Hoping any current or former MBB, LEK, OW, Booze or Big 4 consultants can weigh in on this....
How do consultants manage to entice subject matter experts ("SME") to agree to be interviewed? Do you offer them some sort of monetary incentive? Access to market research reports?
How are these subject matter experts identified and contacted? Do all firms have an internal SME database?
Who conducts these interviews...is it usually the junior employees?
Been curious about this for a long time and can't seem to find a good answer anywhere else....
Standard procedure for SME interviews is to go through expert network services (e.g., Alphasights, GLG, Guidepoint). These vendors will manage the expert identification, contact, scheduling, confidentiality, payment etc. These experts are paid on an on-demand, per-hour basis by the consulting firm.
ENS vendors have a proprietary database of experts accumulated over many client engagements, and fill in gaps through old-fashioned Linkedin searches. For example; if I want to interview customer profiles for a client, I will tell Alphasights I want to talk to VPs of purchasing in industry XYZ, and they will often have a list of vetted profiles ready-to-schedule within a day.
Junior employees are often the ones driving these interviews, although partner-level consultants sometimes engage when they're leveraging expert interviews for client proposals.
Thanks so much for the response! I'd heard of expert network services but I thought they're clients were usually Investment Firms looking to do diligence. I didn't realize consultants overtly paid the experts they're interviewing for market research reports....it makes me wonder how that might skew or affect they're responses.
If this is the case then none of these firms really have an advantage over the other with regards to which "experts" they have access to, correct? Furthermore, there really is no "barrier to entry" as it were for a new consulting firm to access the same experts and glean the same insights?
It's about (1) asking the right questions, (2) synthesizing the findings into a relevant and useful story, and (3) supplementing these with other forms of primary research through surveys to collect data that doesn't exist (in order to add-on to / create new themes / trends / discoveries / research / buzzword)
Bingo on what the above replier said. Any expert you can source through Alphasights is commoditized - the value-add consultants have to bring here is the synthesis and actionable story.
That said, I've seen some consulting firms building proprietary expert network solutions to get some differentiation here (e.g., a proprietary network of retired industry execs on-call, and some tech-enabled stuff).
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