Three consultants, no change

A new positioning. A new funnel. A new channel. Every one of them was defensible, and every one came from somebody who knows their trade. Your numbers didn’t move. That’s almost never the consultants’ fault. It’s an order of operations that nobody follows.

What the three had in common

None of them measured first.

All three looked at your situation, held it against what they’ve seen before, and told you what tends to work. That’s a recommendation, and a recommendation is a reasoned opinion. It isn’t worthless. It’s just not a finding.

A finding sounds like this. Eighteen out of a hundred make it to this step, and sixty made it to the one before. A recommendation sounds like this. The offer could be sharper. You can check the first one. You can’t check the second.

Why that isn’t malice but structure

Consultants get paid for proposals. They come in, they listen, they think, and they leave with something that looks like work.

Now picture the proposal that would be right in a lot of businesses. “Turn the ad back on that you killed two years ago, and write to the forty people who already bought from you.”

Nobody wants to be the one who says that. It looks thin next to the invoice, it makes the consultant look small, and it leaves the owner feeling he paid for the obvious. So it rarely gets said, however often it happens to be right.

None of this is a knock on consultants. I sat in enough boardrooms to know how good most of them are. It’s a knock on a habit that took hold because it bills better than the alternative.

How to tell whether somebody measures or recommends

Three questions, and you can put them to anyone before you sign.

Which number do you look at first?

Answer that with a category instead of a number and you’ll get categories all the way through.

What would I have to show you for you to drop your first hypothesis?

No answer means it isn’t a hypothesis, it’s a conviction. Convictions survive data.

What do you propose if it turns out nothing is missing?

Anyone who can’t picture walking away empty-handed will find you something to build.

Why the fourth consultant changes nothing either

Because the problem is not the number of opinions.

Three opinions and no measurement don’t turn into clarity when a fourth opinion walks in. They turn into four opinions. And the more of them are sitting in the room, the harder it gets to start anything, because every start now has to be argued against three other routes.

It rarely takes another analysis. It takes one person willing to ask the question everyone skipped, and to answer it with a number instead of a career’s worth of experience.