What you’re looking for when you can’t control the outcome.
When you’re a B2B consultant, you’re typically working with groups of people: Group dynamics come into play and can completely alter the energy and direction of a project without any warning.
Since you’re outside the organization, you don’t necessary know what’s going on day-to-day. You don’t know who has a problem with who, or if there’s some inner-office drama going on. In a lot of ways, this is a bonus for you as a consultant, but in others, it’s challenging to be on the outside looking in.
At Dementia By Day, we work primarily with senior living companies who want to elevate their dementia care communities and brands. Although that all sounds pretty niche, we actually work with a wide variety of different types of clients: clients with 1 building, clients with 25 or more buildings, home care companies with one or more franchisees, third-party providers who need a dementia care expert, and more.
If you’re a B2B consultant, you are going to have many (if not all) of the same challenges that we have when working with clients.
The biggest difference between what we do and what a coach does is that we work with teams instead of 1:1.
We always want our clients to come out of a project feeling successful and happy with the work we’ve done together. The challenge for us, though, is that we can’t completely control the outcome for our clients. In a lot of ways, it’s up to the client to do their “homework” and—more than anything else—continue to communicate with us throughout the project.
Here’s when it works:
1. The entire team cares about the project and engages positively in meetings. Bonus: Everyone turns on their cameras for meetings!
If the only person who is invested in improving the company’s program is the CEO, it’s going to be a challenge for us to make any substantive changes at the organization. Imagine that the CEO moves onto another organization, or, more likely, imagine that when we begin to roll out a program, we get a lot of pushback from other team members. The positive energy and meeting attendance also includes the clients’ buildings during the rollout process. Do they come to meetings? Do they do their homework? Are they happy to see us over Zoom, or are they annoyed that we’re trying to make changes to how they do dementia care?
Do team members come to meetings with cameras on (at least most of the time) or is everyone camera-off, muted, clearly doing other tasks while we’re talking?
2. The team communicates with us in between meetings via email and does their homework. Bonus: We are kept abreast of big changes!
If team members aren’t doing their homework between meetings, the project is going to stall out— quickly. We want to get everything done in the time period we’re working together, but that isn’t going to happen if we send a few logos for the team to review and no one replies to us for a week. The more time we have to spend following up with a client, the more this time is going to cut into the actual meat and potatoes of the project. We also appreciate when we’re kept abreast of big changes at the organization. As an example, if the team is hiring a new COO, we’d love to meet them when they come aboard—not three months later when we hear, suddenly, that there is a new COO.
3. We get paid on time and we don’t need to track down multiple contacts to try and get paid each month. Bonus: They’re offering direct deposit!
Not getting paid quickly can stall a consultant’s timeline. When we have a client who doesn’t pay us on time, it means that we have to start putting walls around our content and the time we’re spending with that client. It means we spend extra time and energy following up with the client. It means we’re spending less time doing the valuable work we both want done. Besides that, it’s painful to have to ask a client for payment each month and it doesn’t foster a good relationship between us and the client.
We had a client recently who absolutely refused to pay us on time. It was brutal. We spent weeks on end—each month—reaching out to people at the company to remind them it was time to pay us (and what to pay us.) This was a massive energy drain and eventually eroded our client-consultant relationship.
4. People stay with the company and the company culture is generally positive.
Senior care has high turnover rates, particularly among care staff. We know this and we expect there will be turnover. That said, if there is consistently above-average turnover (in management, in particular) it will begin to affect the project’s workflow. If we’re rolling the project out with a building, and suddenly their Director is gone, we have to pause and restart once a new team member joins and takes that role.
All of our super successful clients have these five things in common. There are plenty of other attributes that we love about our favorite clients, but these five items are incredibly impactful when it comes to rolling out a dementia care program.
