Creating New Consulting Tools

At first I collected the managers’ personal views on business challenges in reaching their five key goals. After that I organized a workshop where we discussed the challenges and combined them into a one-page presentation.

This was a new tool that I created specifically for the project. We needed a way to categorize their customers’ needs and see how the company’s offering would serve those needs.

I’ve used the portfolio method for projects, products, IT systems, and customer relationships. The idea of portfolio management is to derive decision-making criteria from the company’s strategy and evaluate all the “assets” in the portfolio against those criteria. In addition, risk, cost, and reward are added as the generic, hard criteria.

Personas are typically used in B2C service design. I’ve also found them useful in B2B service development. This time I asked my client’s management team to describe their customers or customer roles on a one-page template. The page consists of a photo of the person (real or stock photo) and information that describes the values, behavior, and needs of the person. This method makes customers “real persons”, not just “segments”.

The process resulted in a new customer relationship process model and plan. For the plan I used a tool that I had developed earlier. I modified it to fit my client’s needs. It is a one-page presentation that the client’s customer manager can make for each key customer or customer group.

The example shows how the use of simple tools made the consulting process systematic. They allowed the workshops to focus on certain issues and deliver concrete results, not just loose words without a context. The customer relationship process and plans became tools that all the client’s business units continue to use today.

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