Hello, as a consultant, how do you really deal with a client who always challenges your work and your hypothesis?
For instance, you spent a week to prepare your analysis and your recommendations with your team. While presenting your work, the client seems really unhappy and unconvinced. He asks about every hypothesis and every point in the slide, How would a consultant deal with this kind of situation? Should he defend his work and recheck everything ?
Thank you
Hey,
Touch clients is the best part of Consulting and pushes you to learn the most in my view.
Plenty of good answers by others. Some quick tips from my end:
All the best.
I don't think that having a challenging client is a bad thing. Quite the contrary and for two main reasons:
So in order to deal with that I would do the following:
If you're challenged on a part that you didn't dig enough, you should be honest and state that this was a rough estimation, since that part wasnt important and you worked with time constraint. But that you could dig more on that aspect in a second phase. This happened during our meeting last week. Client was perfectly fine with that and a new mission is already nearly sold to look some small parts of the case in more details
Hi there,
Anonymous B is correct. This situation should not occur! This is because you should have kept them updated with your findings, viewpoints etc. This should be part of the process (also known as snaking).
That said, if this does occur, you need to do (and have done) the following:
Hi there,
as a cosultant you should do your best to meet the clients expectations. So in order to prevent, situations like this in meetings with even important stakeholders, i would recommend the following:
- always keep your customers informed about your approach and key findings while doing your analysis so to manage expectations
- always invole your key clients about your findings before presenting them (e.g. send presentation the day before presentation)
However, some challenge of your work isn't bad either.
Best,
Julius
