A common aspect of many sales cycles right now is the involvement of a consultant, as some of our customers and prospects are hiring consultants to assist them in making specific buying decisions. These consultants range from individual industry experts to huge accounting and consulting organizations, and their role typically involves developing and administering RFPs and auctions. Conventional wisdom would say that we need to give these consultants what they want, and follow the rules that they are setting.

We need to challenge that wisdom and consider breaking the consultant's rules.

Our preferred strategy is to treat these players like other key influencers in the buying cycle instead of the decision makers, and to ask ourselves key questions such as:


Who has hired the consultant?
What are they trying to accomplish?
Who will act on the consultant's recommendation?
How are they being compensated? (by driving vendor's prices down?)
Have we been involved with them in the past?
If so, what was our relationship and how did they impact our success?


This last question is critical. If we have worked with them in the past and have won as a result of their involvement, we might consider them a possible coach. If we have lost, we may be more likely to consider them a gatekeeper. If they are actively restricting our access to the decision maker and others in the organization, there's no question they are gatekeepers. In any case, we have to look at the situation and treat them like any other key player. It has to be up to us to decide who we will work with and how we will work with them.

In the end, we can't assume that the consultants make these decisions, or that we have to follow their rules. Our responsibility as value leaders is to understand our customer's business and needs, and help them achieve success. We can't let anyone, even a paid consultant, stand in the way.