Having worked in a number of consultancy organisations I have plenty of experience of projects (or people) being mis-sold by sale teams and the delivery side of the organisation having to pick up the pieces. Often this is in the form of working people into the ground to deliver on a misguided promise, and sometimes it is in the form of having to replace good people when they get disillusioned.

Quite often this situation arises through the desire of a sales team to "meet targets" irrespective of whether an opportunity is strategic or in fact achievable.

It is clear to me that this is behaviour that needs to be controlled in someway in order to prevent organisations from churning through people and having to continually employ to stay at the same size, and from lacking any sort of technical direction.

Often there is a process of career guidance in place in an organisation that is supposed to help ensure that people get the right opportunities to develop their career in line with their aspirations. Whilst being a noble cause, this often fails to achieve its goals as the guides have no say in the opportunities available.

So how do we ensure that the sales team is selling things that are in line with the aspirations of the staff, the technical direction of the company, and that are deliverable?

It is quite common for organisations to carry out in-depth bid reviews before a bid is actually submitted to a client, but to my mind this is too late.  There needs to be continuous, upfront technical involvement in the sales process. This could involve an individual architect taking responsibility for the technical direction of an account, or a group of architects taking responsibility for all accounts. This group of people would also help to enforce the technical direction of the company, and can facilitate technical knowledge sharing across accounts to enable work to be more effective. All opportunities would be passed through this person (or group of people) before a commitment to bid for/take on work is made. They would have the power to veto any individual piece of work, so long as they can provide adequate justification for doing so.

There are several significant barriers in most organisations to the adoption of an approach such as this. Chargeability is perhaps the most significant barrier - there is such pressure to keep people utilised 100% of their time on paying work that this sort of thing is rarely sponsored at the right level. This lack of sponsorship leads to the issue of empowerment. People need to be given a lot of power/influence in order to be able to effectively do this role - it is far too easy for the sales team to ride roughshod over technical people, or simply ignore them entirely. I have had first hand knowledge of this on several occasions. 

Is anyone out there lucky enough to be involved in the sales process in this way? If so I would love to hear how it works in practice, and whether it has made a difference to the organisation as a whole. Or is there a more fundamental question here with regards to the effective size of a consultancy organisation, although that subject is perhaps dealt with in another post.

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Posted by Sam Dalton on 17 January 2007 17:34:44 GMT #