As you seek new consulting firms to work with during the COVID-19 crisis, you should be looking for consultants that adapt quickly to turbulence and are not concerned with the status quo. These successful consultants all seem to have one thing in common with each other: vitality, or the ability to grow and adapt to the changing needs of their clients.
A main component to vitality in sales is approaching each new client or project from multiple perspectives. Businesses that encourage diverse perspectives and opinions increase their vitality. During this pandemic, they have proven themselves to be much better equipped to manage change and be successful in the long run.
Diversity of Ideas leads to Innovation
Businesses, technology, and customer expectations are constantly evolving and expanding. Staying stagnant is just not an option if you want to be successful now and in the future. Having a team of consultants that come from different backgrounds and have different mindsets is a great first step towards maintaining your business’s vitality and strengthening its presence among customers and competition.
Diversity of ideas, people, industries, etc. are all essential to a company’s long-term growth because of the ways in which people use experiences from their different backgrounds to assess problems and think about solutions. Take for example, a client in wealth management has hired your consultancy to optimize their Salesforce. It might be a good idea, then, to get the perspective of a banker who works with high net-worth individuals to come at the project from a different angle. Or maybe a client in building design is looking to develop their CRM. Talk to engineers to understand what your clients care about and what matters to them so you can adjust your approach.
When a consultancy is working with a client on their latest project, having a variety of ideas to throw out and work with allows everyone to look at the problem a little differently. Everyone brings something different to the table; that’s what makes things interesting. With the diversity of ideas, people bring up new points you may never have thought of. They challenge clients to look at problems from completely different angles and invite them to question what has done before and whether that was as successful as it could have been and how useful it is in the future.
Challenge the Status Quo
Diverse ideas challenge people to think harder about problems that need to be solved. It may make you stop and ask yourself, “what did we do on this last project that was successful?” and “what did we do that we could do better next time?” When a diverse team comes together, they throw the status quo out the window and can start looking at projects with different lenses. This is beneficial to meeting a constantly changing client base as well because clients are also coming to the table with a variety of mindsets and viewpoints.
Without a diverse staff of employees, companies risk falling to the wayside as more innovative competition steals clients away. Vitality in consultancies is essential to maintaining clients and meeting their needs because of how consistently those needs change. You must be prepared to adapt and strategize innovative ideas to keep up with shifting industry trends.
This is especially clear now as COVID-19 has forced many businesses to reconsider their online presence and technology services. As customers’ needs moved mostly online, the companies that took on the challenge of rising to meet those virtual needs quickly proved to be able to succeed in the long run. Looking at what companies were and were not able to accomplish in a relatively short period of time indicates how those same companies will continue to survive and thrive in an uncertain future.
Support from Leadership
While diversity is important to a consultancy’s vitality, it’s not enough to just preach it; leaders need to take charge and implement practices that encourage and support diverse ideas from diverse groups of people. This goes beyond hiring more people from marginalized groups; that should be a given by now. What needs to be enacted are cultural changes within companies that encourage employees to share ideas without fear of ridicule. For people to want to share and feel comfortable sharing their ideas, the environment needs to be encouraging and safe. The more comfortable people feel, the more diversity you’ll see in ideas, strategies, and solutions.
Brainstorming sessions can be a great tool for consultants to come together and formulate a plan for a client. However, if there is judgment going into the session, it can be difficult to formulate diverse ideas because the groupthink is too powerful. When everyone thinks the same or would rather just agree with the leader instead of throwing out an idea of their own, innovation is stifled. And if there is no innovation, the consultancy will lose vitality as they will be less likely to support different ideas and less likely to keep up in a changing climate.
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