This week I'm taking a blogging break and handing the keyboard to Ben Krefting, consulting oracle and my former client. I’m delighted to have Ben as a guest author. His vast experience from both sides of the fence gives this series a fresh perspective from a time when Nexient was evolving from vision to reality.

Consulting in Transformation: A 20-year journey through the client’s eyes

I’ve been following The Consulting Balance with interest, having had a close relationship with Nexient while it was going through its evolution. I’ve also found the content in itself enjoyable as it mirrors my own experiences and echoes advice I give and practices I employ.

I want to offer my side of things to this series and validate that what Mark has written so far is spot on. And that’s coming from a client’s perspective. I also want to respectfully “borrow” this platform as an opportunity to share my thoughts on the consultant-client relationship, its evolution in the marketplace, and how we can work better to strengthen what is oftentimes a delicate balance. Diverse skillsets and approaches to problem-solving can occasionally offset this balance, when at the end of the day we’re all seeking a successful outcome.

Ever-changing world

I’ll start by sharing a bit about me and my observations from the last 20+ years in the technology and consulting space. The past two decades have been unbelievably dynamic in this sector and my experience is a reflection of that. So far this century I have seen trailblazers identifying a need and learning on the go, the globalization of an industry, a revolution in technology, an evolution in retail, an emergence of boutique specialization and their eventual absorption by global giants.

Whatever has been moving and shifting on this landscape one thing has been constant - the relationship between consultants and clients. In an ever-changing world clients have no choice but to trust the expertise of those who say they know. The truth is usually different from this and the consultant just knows more than the client - but that doesn’t make them an expert. How can one be an expert in something that is continually evolving? Honesty, understanding and collaboration is what builds true partnership. My first experience of this was with Mark and his team at Nexient. But before I get to this let me tell you my story.

My consultancy journey in tech from the early 2000s to today

After graduating from the University of Maryland in 2003, where I completed the Quest honors program, I joined Accenture. Quest focused on Total Quality Management - really pre-consulting - with the project management, process design, product development, delighting customers, and team-building modules preparing me well. My journey to being customer-centric and working with cross-functional teams continued at Accenture and really set me up for my future reality. That said, when I began working as a consultant at Accenture in CRM technical architecture, I realized most of the learning really happened on the job. The world was changing so quickly in this space that it was actually the best way to learn.

Being based in the Washington DC area it seemed like I had two choices coming out of college, joining the government or joining a government consulting firm. I quickly decided that I wanted to see the world and through Accenture worked and lived in London, Los Angeles, New York, San Jose, Houston, and Ireland for clients ranging from movie studios, to tech companies, to oil companies and more. What I saw happening in that time was change - consulting was becoming global and we were leveraging consultants from all over the world.  

After five years I decided to get closer to the business and go client-side. I joined Nestlé in Southern California at which time I also completed my MBA. At Nestlé I worked with partners in an offshoring model to deliver CRM, finance, and supply chain solutions. Times were again changing. A renaissance was brewing in San Francisco and product design and software engineering were changing the way we all lived. Enterprise systems were no longer the only place where technology skills could be applied. Investment was now going into solutions held in the hands of each of us every single day - apps. I wanted to be part of this change, so I moved to the Bay Area and joined Williams Sonoma to scale what I learned at Nestlé, working with consultants to deliver an outsourced technology vendor program.  

At Williams Sonoma, my objective was simple - survive the retail apocalypse by building the technology needed for high-end retail to remain relevant in the amazon world. It quickly became obvious there were two types of work a CIO needs to source:

1. Commoditized - it could be defined, documented, and repeated;
2. Thought leadership related - solutions were not obvious requiring iterations between stakeholders with trial and error to get the right solutions.

This second type was a very tricky space to be in with most partners. Even today consultancies cost work to a defined scope, with assumptions made on the costs of the resources being provided. Back then and still today, projects seemingly reset with the acquisition of new information and the evolution of both parties’ understanding of the desired outcome.

There were clear issues with this model. A supplier often sold their resources, experience, and knowledge as being more evolved than it really was and the client wanted to choose the best possible expert to solve their problem. However, in consulting firms staff turnover can be high or good people might be lost to more pressing or higher profile projects or clients. As a client this can be very challenging to navigate.

