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When the Client Is Wrong You Need to Make It Right

By Alan Weiss

In perhaps a quarter of my consulting work over the years, I've found a client—that is, the buyer of the project—to be dead wrong about one or more assumptions, “facts,” or beliefs. It’s usually the result of neither stupidity nor malice, but rather of insulation and isolation from the operation.

And, of course, many of the buyer’s direct reports are withholding or “spinning” information so as not to get the boss in an uproar.

Here are some typical incidents that I’ve found where the client believes one thing and I’ve found another:

• Customers find that service and responsiveness are not good
• Employees don’t feel free to speak out and suggest ideas
• Projects are not coming in within budget
• Evaluations and promotions are not made with objective criteria
• The organization is not diverse and providing equal opportunity
• Training and development are not tied to line performance needs
• The buyer is not respected and admired, much less “loved”

You get the picture. While I’ve found a few clients who, apparently, deliberately try to mislead themselves and avoid harsh truths, most are simply not looking and listening sufficiently to absorb new information. As trusted advisors, it’s our job to apprise them of the weakness of that process and the lack of that content.

The Pogo Effect

Here’s how to inform your client of the “Pogo Effect” (“the enemy is us”) without getting clobbered, without sacrificing your next fee installment, and without creating lasting enmity. Some techniques are preventive, some are contingent, but all are eminently useful and applicable immediately.

1. Educate the buyer about your role

Let the client know that “throwing good money after bad” is not your idea of consulting prowess, so you’ll be validating and verifying what you’re told. Acknowledge that a large percentage will be consistent with your buyer’s perceptions but that, in your experience, the small percentage that is not is always worth examining closely. Inform your buyer that this is your job and will be part of your early feedback. (Mercedes executives said to me once, “We KNOW what’s wrong in our stores and how to fix it!” I asked, “If that’s so, why do you need me?”)

2. Develop dissonance detection skills

Watch behavior and listen to language. Are they consistent with what the client is telling you? If customer attention is the highest stated value of the client, do people take customer phone calls and speak well of their customers? I heard a candidate for a job not long ago talk of his prior customers as “bigoted.” Thousands of them? I doubt it. That wasn’t consistent with the stated values he was to promulgate. Also, are people rewarded for what the organization claims is important? Years ago, in a famous instance at United Airlines, reservationists were urged to provide caring, informative customer service, but were measured on how many calls they processed a minute, hardly compatible reinforcement.

The Right Language

3. Focus on evidence not supposition

Never accept rumor, opinion, or analysis that is not borne out by the way people act. No matter how seemingly reliable the source, many pieces of “conventional wisdom” turn out to be neither conventional nor wise. This is why Hyatt executives for years took the places of room service deliverers, front desk people, and the bell staff. They wanted to see if the customer responses were consistent with what they were being told. Similarly, you should shop a customer’s business to see what your experiences actually are.

4. Create language to convey negative news positively

I often relate to my speaking audiences a true story about my saying to a buyer, “I’ve found the problem, and both the good news and bad news is that I don’t have to leave your office to address it.” You have to create the right language to apprise a buyer that he or she has been under the wrong impression, and that they have been “wise” to have asked you to validate or invalidate it. You have to show that this is an opportunity to make a huge difference, not an instance to assign blame or take names. When I pointed out to the president of Calgon ten years ago that clients weren’t leaving because of forced shutdowns, as the sales force claimed, but because of lousy sales service, the president immediately saw it as an opportunity to significantly reduce attrition, realizing we could work on the honesty of communications later.

Most clients know their content well (e.g., how to make cabinets or sell insurance) but don’t know their processes well (e.g., how to make quick decisions or negotiate with vendors). Customer reactions are filtered through layers of people who have self-interest in massaging the message and interpretation.

You have to be able to prepare the client for the possibility of being wrong in some beliefs; for the eventuality that you’ll be bringing this up; and for the opportunity of correcting the internally incorrect.

That’s why our retirement plans aren’t vested in our client companies, and why we should always attempt to get paid in advance (though that’s a topic for another column)!

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Alan Weiss, Ph.D. is the author of twenty-five books, which appear in seven languages, including Million Dollar Consulting. He runs the unique Million Dollar Consulting™ College three times a year, and has a global mentoring program. You can reach him at www.summitconsulting.com, where you can also download hundreds of free articles. He was recently inducted into the Professional Speaking Hall of Fame® and received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Press Institute, the seventh in its sixty-year history.