Do Premium Consulting Firms Really Need Designated Rainmakers

Over a decade I’ve seen plenty of consulting firms hire salespeople to boost their sales, but all they’ve achieved is bloated costs of sales and high attrition of salespeople.

In many cases cost of sales increased more than sales, let alone net profits.

Yes, gross revenue has gone up, sometimes pretty impressively, but when we look at meaningful indicators like, gross profit per team member, we often see a significant decline.

And when partners realise the loss, they hire more salespeople creating further increase in cost of sales and attrition.

Of course, talking about a consulting firm, we can’t call them salespeople. They are rainmakers, account executives, practice/business development managers or some other fancy title holders.

But the expectation is the same.

Due to lack of marketing, firms have to beef up their hunting-type selling efforts, and to do it quickly, they have to resort to cold-prospecting.

So, half of the salespeople are dialling for dollars and the other half are pounding pavements and knocking on doors.

So, since the firm uses brute force client acquisition, partners don’t want to participate.

Neither do even the most junior associates.

After all, this is not why they worked their arses off to earn their MBAs. One of the reasons is that the consulting profession in general looks down on client acquisition.

Many consultants regard sales and marketing as something beneath them, so they want to abdicate the dirty work to designated salespeople.

Well, the interesting thing is that screwing the client over during the project through billable (bilkable ???) hours is fine and most senior partners happily practise it, but acquiring new clients is a dirty job; something not to be touched by the firm’s holier-than-thou partners.

So, the idea of hiring designated salespeople on straight commission is pretty appealing.

But this approach comes with two big questions... And this is what we discuss in this month's brain-fryingly exciting episode of Commando Consulting, entitled, Do Premium Consulting Firms Really Need Designated Rainmakers?.

Enjoy!