To a client it ends up feeling like consulting firms come in and put on an elaborate show about their accomplishments and resources, only to bring in more junior people once they’ve won the business. This leaves the customer having to tightly manage the outcome as they can’t rely on their consultants to bring thought leadership.

Mark and Nexient

When I met Mark’s team, they understood the challenges with this engagement model. They were different, with a unique approach where they worked with you locally. Being 100% US-based, they closed the time gap between onshore and offshore that often caused delays in communication and issue resolution. They also had a rare model of ensuring their sales team was actively engaged in delivery. (Sales and delivery are often disconnected worlds for consulting organizations.) Finally, they had a curiosity of business problems and a thirst for knowledge, quenched by having product managers spending time onsite working hand in hand with our teams.

At the end of my time at Williams Sonoma in 2017, I walked away with a recipe for success with consulting partners - all thanks to my open and collaborative partnership with Nexient. I now also had ample experience seeing how hundreds of software and services companies go to market and deliver. So building upon this, I wanted to join the best I had seen - Salesforce.  

At Salesforce, I joined the customer success team and partnered with tech companies in Silicon Valley and Silicon Beach. I helped customers overcome their delivery challenges by working with consulting partners and employing the successful recipe I had brought with me. Unique to this period, many boutique consulting firms rose up specializing in one specific Salesforce product. Their skills were excellent, able to go deep into the issues customers had and resolve them. Gradually, these firms were absorbed by large global firms and appear to have disappeared.

As products evolved and matured at Salesforce, the role of customer success evolved with it. A partner ecosystem thrived offering customers specialized industry knowledge to implement high value solutions. Witnessing this evolution first hand was fascinating. Helping mid-market tech companies quickly grow from start-ups to public companies opened my eyes to possibility and left me wanting to share my experience with an industry ripe to benefit and thrive from what I’d learned. This quest has somehow taken me back to Teaneck, the New Jersey town where I grew up visiting my grandparents. I’m still there today leading customer success at Cross River, a technology infrastructure provider that offers embedded financial solutions. I am constantly looking to solve problems related to sales, support, enablement, cross-functional collaboration, and customer engagement - offering customers the benefits of everything I’ve seen on my journey so far.

Thoughts and observations on making a relationship work

For over 20 years, from the classrooms at the University of Maryland’s Quest Program, across Europe, throughout the USA, and back to Teaneck, New Jersey, I’ve been striving to create amazing customer experiences with products greater than the sum of their parts. These products, solutions, and services almost always have internal and external teams coming together to deliver. In my role you need to make these connections to achieve success in the face of many challenges - technical or non-technical.

Patterns emerge when shopping for partners to deliver alongside you. Every partner's pitch always claims they’re an expert with a large number of resources who have implemented, executed, or operated the model or technology you’re pursuing. However, almost always without fail, the first attempt at delivery doesn’t go as expected. I will never forget a statistic I learned in business school - 90% of new technology implementations fail the first time.  

Clients want to trust that the party they’ve hired is who they say they are and capable of what they said they can do. However, we also need to own the outcome and invest time and resources into overseeing and driving success with consultants. It's a fallacy to expect that someone will come in off the street and within a short period be able to understand exactly what your corporation wants to achieve and how. You’ve been in the “hallway conversations” and sat in all the townhalls, leadership presentations and offsites. That context doesn’t exist for your consultants. Their perspective and resources live solely in the vacuum you create for them. And on top of all that, we are now in a far more virtual world.

So if I were a consultant today, how would I stand out?  

I’d demonstrate a curiosity beyond the 10-k of my prospect, showing I understand their strategy at the business and technology level. I’d mitigate the risk in choosing me as a partner by illustrating what delivery can look like when it fails and showing the solutions I’ve built to avoid that happening. I’d follow the process that Mark’s team at Nexient implemented, ensuring the sales team are experienced practitioners, strategists question and suggest solutions, and developers spend time onsite to really get to the heart of the business.

I appreciate when trying to win business you don’t want to come bearing bad news or a bigger SoW, but showing what could happen if a client were to buy the work of the blind promisor, versus what will happen if they invest in you – the honest, involved, proactive practitioner – is what long-term relationships are made of. And with this model in place, consultancies can truly call themselves partners to their clients.