Picking The Right Consultant

Today’s clients are faced with a daunting array of choices when looking for a

consultant. There is a broad array of consulting companies which run the gamut

from one person shops to large organizations. Typically, the consulting company

will have people who specialize in one area, making them experts in sales for

example. That’s wonderful, but if the problem is with marketing or quality, can

the sales specialists drill down deep enough to get to the root cause of the

problem? And, where do they get the resource to deal with that issue? Just as

bad is the consulting company whose members have never had line jobs and

don’t truly understand the top and bottom line implications of their

recommendations. Many projects have never been implemented because the

appropriate analysis wasn’t done by the consultant, leaving the client with a nice

binder, a big bill and no results.

It is critical that the client look for some key indicators of the consultant’s ability:

• Breadth of experience in the project scope

• Quality of the consultants available for the project

• Ability to bring multiple disciplines to bear on the project

• Results of previous projects

• Quality of responses and proposal: both verbal and written

• Feedback from previous clients

Once you have picked a few, the next step is to get a proposal from them. Be

sure to take the time to outline in writing what you want. A bidder’s conference

call is usually the best way to do this. Set up a conference call with the

consultants and go through the project. Take good notes on what they ask and

you say. Voila, you have your job specification. Ask them to generate a

proposal for you.

It is very difficult to decipher some proposals. They are...... Click here for rest of article