Consulting requires a significant amount of communication. It says here a client communication, but just general communication with you and your manager, you and your team. The communication happens in multiple shapes and sizes. You can see here the icons by email, by meeting, by Zoom, by all of those things. Here, a hypothetical eight-week project, you can see the different stars, 1, 2, 3, and 4. These are all different examples of client communications that you might have. Number 1, if you have a kickoff meeting, you need to make sure that the right people are there. Number 2, data requests. Three, setting up client interviews. Which clients? How much time do you need getting on their calendar? Then number 4, executive status reports, because you want to give the client updates as you go. Let's use the example of data collection. I think the example was number 2 on the previous page. Let's use number 2, data collection as an example of how you follow up with a client. This framework I've used many times, the head, the heart, and the hand. When we're collecting data from the client, we want to make sure that it makes sense and we are treating them well like a human, and then making it easy for them to get the job done. I've been guilty of this too. You can see here at the bottom I said, sadly, consultants many times are in a rush. The client didn't give us a lot of time to do this work. As a function of that, we get a little rushed, we get a little sloppy. Maybe we're not very clear to the client and we push the client to get it done. The next several pages, we will talk about pushing the client. But I will say we need to do this in the right way. The name of this section is called client communication. But what you could say is, how do you motivate and persuade the client to take action in a professional way? First, what you're asking the client needs to make sense. Obviously, if it's not clear and it's not understandable, and the client is scratching their head and they're sending you an email back saying, "What is it that you want?" You have problem. Communication is breaking down. This seems like the very first step. Let's be very clear in what you want. In a data collection, data requests scenario, it's the things that you would expect. I'm going to highlight them. What is the data? The different products, the locations. Did you want costs? Did you want price? Did you want quantity? What exactly in there are you looking for? Date ranges. Is one year of data enough or do you need two years of data? What's the delivery format? Can I send you a flat file or a CSV Excel? Can it be just a straight SQL data pulled from the database? What's the format is going to be in? The third one, data definitions. This is something that I made the mistake before where you ask for the data, but what I call something is not what the client calls it. When they gave it to me, they thought it was the right thing. I thought it was the right thing. But after doing all the analysis and spending hours at the hotel doing the analysis, I find this actually doesn't make sense. Make sure what you're asking for is very clear and it's the same language. There's a clear definition of the data, and give it a due date. If you ask the client for something and don't specify when you'd like to have it, look, it's not going to happen. The last one and this is true, I feel like for a lot of things that new hires, the green graduation caps, are going to do is vet your thinking. Before you send stuff to the client, especially in the first year or two of the job, your manager will not mind, M-I-N-D. They will not care if you're a little cautious and you say, "Hey manager, I'm about to send out this data request. Can I send it to you first to take a look over? Make sure I didn't miss anything." Because if you're going to make an error, your manager would much rather, you make that error and let her take a look at it first before it makes it through the client organization. Number 2, just like the title says, consulting is a people business. How you treat people matters. Put this another way. Don't be rude. A lot of times the clients, they don't know who you are. They don't know where you're from. They don't know how long you're going to be here. They don't know what you're going to do with the data that they give you. There's a sense of vulnerability and so you need to just be smart, respectful, build rapport, and be a human. What I would say is sometimes the "Data guy" is not the most appreciated person in the organization. They're not the executive. They don't have the corner suite with the glass windows and stuff like that. Take a moment and pause and explain the why. Why is this data required? Why is it that it needs to be done by next Friday? Why might this be useful for this initiative? One, it helps to motivate that person when they know why they're doing it of course, but maybe even more important than even. There's a fairly good chance that if you explain why you need something, they will be able to provide you better ways to do that. Hello, Mrs. IT person, we would like to pull out some data for x, because if we have x will be able to do this thing. It's very possible once she understands that she might say, I see you're trying to do this thing. But x is not really what you want, you want y, because she knows the data potentially at the client side better than you do. Let's not be so arrogant to think that the clients, IT person or who's in that client organization doesn't know potentially better than you, where the treasure is. Here's a funny expression that I've used a fair amount in teaching and consulting. You need to be persistent. A fair amount of consulting is professional nagging. You need to be pretty good at nagging people to get stuff done. People are people, they have a full-time job. They're not getting paid extra to help you the consultant, so call it nagging, call it being persistent, call it what you want. But your ability to motivate people to do stuff is a part of what makes you a consultant and it's a really nuanced skill set. It's not something that everybody can do and a lot of people do this very poorly all right? The final thing is, if there's a risk, if there's a chance that you're going to be delayed. Data is no good. They're not being responsive, you need to raise a flag very quickly and get on this. Especially as it relates