Muttering ‘I Don’t Know’ Saved My Consultant’s Ass Many, Many Times. Here’s How.

The unorthodox consultant’s survival guide

Would you prefer to transact with Truth?

What is the alternative, you ask.

Good question.

It is fluff, smokescreens, and mirrors. Add an occasional spice of sweet talk, layering over an aura of unbelievable pretension.

• The pretense that we know.
• The pretense that we have done it a million times.
• The pretense that we can deliver what is asked for.

It is easy to do this in sales. Broadly speaking, in consulting sales.

Clients find it hard to distinguish between those with a gift of the gab and experienced smooth talkers. From that perspective, yes.

We can smoke it out to win a deal.

No qualms about it.

But.

Are we ready to pay the price months later?

For Me — That Answer is No

I am not ready to pay that price.

I don’t want to, either.

It is too painful. And our reputation gets tossed out of the window.

Imagine how it feels when The Emperor has no clothes on a chilly day. It sucks.

Worse of all?

Clients think we are airheads and that we know…

• Sh*t about their business.
• Next-to-nothing about their industry.
• Nuts about their best practices and dominant product niche.

It is a done deal when you hit this rock in the road. Your consulting contracts will not be renewed upon expiration. Your clients wouldn’t want to hear a word from you.

May I add ‘ever again’.

Why go there?

Why not walk the counterintuitive path?

Of course, the onus is on me to explain what that means. It is simple, really. I use these 3 words in my client conversations purposefully.

I don’t know.

Yes. I don’t.

My point is.

Why should I?

Solving Difficult Problems and Working With Agenda-Driven Folks Require Humility, Not Pretense.

Every client who pays big bucks wants a quick fix to their larger-than-life business problems.

No surprises.

Why would they shell out big bucks otherwise?

But we must understand one thing. Every business problem is unique to that client.

To be clear, I mean that one client. That person. Not the company.

Let us take a second, step back, and think about our jobs.

All our jobs. Previous. Current. Future.

Yes, you may conclude that you are surrounded by goons.

That said, did you notice that the goons in your previous employment are different in a different way from those sitting beside you right now?

Why so? Easy.

Because different environments nurture different goons.

It is the same with our consulting clients. There is no one reason to explain why they fail to perform, earn more, or sign more clients into their proud logo list.

There are many reasons.

• Bureaucracy.
• Office politics.
• Organizational ineffectiveness arises from multiple tiers of management.
• Low to no regard for innovation.
• Lack of future vision.

In one organization, the pain-in-the-ass can be the business development director. In the next high-performance firm, the procurement vice president is that son-of-a-b***h.

They flex their muscles in different ways to get what they want.

And now we walk into the dark side.

Many things happen behind us. That is why office politics is so toxic. We can try to be as open and candid as possible.

Yet the most intimate, critical, make-or-break decisions happen behind closed doors. That includes the 6-digit deal with you.

I avoid saying within sheets, but you get my point.

That is the first-level deconstruction of reality. Where personal interests intertwin with corporate goals

The second level of analysis is a question.

What drives them?

This is a long list.

It could be,

• Anchor clients,
• Y-o-Y revenue growth,
• New market penetration,
• New logos to acquire for venture funding,
• Optimizing production costs per unit,
• Building their own team,
• Spinning off from HQ.

Some of these goals are overt. Many are covert.

Remember. Human ambitions are rarely exposed to Sunlight.

Therefore, your direct sponsor will never show you his/her cards. If we are lucky, we get close enough for them to tell us. Otherwise, we guess.

There is a lot for us to guess, by the way.

You see, there can be more than one primary concern. I know that fails in grammatical expression. In real life, singularity seldom works.

Your direct client may be secretly planning to spin off from HQ. To do so, he needs 50% more sales revenue from his product line than all other product lines combined. To achieve that, he may be prepared to cannibalize sales from his colleagues in other offices selling the same thing.

Tell me. How is that easy?

It is anything but.

If you go to the first meeting thinking that the engagement is nothing else apart from revenue growth…

Be prepared to be fired on Day 1.

Okay, maybe not.

Make it Day 2.

For us to sell and successfully deliver what is required, plus a possibility of service retention… I say this.

Stay simple. Play dumb.

Say I don’t know. And then ask questions. Unearth intelligence. Dig deeper.

You will realize one thing. Dumb questions reward you. Your client will hold you in higher regard.

Because this is how they think when you say I don’t know.

“Man, this guy is smart. He asks all the right questions. I want him beside me in the boardroom.”

When that thought bubble pops into our client’s head…

… The fox is in the henhouse.

The Close

Sales is not just about the transaction.

This is more so for consulting sales.

Clients aren’t paying us to buy a product. They are not interested in forking out streams of cash because we scream billable hours. Nay.

What they want is a person who can,

• Solve their strategic, tactical, and office politics-driven problems,
• Take them to the next level they desire,
• Be an ally to them in times of peril.

And that is the reason we must learn to say I don’t know.

Because that is the only way we can get them to talk.

We will know what to do when they unzip their lips.

That is how we score big… as consultants.

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