"Cold calling" fit with this role?
I'm a relatively recent grad from a semi-target who has been in conversation with a small management consulting group for a few months now. I was told during an informational call for an entry-level analyst role that there would be some cold calling involved during a project in order to gain information from the client's competitors or conduct brief interviews with customers of the client. Absolutely no selling.
Is this typical of entry-level roles in consulting? I am dead afraid of a role that will force me to be on the phone all day, so I wanted to make sure this was common among small shops or even the larger firms. Creating deliverables and writing reports were also communicated to me as part of the job.
I'd advise you to ask them more info regarding this part of the job. I think that smaller consulting firms often lack the relevant insider connections or the budget to interview industry experts thus the need to cold call. Not sure how a competitor would receive such a call though. Justifying a cold call for selling a product to a distributor is generally well accepted but cannot say the same for someone receiving a call and asked to provide business intel info to a competitor for free.
Thank you for the thoughtful response. I have my final round tomorrow and hope to do some digging as to how they have gone about cold calling in the past and how exactly they get a competitor in the industry to shed insight. It does seem a bit strange.
Is this firm at least offering a complementary glass/plastic cup of premium boxed wine to these companies before they try to fuck them?
No worries. It's likely you get the job. Please keep us updated I am also about to itw for boutique consulting firms and cold calling is something I've definitely seen often in job descriptions
Had the final round. Seems like a legit shop and the calling won't be bulk of the work. I didn't really nail a brain teaser that I wasn't expecting, but still hoping for the best.
Not sure if y'all wanted an update, as of a week ago they still haven't gotten confirmation that the deal I would be on has closed but said they were optimistic. I'd like to think that they would have rejected be by now if I definitely didn't get the gig. I've been in conversation with them starting in December, and picked back up interviews with them in April, so waiting has been part of the game all along. Will ultimately let you all know how it goes.
Thanks for the update. Hope you get the job! I don't know their project workload but given the context you provided it seems stupid for them to reject you at this point
I worked at a boutique consulting firm several years ago. We cold-called a ton, and I think similar-size firms do the same. It wasn't in the budget to connect with expert networks, so often times it was calling lower-level employees, academics, consultants, or small business owners to try and get a few minutes of their time to explore some things going on in an industry.
It wasn't fun, I'll tell you that much. But it was a useful experience. Analysts at my firm were expected to source their own contacts for cold calling, as well as distilling the information learned into meaningful insights and designing decks around what we learned. It wasn't very formulaic, which was both good (allowed for creativity in problem-solving) and bad (it was a shit-pile of work).
I also learned how to talk to people from all walks of life, and how to gently steer them through a conversation so that they talk about things that I need to know instead of the things they feel like talking about. All in all it was a valuable experience, but I don't miss days of dialing dozens of numbers and dealing with a single-digit hit rate.
That sound fairly light actually -- that sounds a lot like an entry level sales gig.
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