to data collection. This work is very front loaded, meaning a lot of this stuff happens at the beginning of a project. Once that starts getting delayed you, it becomes a bit of a pile up during the project and that's not going to make anybody happy. The last logo here is the hands. How can we make it easy and less painful for the client to do the work? Our goal as consultants isn't to make the client's life worse, it's to make their life better and then also involves any requests that you're doing to the client. You're going to make it easier to understand. You're going to explain why they're doing it, but then also make it very easy. Let's make sure that we give them enough time. If you can give them a template, an Excel file saying, yours might look a little different than this. But if you had an Excel file with these type of elements across a two-year time-frame, that would be great. All right, So just making it easy, giving them an example of something to go by. Definitely confirm that they received the request. You don't want something as simple as I thought you thought she thought went to the spam filter, it's the wrong address, you meant this Tuesday. That's all disaster. It might seem juvenile or basic, but follow up and make sure people understand it, they know when it's due and they don't have any questions. The last thing is, be a little flexible. There's a good chance that what you're requesting will come back in a format that's a little different. Now, if it still allows you to do the job, that's great. You're making chicken curry and maybe you wanted red curry sauce, but they only had green curry sauce. Sometimes that's okay. Sometimes that's not okay. Be flexible and have some discernment to know this is a change or a difference or this is a deal breaker. One of my favorite quotes around leadership is this one from Dwight D. Eisenhower, and he said, "Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something that you want done because he wants to do it." Let that sink in a little bit. Basically you're like a Jedi because you want them to do something and they do it. That's great. But the real art of it here is because they want to do it. They understand how it fits into the bigger picture. They like you. They want you to be successful. On some level, it's in their interest to do so. If that's true, a couple of smart things that a consultant might say is, I sent you the email for the data requests. Did you have any questions on that? Also, Number 2, I know the data requests seemed really long. I'm sorry, it's so long, but you can understand why we want to do a good job for you. We did prioritize it though. A, B, and C is actually more urgent than X, Y, and Z. If you wanted to prioritize and you wanted to work on it a little bit today and a little bit tomorrow, why don't you start with A, B, and C. Number 3 and 4, it's like the manners that your mom taught you. Say thank you. Say you're sorry when you're wrong. Be a human. Be a good egg. Then here, Number 5 and 6, making it very simple for this person to do the work. It might be allowing them or telling them, I want this to be as convenient for you as possible. Don't worry about formatting it and making it really beautiful. If you're pulling the data and you're pulling it from five different factories, pull each one and just send it to me. I don't mind if it's in 15 different emails. The stitching together, cleaning it up, doing all that, let me worry about that. Just being respectful and courteous of their time. Here in Number 6, this is a really good tip actually. It's possible that you need information from, like I said, five different factories. What you can offer is say, just to make sure that we pull the right thing, rather than pulling all five, why don't you just pull me one? Send me a sample of that one factory data. Let's make sure that it's the right thing, it passes the sniff test, S-N-I-F-F. It smells about right. Then once we know this is right, then you can pull the other four. Think about it this way. At the very bottom of this page you can say, what if someone asks you for the data request? One thing you learn as a kid is that, always put yourself in that person's shoes. If you receive this data request, what would annoy you? What would you not like about it? Or what would make it easy for you to say yes. When you receive that email, would you be happy to do it or would you be a little bit grumpy and fussy and not want to do it. On this page, feel free to pause the video. It's two different scenarios. What if, Number 1, you're asking for the data, what would the email look like? Then what would you do if that email didn't work or you didn't get a response. Here at the bottom, put yourself in their shoes. If somebody asks you for data, what would you want that email to look like? What is a situation where you'd be very encouraged and likely to want to respond? Two I think, really key takeaways, and this is targeting the new hires. Because you are going to be interacting with a client almost daily, a lot of management consultants are actually on-site. When it comes to data requests specifically, this is oftentimes the first impression that you as a consulting firm are giving the client. Clearly want to be very professional in your communication. Do things on time, no typos, all those kind of things. Be respectful, very clear, easy to understand, all those kind of things. Also, when it comes to client communications, I can't emphasize this enough, you need to be very patient. These clients, this is not their day job. They have a full-time job, and in addition to that, they were asked to help the consultants to get the data or do the work. Honestly, there's actually not a lot of incentive for them to bend over backwards and go the extra mile and stay late and do the work. Yes, consulting involves a lot of persuasion, client communication, and professional nagging. Be patient. For me, it's a little storytelling. It's not unrealistic that you send an email, they say they got it and you have to follow up with one, or two, or even three emails to get it done. Think about it this way. This is all practice and you learning to build rapport very quickly with people you don't know. Be patient, learn through the process. Like Eisenhower said, make it easy for people to do what you want. Not because you want them to do it, but because they want to do it.
