Without Thought Leadership, Consultancies Will Fail
Every year, Grist conducts research into thought leadership trends in the advisory industry. Hands...
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In Aesop’s fable The Fox and the Cat, the fox boasts of having “a whole sack of tricks” to escape danger. The cat admits to having only one. Yet, when the hounds arrive, the fox freezes, unable to choose a tactic. The cat? Springs up a tree and survives.
Much like the fox in the fable, modern consulting buyers struggle with decision paralysis. How could they not. A simple Google search can lead them down a rabbit hole of options: hundreds of consulting services, just as many software solutions, the possibility of solving a problem in-house, hiring a freelance specialist, waiting and doing nothing, and on and on it goes.
Consulting firms sure aren’t making it easier – 90% of them sound identical, making vague, often grandiose statements that buyers have learned to tune out by now.
In our conversations with both struggling and high-performing consulting firms, we continuously come across the notion of decision paralysis/confidence. It can be spotted in phrases like:
- They seemed interested in our services, but then stopped responding to follow-ups.
- The prospect just kept asking for more information. Nothing seemed to move the needle.
- We don’t have a problem generating leads, but we struggle to convert them.
These mentions instantly signal a consulting firm’s ability level to help prospects build decision confidence. And that’s what I will be discussing in this article.
Decision Confidence in Consulting – What Is It and Why Does It Matter?
“You have to be a trusted expert on a very specific subject for a narrow audience” – this is the way of thinking that has allowed me to build multiple successful businesses in the consulting space.
It is this mindset that gave me the courage to say no to project requests outside of my area of expertise, to continuously study a narrow set of subjects as I tried to get a more in-depth understanding, and not to hesitate to speak up to clients on the course of action without the fear of alienating them.
My thinking was, and still is: “I am not here to tell you what you want to hear. I’m here to help you solve a problem. And I know exactly how to do it.”
That’s why I was so delighted when I read The Jolt Effect by Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna and The Framemaking Sale by Brent Adamson and Karl Schmidt.
These books helped me conceptualise my operating mode. They put language to what I had long practised intuitively: guiding clients toward decisive action by reducing complexity, narrowing their choices, and boosting their confidence in the path forward.
The fear of making the wrong decision is one of the biggest obstacles in sales, according to Dixon and McKenna. Modern buyers are risk-averse. This fear of action is often driven by omission bias: people feel more regret (or responsibility) for bad decisions they actively make versus things they didn’t do.
It is this risk of action that often makes prospects drop off the face of the earth despite previous interest and engagement. It is this fear of making the wrong choice that puts them in an endless loop of requesting more info and having additional questions.
Adamson and Schmidt explain another angle on indecision: B2B buyers are overwhelmed. They have too many options, access to too much information, and involvement of many stakeholders. This overload makes it hard for buyers to make bold decisions. As a result, they often default to safe, incremental choices. Or they don’t decide at all.
Building Trust at Scale
Decision confidence is the last step in a consulting firm’s ability to unlock sustainable growth.
Consulting Growth: Building Trust at Scale
I discuss the three layers of trust-building in a different article of mine. Here is a quick summary of the layers:
- Value Articulation Specificity (Layer 1): This layer is about clarity – making it obvious to the buyer that the consulting firm truly understands their problem.
- Proof of Value (Layer 2): Repeated patterns of similar projects turn claims into evidence. Proof of value comes in various forms: an ideal client success journey, outcome stories from clients facing similar challenges, thought leadership that inspires action, and so on.
- Decision Confidence (Layer 3): Trust at this level involves assisting buyers to alleviate doubts. By reducing the risks associated with their choices, guiding their exploration, and building shared confidence, consulting firms shift from persuasion to collaboration. It’s not about persuading more forcefully, it’s about helping clients feel secure in making their decision.
In other words, decision confidence is what helps consulting firms close deals with their ideal clients. Layer 1 makes prospects stop scrolling and pay closer attention. Layer 2 demonstrates the consulting firm’s ability to effectively diagnose and solve the problem. Layer 3 helps prospects feel safe enough to act.
Each layer is vital in a prospect’s journey. Unfortunately, many consulting firms seem to forget or ignore the third layer.
Recommended reading: How Consulting Firms Can Build Trust at Scale
How Consulting Firms Can Help Buyers Build Confidence
Helping consulting buyers build decision confidence is not about pushing harder, continuously explaining the benefits, or engaging in endless customisation. What pushes the needle is consulting firms helping their prospects feel safe in their decision, informed, and supported in making a choice amid complexity and risk.
