How to Win at Consulting (8/8): Never Lose Your Audience

8) Never Lose Your Audience

It's time for a presentation with the client. You've done all your preparatory work, caught all your mistakes ahead of time, and bound the documents. Now you just have to sit in the room while your manager presents the deck. The presentation begins..

..your manager talks about the status of the project, how things are going, shows some preliminary findings and hypotheses to explore next.

Out of nowhere, the client takes a particular interest in how a given figure was calculated. Your manager clears his throat and looks at you. You're the one who calculated it and the client wants to know right now.

Approach A: You take a moment to think about how you arrived at the figure. You stand up, make eye contact with everyone in the room, and begin. "So first we made an adjustment for inflation, I mean technically the exchange rate varies month by month compared to when the costs are booked, the quarterly cost booking that is, so it's not 100% accurate but we made some assumptions. So, it's more or less correct.."

The client management stares blankly. You go on.

"We then took an aggregate composite of the the [other data] and took a weighted average - well - one as best as could be done given the data integrity. We used only the post-merger data so it shouldn't be that fuzzy. You look confused. I'm happy to further clarify anything if you need it." the client looks at you like who is this kid.

"You've lost me," says the client representative.

The manager tries to jump in and help, offering to take the discussion offline but the client wants to know right now. The other client management members in the room start glancing at their watches, pulling out their blackberries, and generally offering clear signs that they've stopped caring about anything in the meeting room.

The main client representative takes a breath, looks like he's going to say something, pauses, and slowly asks your manager to continue the presentation.

Now your manager has to try to help clean this up later. This marks the end of you getting asked to explain anything for a while.

Approach B: You stand up and clear your throat. "Thank you [your manager's first name]," you begin. "To get this figure, we took the total of the costs from [client contact 1] and converted them based on exchange rates from [client contact 2]. Then we made an adjustment for inflation using public data."

"Ok.. how about the [other data]?" the client contact asks.

"For that, we took a weighted average based on business allocation trends from the 3 years following the merger."

"Hmm, makes sense. Ok, [your manager] continue."

You sit back down. The presentation continues.

Conclusion: In project meetings with consultant teams, some (not all, but some) high-level managers are thinking several things: a) what can these guys tell me I don't already know b) were these guys worth the fees, and c) this lunch is making me drowsy.

This is the person with whom you're communicating. Don't confuse him or yourself with unnecessary words/details.

You may think your boss is your boss. That's partly true, but not the whole picture. The clients write your boss's paychecks.

In all communication, you must make sure people understand what you're saying. The first part of this is to answer what you're asked. The guy in Approach A stood up, fleetingly acknowledged that his audience was in the room, and jumped right into the mechanical details. At no point did he stop and think about the question from the client's point of view. The result was that he lost his audience and couldn't get it back.

The guy in Approach B clearly had his audience in mind. He made a transition from the manager to himself, answered the question directly, and only provided follow-up answers when asked. He also respected everyone's time by not taking more than was necessary - a sign of real professionalism.

Whether it's your boss or a client, you have to always answer the question you're asked- no more than that. If someone wants to know more, they'll ask more. If there's a relevant detail, answer the main question first and ask if the listener requires more details.

I hope you new guys and summer interns have found the posts and comments useful. I'm happy to answer a few monkeys' questions over PM.

That's it for now, good luck out there.