Consultants produce deliverables. Discovery reports, process designs, business cases, implementation plans. These are the visible outputs of the work.

They’re also the easy part.

The hard part is everything around them: understanding why the organization works the way it does, getting the right people to care about changing it, navigating the politics that determine whether a recommendation gets implemented or filed away. The projects that succeeded were never the ones with the best documents. They were the ones where I understood the organization well enough to position the work correctly.

flowchart LR
    A["Good analysis"] --> D["Deliverable"]
    D --> Q{"Does the organization<br/>want the change?"}
    Q -->|"No"| Shelf["Filed away<br/>or quietly ignored"]
    Q -->|"Yes"| I["Implemented change"]
    U["Understand the organization"] --> Q
    T["Build trust"] --> Q
    P["Time the recommendation"] --> Q
    O["Create internal ownership"] --> I

Understand why things are the way they are

Before you propose a change, understand why the current situation exists — not as a problem to diagnose, but as a series of choices that made sense at the time.

A manufacturer with a five-day quote turnaround didn’t end up there by accident. At some point, someone decided that sales engineers should validate every configuration. That made sense when the company had 20 customers and three products. The process stuck. A company without a renewal process didn’t forget to build one — every budget cycle, retention operations lost to something that felt more urgent.

Walk in with “your process is broken, here’s how to fix it,” and you’re implicitly telling everyone they’ve been making bad decisions. The better argument: the situation has changed. What worked at €10M doesn’t work at €50M.

Get close enough to see what’s really happening

The sanitized version of a client’s operations is what you get in kickoff meetings. The real version is in the spaces between.

Find it by sitting next to the person who does the work. Watch them build a quote. Notice that they have a personal spreadsheet tracking things the CRM should be tracking but doesn’t. Ask to look at the CRM the way a rep sees it, not the way an admin configured it. The difference between those views is usually where the biggest opportunities are.

Listen to the language

Every organization has its own vocabulary. If leadership talks about “customer lifetime value” and “retention,” your recommendations should use those terms. “We’re a sales-driven organization” tells you where the power sits. “We tried something like this before and it didn’t work” is the objection you need to address before proposing anything new.

Listen for the stories too — the project that went badly, the tool nobody adopted, the consultant who didn’t understand the business. These shape how your work will be received. If the last CRM implementation failed, your approach needs to address why this time is different before it addresses anything else.

Change at two speeds

Some recommendations run with the grain: the sales team wants faster quoting, finance wants discount visibility. Build it, show the results, move on. This is where you establish credibility.

Other recommendations run against the grain: shifting investment from acquisition to retention, introducing discount governance where there’s been none. These require shifting mental models that have been in place for years.

Surface evidence gradually. Before proposing a change, share data points in regular conversations — “I noticed our renewal rate drops for accounts where nobody engages until 30 days before expiry” — without presenting the solution yet. Let it become a recognized issue first. Internal advocates always carry more weight than external consultants, so give the people closest to the problem the data that quantifies what they already feel.

Pay attention to what gets deferred

The things an organization has postponed tell you more about its priorities than the things it has done. If a company has operated for fifteen years without a structured renewal process, something else was more important every year for fifteen years. Understanding what tells you how leadership thinks about growth.

Don’t assume these patterns are mistakes. Assume they were deliberate. Work with that understanding rather than against it.

The deliverable matters. Sloppy analysis undermines credibility. But it’s maybe 30% of what determines whether an engagement succeeds. The other 70% is understanding the organization, building trust with the right people, timing the recommendations, and creating the conditions where change feels like the obvious next step.

The best compliment I’ve received from a client: “It felt like the team came to this conclusion on their own.” Change that feels internally driven sticks. Change that feels imposed from outside gets reversed the moment the consultant leaves.

The document is never the hard part. Getting an organization to want what the document recommends — that’s the work.