battle.

Or maybe not.

A recon scout returns and tells you that the enemy's tanks have just entered the canyon and the tank commanders are sitting on their tanks' turrets unprotected, so by sending out 10 snipers equipped with 10 CheyTac M200 Intervention rifles (one of the world's best sniper rifles) and retiring the tank commanders, the tank battle can be avoided altogether.

That's a force multiplier.

So, the key is not working harder and longer (higher labour intensity), but working differently at lower intensity.

In the above example, one Intervention costs $13,800 and the ammo $7.50 apiece.

Operating a tank regiment for once second costs more.

But to achieve this low intensity but high value work, IT consultants have to focus on working with the right clients.

And just as consultants have expectations of their clients, good clients have specific expectations of their IT consultants.

And this is what we try to discuss today.

Let's start with...

1. Specialists, NOT Generalists

"To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is the alone distinction of Merit." ~ William Blake, English poet, painter and printmaker

Good clients are seeking specialists. They regard their businesses special, offering highly differentiated products and services to specific target markets, so they understand that importance of specialisation.

They also know that the more their IT consultants know about their clients' industries, the more valuable they can be.

Why?

If you're just another generalist, you can only help your clients at a server room level. And not as a consultant, but as a contractor.

What is the difference?

Consultants solve expensive business problems working with CXOs in the boardroom and then moving down to the server room.

They start with looking at business symptoms that cause headaches and sleepless nights for the boardroom dwellers. Then they diagnose the business symptoms and discover the technical root causes.

For instance, due to server instability and repeated crashes, salespeople don't bother to enter key information into the horribly expensive CRM system. Key information falls through the racks and clients get pissed off.

So, sales are going down and clients are deserting to the competition and negative word of mouth has started spreading on social media.

In this situation, consultants work on a quantifiable business problem.

Consultants also look at the financials because consultants are finance literate.

And only then do consultants go down to the server room to inspect the technical problem.

By contrast, contractors take dictation from their clients as to what tasks they want the IT people to perform. Constrictors work in the server room and have no hope in hell to ever enter the boardroom. They most probably never meet the CXOs. They work under the guidance and oversight of line managers and supervisors to fix a crash-prone server. Commodity skilled labour, nothing much.

The difference is that specialists who focus on one industry can learn the ins and outs of that industry.

But if you're a generalist, you don't really understand any industry at a deep level.

Specialist means different things to different people.

Based on two studies by the Wellesley Group (RainToday) and Broderick & Co., Global Fortune 1000 recruiters' top two speciality factors are subject matter expertise and hands-on industry experience in the clients' industry.

2. Collaboration, NOT Demands And Dictation

Good clients know that the end result is more dependent on them than on the consultants that they hire.

In fact, when you look at the success of collaboration between clients and IT consultants...

  1. About 10% comes from consultants' expertise.

  2. About 30% comes from the consultant's position in the relationship - peer vs. subordinate.

  3. About 60% comes from the clients' commitment to their successes.

While bad clients are obsessed with #1 (they tend to regard themselves as perfect), good clients focus on all three factors.

Highly committed and collaborative clients and mediocre and collaborative IT consultants are likely to achieve better results than abdicating clients and genius IT experts who operate on a "Tell me what you want and get out of my face".

Here are the typical reasons for IT project failures...

3. Recruiting, NOT Hiring

Good clients recruit their IT consultants, bad clients hire them.

What is the difference?

Quite a bit.

For professions where the difference between competence and incompetence can have serious consequences, smart companies recruit.

Soldiers are not hired. They are recruited. So are high-level executives, lawyers and specialist doctors.

Hiring is really a kind of reverse auction. Who can clients get to perform a list of tasks at the lost possible price?

So, they yell to the world through their megaphones and send out their RFPs to the whole IT community with lots of impressive promises and even more hidden agendas.

Those clients don't look for the best they can find or even the 11th best. They look for someone who can perform the bare minimum for the lowest compensation.

After all, they know they are pretty low-grade in their own industries.

Good clients with big aspirations don't rely on cheap IT professionals.

In contrast to the retail operation of hiring, recruitment is a marketing effort.

Good clients are looking for the best they can find and they know that those people are already working on something they enjoy.

So, they have to entice those professionals away from their current projects and have them invest their expertise and experience in those good clients' projects.