The benefits of mastering this last layer of trust (assuming that the other layers are also taken care of) include, though not limited to:
- Significant increases in conversion rates
- Stronger client satisfaction
- More long-term relationships and recurring revenue
Step 1: Understanding the Source of Indecision
Dixon and McKenna explain brilliantly that the fear of making the wrong decision is often the primary barrier to action. Buyers worry about the consequences of a wrong choice. In the context of consulting, this could potentially mean wasting tens, hundreds, or even thousands of consulting fees and weeks or months of employee time.
That’s why buyers repeatedly request information, stall, or disengage completely.
Additionally, consulting buyers are overwhelmed. They have too many options, too much data, and too many voices weighing in.
Understanding the why behind prospects’ indecision will help consulting firms understand whether it’s due to risk aversion, information overload, internal misalignment, or something else entirely.
Step 2: Simplifying the Decision Path
Both books – The Jolt Effect and The Framemaking Sale – emphasise the importance of simplifying complexity. I experience this daily in our work as well, both in how we engage consulting firms and the advice we give them.
Simplifying complexity is about guiding buyers, helping them eliminate unnecessary options, clarifying trade-offs, and minimising risk.
In consulting, this could mean offering prospects a couple of options for how to proceed at each milestone in the customer success journey, rather than presenting a long list of capabilities and services to impress.
Furthermore, as Adamson and Schmidt stress in their book, sellers should help buyers frame their decisions. That means helping them structure their choices in a way that is understandable and highlights the consequences of each action or inaction.
Step 3: Providing Evidence that Reduces Perceived Risk
Decision confidence grows when prospects trust that the consulting firm can deliver – Layer 2 in the Building Trust at Scale visual.
This means offering relevant examples of repeated success when delivering on similar projects. It could take the form of case studies, client success stories, testimonials, and so on.
Both books discuss the importance of buyers feeling like someone has successfully navigated the same challenges as they did.
Step 4: Guiding Exploration
Much of the success of Layer 3 – Decision Confidence – depends on a consulting firm’s ability to guide its prospects. Not manipulate. Not push, not overwhelm with information or a long list of capabilities or options, but rather guide the client.
Consulting firms will achieve stronger results if they assume the role of trusted advisors, encouraging independent thinking and decision-making. This entails helping prospects understand the decision from multiple perspectives, highlighting the most viable solutions, explaining why certain options might be better, walking through the consequences of inaction, and discussing solutions for internal alignment.
Consulting buyers should feel comfortable in their decision-making and feel ownership over it.
High-performing firms act as a “buyer’s agent”, explain Dixon and McKenna. They advocate for the buyer’s success rather than pushing the deal.
Similarly, Adamson and Schmidt reinforce that when sellers help buyers frame their choices, the conversation shifts from persuasion to problem-solving.
Being honest and transparent in this role as an advisor means being truthful in recommending a path, even if that path points to a solution outside the consulting firm (e.g., a different consultancy, a software product, or training that would allow the client to build internal capabilities).
Yes, that means the risk of losing a client in the short term. It also means solidifying trust with that prospect who will not hesitate to recommend the consulting firm to colleagues or other network members (or come back at a later stage).
Step 5: Moving to Collaboration Through a Low-Risk Entry Point
Easy-to-enter, low-risk entry points allow consulting firms to engage prospects in a way that makes them feel safe. This could be achieved through pilots, proof-of-concept projects, limited-scope engagements, discovery services, or feasibility studies. These smaller commitments allow prospects to dip their toes in without overcommitting and reduce their risk feelings.
Recommended reading: Every Consulting Firm Needs a Discovery Service
In Conclusion: Value Proposition Is at the Foundation of Confidence
“Dear prospect, we have a proven approach to solve your problem that we tailor to your specific context to achieve the biggest possible impact.”
I have shared this sentence many times with prospects who insisted their situation was unique. I have never been challenged. Not once.
If a consultancy has deep expertise in a specific problem (or problems), only the client's context differs. Not the problem.
Prospects always responded well to my sentence because it communicates three things:
- This consulting firm understands the real problem we face.
- It has solved our problem repeatedly and reliably.
- It has a reliable way of helping us succeed in our specific context.
And the only way to confidently claim this is when it’s based on a solid foundation of a laser-sharp value proposition. It’s one of my biggest learnings in the past decade.
Prospects’ decision confidence can’t be built on a consulting firm’s indecisiveness or ‘open-door-strategy’ (accepting everything from everybody). Consulting buyers won’t develop trust toward a consulting firm that can’t articulate its value, can’t prove success, and can’t clearly explain how it helps solve a specific problem.
When consulting firms are confident in their expertise and know how to guide buyers, they give these buyers the courage to act.
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