Consulting with Clients

If your organization offers solutions that can mean real change in how your clients do business, resistance to change can stop the sale. Consulting with Clients (CWC) helps your consultants diagnose the client's change-readiness, identify interests and potential allies, and help set your clients up for successful implementation. Helping clients succeed from the onset of the relationship puts you at their side as an ally, reduces resistance to change and objections, and reduces the percentage of projects that fail to succeed and grow after the contract is signed.

Program Outcomes

Consulting skills are as important as technological proficiency in today's environment. Consulting with Clients is an intermediate-level workshop that enables consultants to bring business value to their internal or external clients. They will learn how to align solutions to address business priorities and processes and, as a result, achieve increased revenue and customer loyalty.

Learning Objectives

As a result of participating in Consulting with Clients, consultants are able to:

Understand the client's agenda, commitments, and views of the project
Develop a deeper interpersonal relationship with the client centered on trust, credibility, and rapport
Understand the individual and cultural expectations, goals, and style needs that must be addressed to develop appropriate solutions
Gain the client's personal and formal commitment to take action and implement the recommendations
Deliver business value to the client and the client's organization beyond that of a technically correct solution

Approach

Consulting with Clients is a two-day, interactive workshop composed of the following three modules:

Making Sense of Complexity
Creating Productive Relationships
Facilitating Meaningful Change

Enabling Improved Performance

Consulting with Clients can be enhanced with optional performance application, reinforcement, and support tools. These ensure that participants can hone newly acquired skills and behaviors upon returning to work. Involving managers early on and training them to coach to Consulting with Clients is also important for a successful implementation.

Evaluation

Organizations that implement Consulting with Clients have access to a broad range of tools to measure initial behavioral changes and business results. One approach may be a web-based survey of participants to identify the degree of change in key skills and document the differences this change makes.

To learn more about measuring the impact of learning, visit Measurement and Evaluation Services.