While recruitment is a process of raising the bar by looking for the best the client can justify and afford, traditional hiring is a race to the bottom by looking for the cheapest professional who still can perform the set tasks.

Recruiting raises the bar because in order to find high-quality talents, clients must have high-quality opportunities.

Yes, recruitment costs a bit more than hiring, but the payoff is significantly higher.

But for sewage-grade clients with sewage-grade opportunities, there is no need for quality IT professionals.

4. Philosophical Fit, NOT Merely Technical Match

While bad clients only care about criteria like price or number of hours worked on some specific - usually grossly obsolete - technology, good clients know something very important that English film director and Monty Python team member, Terry Gilliam has summarised thus...

"I like working with good people because if I come up with an idea, they come up with a better idea, then I come up with an even better idea, and so on: It's a leapfrog process, and the work becomes much better than it would be if I only did exactly what I want."

Very often, bad clients jump into projects without ever talking to IT consultants. They chat back and forth a bit and then start the project.

Halfway down in the project the observant Jew client discovers that the IT consultant he works with is also a part-time a neo Nazi activist with deep admiration for Moustache Dolfie and Little Benito.

And that is likely to cause friction which is the best to end as soon as possible by refunding the client's money and moving on.

Good clients don't jump into projects. They ease into them. They chat with their IT consultants to seize them up for character.

5. Objectivity, Not Complicity

With bad clients, IT consultants have to walk on eggshells, knowing they can get fired for no reason at all just because clients woke up on the wrong wide of their beds... some of them head-butting the wall rearranging the structure of their conks.

For good clients, the biggest value IT consultants have to offer is objectivity. Even if clients have in-house IT professionals, they often hire external IT consultants for their objectivity.

And good consultants with objectivity are much more valuable than excellent consultants who are hopelessly entangled in company politics and have secret affairs with their bosses.

In-house people focus on being socially-, politically, religiously and any other way correct in order to keep their jobs. They never tell their bosses that their babies are butt ugly.

Good clients know that the difference between correctness and objectivity lead to friction, but deal with it, because they know, as General Colin Powell put it, "Untidy truths are better than smooth lies."

As mature men and women, they value respectful honesty higher than grovelling politeness.

As adult children, bad clients have the habit of throwing temper tantrums when something goes against their plans.

For them politeness is more important than honesty.

6. Progress, NOT Busyness

Many bad clients suffer from the rocking chair syndrome: Lots of busyness but zero or little progress.

But I could also use the impotent husband syndrome: Lots of effort but nothing to show for.

Bad clients love keeping their IT consultants hyper-busy with minutiae, so those "thieving IT consultants" actually deserve the low price these clients pay them.

Yes, those clients want to see good work, but more importantly, they want to see their IT consultants sweat, suffer, starve, slave and struggle to earn their money, so by the time they finish their projects, they are dutifully battered, bruised, bashed, bloodied, beaten, crashed and crushed, so they actually deserve their clients' money.

For those bad clients, it's perfectly normal to call their IT consultants in the middle of the night and demand an instant progress report.

In contrast, good clients focus progress and productivity. Since they have peer-to-peer relationships with their IT consultants and work collaboratively, they always know how much progress they've made and how much they've left to do.

7. Understand My World

Good clients want their IT consultants to understand the world clients operate in.

So, manufacturing clients want their IT consultants to have manufacturing knowledge.

A trucking company client wants IT consultants to have some knowledge of the trucking industry.

And they can justify the higher price of specialists.

All in all, good clients care about exceptional credibility on the top of expected credibility.

Expected credibility is that you know your area of expertise.

Exceptional credibility is what you know about your client's industry.

When you understand your clients' mindsets, you can link your expertise to their agendas and establish exceptional credibility.

Bad clients focus on expected credibility because it's easy to compare and it's easy to create a bidding war based on it.

8. Mistakes, NOT Hide Them

Good clients admit their mistakes. They know that in their peer-level relationships with IT consultants nothing, bad can happen.

The mantra is not who to blame for the mistake, but how to correct it.

Good clients and good IT consultants don't make an ego issue out of mistakes.

They both know that none of them is infallible, so mistakes are parts of the game.

But since many bad clients are ego-driven, no matter who makes the mistake, they tend to blame their IT consultants. Yes, often even for those results that IT consultants can't control.

Client: "You've promised me that my new server would have a 100% uptime. Now it has a 100% downtime. I demand my money back!"

