Are You Really A Consultant?

Please indulge me while I start with a little cautionary tale…

A customer walks into a hardware store and tells the next available assistant that they’d like to buy a hammer.  

“A hammer? Sure! We’ve got loads of hammers! Bell end, claw or maybe a mallet? Wood? Rubber? If you needed to go heavier, you could consider something from our sledgehammer range…”

The customer leaves, hammer in hand, feeling delighted! After pausing briefly, to post a 5-star online customer review for the service just received, they drive home and proceed to try and knock a tree down with their new hammer.

A lot of people claim to be SAP consultants. Most of them are hammer sellers. 

The reality, in my personal experience, is very few “consultants” in the SAP ecosystem are “real consultants”. Not to say there aren’t some amazing consultants out there, but there aren’t many.

Imagine I’m holding my hand up and there is a very small gap between my thumb and finger. That’s how many. 

I am a stickler for language. In fact, my mandate within DalRae is that we need to be hyper-specific with all language that we use. On that basis, the question of whether you are or are not a consultant should probably start with the definition.

The Cambridge dictionary defines a consultant as: “someone who advises people on a particular subject”.

In most cases, I find that these supposed “consultants” will agree to configure or build whatever the customer has asked for. There is zero consulting in that scenario. They agree to sell hammers. All too often I think it’s the easiest path, and most often, the easiest path to money. To be professional requires one to not run straight at the easy money, but to step back from the tree and take in a bit more of the forest.

Consulting involves figuring out what the customer does, what their value proposition is, what their problems or pain points are and what the possible options are to achieve a better outcome.

Agreeing to build some poorly thought-out band-aid solution is NOT consulting.

Even if you want to chase the money ruthlessly, “real consulting” is still the way. Selling is expensive. Retaining can seem difficult, but with “real consulting” it’s cheap and easy. With a focus on “customer success as CEO” (a topic for another time) and “real consulting”, keeping customers happy is easy and as we all know, keeping happy customers is easy!

Back in the day when I ran my own consultancy my catch phrase was: “When you say jump, I won’t necessarily ask how high…”

The point being? Consulting is about pushing back when the customer, who does not have your domain knowledge, is asking for a suboptimal or short-sighted solution. 

It’s OK to say no. That’s what you should be getting paid for.

Tell me, are you a consultant?

Barring some minor edits, I first posted the above on LinkedIn and was kind of surprised and kind of not by the reactions it got. A lot of people, who I know first-hand, are excellent consultants felt fired up enough to post a reply. Let’s be real, for a lot of us, it has to be something pretty personal to post anything beyond “congrats on the new role Dijon!”. I felt I’d struck a nerve and being asked to write this article only adds to that.

So, it seems I’m on the money saying “real” consultants are hard to find, so what’s the answer? Make your own! Is it possible to teach someone how to “really consult”? Absolutely!

Again, a topic for another time.

Blog written by Mark Pyc from DalRae.