“It works precisely because we don’t do that,” he replied. “We
don’t go back a month later and try to sell them on a solution to an
issue they raised. That by itself reinforces trust. Just by creating
these forums, we’re adding value in ways that our competitors can’t
and don’t. The experience enhances our relationship with the
executives, giving us insight into their issues; thus we’re able to bet-
ter evolve our own service offerings.”
Some firms create a small client panel that has a fixed number
of client executives (ten or fifteen) who meet once or twice a year
to provide advice on overall strategy and service offering develop-
ment. Others, such as ERM, invite a large group of clients, whose
composition changes slightly from year to year, to an annual event.
In the technology arena, many manufacturing firms create user
groups, which provide this type of feedback on a regular basis.
Conduct Innovative Industry Research and Analysis
This is a time-honored but underutilized approach to uncovering
potential client needs, and it can also garner valuable publicity. I
recall vividly a study done some years ago at the strategy advisory
boutique where I began my own consulting career. My firm had
analyzed the financial performance of hundreds of publicly held
banks and then had sorted them into a two-by-two matrix, with
return on equity and cost of equity representing the xand yaxes.
Each of the four quadrants was given a fancy name. The “sharks,”
whose returns well exceeded their cost of equity, were poised to eat
the “minnows,” whose profitability was weak. The study attracted
enormous media attention and stimulated dozens of meetings with
potential clients to talk about their position in the industry
and whether they were doing enough to bolster their financial
returns. Sometimes simple frameworks synthesized from industry
research—or just an in-depth knowledge of your client’s opera-
tions—can become powerful tools to get clients to open up and
discuss their issues, which leads to idea-generating opportunities.
The Boston Consulting Group’s work with Texas Instruments in
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