Consultant (Inspecting the server): "But this server is turned off. Why don't you turn it on?"

Client: "Why? Why? Because the utility company has turned off the electricity in the whole building until we pay our bills."

This and similar situations sound ridiculous, but happen more often than we'd like to. Much more often.

Brainpower, NOT Brawn Power

While bad clients seek extra muscles in IT consultants to perform rigidly defined tasks, usually based on flawed diagnosis and flawed solutions, good clients seek new brain in IT consultants.

Yes, they need IT consultants to implement the jointly developed solutions too, but first, clients need experts to think WITH clients to diagnose the current situation and then to develop the best solution to move forward.

According to a McKinsey & Co. study, some 68% of projects end in disaster and clients don't get the value they bought and paid for, because they interfere with the work of the experts they've hired to solve a problem.

Bad clients always come with specific tactical requests...

"We need windows-based network with 12 workstations with wireless mice and keyboards."

These clients know exactly what they want tactically. Right or wrong (in most cases), this is what they demand. They seek some hired muscle to performed specified manual labour.

Good clients always come with specific objectives to achieve or symptoms to eliminate...

"We're in the XYZ industry, and we are seeking an IT consultant to help us to increase our network's capacity based on our growth projections. Apply if and only if you have hands-on experience in the XYX industry."

These clients know exactly what they want in terms of goals and objectives. And now they seek IT consultants to help them to refine the strategy and the tactics to achieve those objectives.

10. Strategic, NOT Tactical Competency

There is a helluva difference between a, IT consultant and a computer repairman.

How much?

About as much as between a chartered accountant and a bookkeeper.

The former is a big picture person; the latter is a nuts-and-bolts person.

An IT consultant may not know the most effective way of a PCB-mounted VGA socket or changing a laptop's hard drive, but she knows IT at a systemic level and how IT fits into the client's overall business strategy.

Without this knowledge, the repair knowledge is as futile as playing chess with a pigeon. At the end of the game, the pigeon knocks over the pieces, shits all over the board and performs a victory parade.

IT pros know that a high percentage of prospects are broke and/or broken.

Broke that they can't afford to pay professional "real-world" prices for the work they need.

And broken that they can't play a professional game. They seek special concessions, discounts and treatment in dysfunctional relationships in which they can dictate to IT consultants how to do their work.

Raymond Chandler, in his book the High Window, formed a nice description for these clients, "From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away."

Good clients know that good IT consultants with good marketing can always find work, so they don't have to take crap from broke & broken clients.

Also, good clients who are real experts in their fields, recognise other experts and treat them with respect.

For bad clients, the opposite applies. Basically, the Dunning-Kruger effect hard at work.

Dunning-Kruger victims suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly believing they are better than others. Unskilled people fail to recognise their own incompetence, and they project this denied innate incompetence onto others. As a result, they will...

  1. Fail to recognise their own incompetence.

  2. Fail to recognise competence in others.

  3. Fail to recognise the magnitude of their incompetence.

  4. After becoming competent at that skill, they recognise and acknowledge their own previous incompetence.

Bertrand Russell once said, "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

Along similar lines...

Bad clients don't have clear objectives; they just want to dictate their methodologies to IT consultants.

Good clients have clear objectives and eagerly collaborate with IT consultants as to what to do (strategy) and how to do it (tactics) to achieve them.

Conclusion

It may be sad but true. No matter how good you are as an IT professional, unless you have good business development supporting your IT expertise, you have to duke it out in the highly competitive "fungible vendor" category and compete on price.

So, what to do?

Get conversational in boardroom English of your target market. Well, this requires that you specialise both vertically (target market) and horizontally (range of services).

If you do real IT consulting, don't offer keyboard-cleaning and other less-skilled services.

Becoming very at backup and data recovery for mid-sized manufacturing companies is much more lucrative than "doing IT".

It is better, easier and more lucrative to be one of the 20 IT specialists in the whole country than being one of the 200 IT generalists in your town alone.

And now you have a choice between becoming a generalist high-volume pro or a specialist high-margin pro.

They are neither good nor bad. Just different. Drastically different.

In the meantime, don't sell harder. Market smarter and your business will be better off for it.

Attribution: "This article was written by Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan who helps privately held information technology companies to develop high leverage client acquisition systems and business development teams in order to sell their products and services to premium clients at premium fees and prices. Visit Tom's website at http://www.varjan.com.