Mastering Management Consultancy: How to Develop your Skills as a Successful Consultant

by Calvert Markham

Overview

Mastering Management Consultancy is a comprehensive guide for all consultants looking to provide a first-class service to their clients and who wish to become expert practitioners. Calvert Markham shows how consultants can develop their performance in a wide range of areas, including:

• Product development and marketing consultancy.
• Selling and managing consultancy projects.
• Consultancy problem solving.
• Running a consultancy business.
• Managing client relationships.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781789550795
Publisher:	Legend Press
Publication date:	12/13/2019
Pages:	308
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Calvert Markham has been a UK Trustee on the International Council of Management Consulting Institutes, of which was a Vice Chairman, chairing the Professional Standards Committee, which oversees global standards in management consultancy. As well as visiting professor and lecturer at Cass Business School in City University, he founded Elevation Learning in 1989, which specializes in consultant development and has trained hundreds of consultants around the world. He is the author of several books on management consultancy.

Table of Contents

Preface 7

Introduction 8

1 The nature of consultancy 9

What is consultancy? 9

Why use consultants? 11

The nature of consultancy practices 12

The role of the consultant 14

What sort of people become consultants? 15

The relationship between the practice and the client 16

Consultancy skills 16

2 Consultancy problem solving 18

The structure of business problems 19

Making sense of a client's predicament 22

The problem solving approach 32

Data collection 37

Data analysis and conclusions 45

3 Operating a consultancy project 48

The structure of a consultancy project 48

Terms of reference specify the project 51

Diagnosis: managing consultancy projects 63

Intervention: developing and implementing recommendations 67

Closure: completing the project 75

4 Managing client relationships 77

Why the client relationship is important 78

Account management 80

Factors contributing to the quality of a relationship 84

Monitoring the client relationship 90

Creating satisfied clients 92

5 Product definition and marketing in consultancy 97

Product-market definition 98

Marketing consultancy 102

Promotional activities 106

6 The consultancy sales process 108

The consultancy sales process 109

Relationship development 110

Prospection 114

Developing the proposition 115

Pitching for the sale 117

Organising for selling 119

Monitoring sales performance 122

Developing sales performance 126

7 Conducting specific sales transactions 128

Becoming a consultancy salesperson 128

The ingredients of selling performance 131

Purposes of selling - what we are trying to achieve 132

The sales process 136

Establishing a dialogue with a prospective client 137

Conducting selling transactions 140

Converting the ITT to a sale 149

Developing selling skills 153

8 Commercial aspects of consultancy 161

Determining fee rates 161

Expenses 163

What do we tell the client? 164

Terms of payment 166

Other methods of generating revenue in consultancy 170

Using sub-contractors 172

Non-time related charges 172

Terms of business 173

9 Managing a consultancy business 177

Leadership in a consultancy practice 178

Organisation structure within a consultancy practice 179

Intellectual property in a consultancy practice 182

Managing consultants 184

Epilogue 191