i'm very much looking forward to this video because today's topic is both quite juicy but also highly educational an inspiration for today's topic was coming from a harvard business review article that was reading the article is called how consultants project expertise and learn at the same time i will link the article in the video description i do think it is quite insightful it'll pretty much ask the question are all consultants con man are they sincere what tactics do they apply to potentially create an impression from the client that is not accurate and as an introduction to the topic i want to read out to you one paragraph of the article the challenge with effective consulting is that it depends on in-depth situational knowledge that consultants simply can't have when they start an assignment what's more they may not yet be completely clear on what the client who's paying top dollars and expects results immediately really once so consultants must rapidly and discreetly gain knowledge of the client's business while simultaneously giving an impression of competence and self-confidence we call this channel learning credibility tension and this is indeed a challenge that you almost always face as a consultant if you start on a new project because on the one hand the client expects you to be super competent highly knowledgeable on a topic from day one from the very first day you set foot at the client's office but on the other hand you might be young you might come fresh out of university maybe you did a similar project in the past for sure you do not know in detail the client's current processes so how can you be perceived as credible and confident by the client if actually you are not if actually you might need a couple of weeks a couple of months to get up to speed to really get all the knowledge and learnings that you need to really come to a great and valuable recommendation for the client so this is the topic we're going to talk about today so welcome to another coffee break here on my channel firm learning my name is heinrich i'm a former strategy consultant and i want to help you to become successful in the first years of your career now before we jump into this i know that this topic is a little bit controversial and after watching this video some of you might really indeed think that consulting is a con man job this is not really what i want to say here with this video this is not my position and i also want to open with a little disclaimer that all the things that i will talk about now are to my knowledge not officially endorsed by any large consulting firm for sure not by the employers that i worked for in the past and these things are also not part of any official training curriculums of any of these large consulting firms that i'm aware of this is rather practical street smartness type of knowledge type of tips that you will pick up by doing this job over time so let's start by putting ourselves into the shoes of a consultant you're sitting at the client in your first one or two weeks of the project and you need to learn more you need to learn more about the client's business the clients industry what exactly the problem is that you need to solve how the client's processes work and so on now what can you do of course you can just blatantly ask the client what does this mean how does this work how's this supposed to go so if you do this if you ask these type of direct questions you will often get not so nice answers from the clients they might say well this is why i hired consultants for them to give me the answers i shouldn't train you you should know these things why are we paying you so much money if you're not even aware of these vedic things of our business of our industry and so on and trust me that these are not some theoretical considerations you hear things like that all the time on projects these things happen quite frequently and indeed a partner i worked with in the past once told me well heinrich you know consulting is like close quarter combat you really need to be careful need to watch every step behind every corner behind every door there might be danger be careful so it might be fair to argue that as a consultant often you need to fake it till you make it in the first weeks or in the first months you somehow need to pretend to be knowledgeable to be an expert until you really build up that knowledge over time and this is now where the juicy part of this video begins because now i want to share four of these sneaky tactics that you could employ as a consultant to create exactly this impression and again i do not say that every consultant is using techniques like this and also do not necessarily endorse to behave in this way but let's just say that tactics like this can be quite helpful in certain situations and the first tactic is to leverage the fact that you as a consultant have an opportunity that many other employees of the company do not have and this is that you as part of your project will very often be able to talk to lots of different people at the client from lots of different departments and by that you will collect lots of information the probably many employees will not be able to have if they just work on one specific task in one specific department for their whole career so often by talking to one client you will pick up some industry trends some certain specific information on what is going on in the company the probably another client of yours another employee of the company is not really aware of so the next time you then talk to this other person at the client you can then selectively share some of the information that you got from the first client and by that because this other client might not be aware of that he or she will then often perceive feels very competent very well informed that you really know your things if you tell him information about their company that even they do not know and indeed there's this sarcastic saying that consultants just borrow your watch to tell you the time and while of course this oversimplifies it i do think that there is some truth to that in the sense that this works up to the highest levels often after a project in the end than if you really present your final results to the board to the sea level in your recommendation it will not be unusual that at least some of the recommendations that you make will be ideas that you more or less directly derive from information that you got from other people working in the organization from people really working in the machine room that just shared some ideas with you and what the company needs to do to improve and to now not digress too far from the topic of this video i do not want to debate the merits of this i do think though that there is an argument to be made that even if consultants do that there still can be a significant value add in the way that consultants do this but again let's maybe park this for another video the second sneaky tactic that i want to talk about today is just how you frame your information and specifically to frame information that you have as your very own experiences so let's imagine that you indeed do some research on the client on the industry before you start the project and you maybe read a book or report about specific things maybe you even talked to some experts some other people some senior partners so you do know some things about the topic that now you need to work on but of course the problem here is if you're having a debate with a client and you want to share some pieces of information and you just say oh yeah i read this in a book or i read this in a report of course this will often not be very convincing this will not really portray you as a big expert on a certain topic so instead you can frame this as your own experiences you can say oh yes last time i worked on this this is how we did it you can say from my experience this is how this is handled this is how usually this works this is what other companies in this field do and this frames you as not only being book smart it's not only being a student who read about a certain topic in the past but as being a practitioner is being an expert who has done similar things in the past has worked on these specific topics on prior engagement on prior jobs or whatever my third little sneaky tactic is on how to frame questions and actually this i picked up in one of my very first internships i was working with a project lead and she always seemed super confident she always seemed like she really wouldn't know her things so one day i just asked her as an intern you know how do you do this you always seem so confident though clearly these topics need to be new to you at least to some extent as way so i asked her how do you do this and she indeed shared one little tactic with me that i really found helpful and frankly also applied several times myself then afterwards and she told me you know whenever a client uses a term that you do not understand or say something that is not really clear to you instead of asking what does this mean what does this term mean instead of asking this because these questions of course potentially make you look ignorant instead rather ask what do you mean with this term what does this mean to you what exactly do you mean if you say this because what this implies is that not only you understand the general meaning of what this person was talking about but you even have this higher more abstract knowledge that you are aware that not everybody in every company is using this term in the very same way so now you want to know specifically how this client and this company is using this so you completely turn around the frame from you have no idea at all about what this person is talking about to you really completely understanding this but now you really want to understand how exactly this is meant this is to be understood at this company for this client for this person so the fourth tactic is maybe the most sneaky one and i even asked myself whether i should include it but i want to be open and transparent with you because i do know that some people do this but reflect on this for yourself and only use at your own discretion and this tactic can help you to be perceived as intelligent of course the client when he or she hires consultants especially when the client hires mbb consultants everybody knows what the fees are for these type of professionals they expect to work with highly intelligent people and so of course it might help you if you are indeed perceived to be intelligent but how can you signal that you are intelligent and indeed at least from my experience one of the strongest signals that always have a very strong effect is mental math if you are really good at mental math everybody will think that you are highly intelligent interestingly this is not only true for clients but for your own team for your partner your project lead you work with this way and of course ideally you really are good with mental math this is really easy to you and then you can indeed impress people just by doing some crazy calculations in your head so what do you do actually your mental math is really bad you're just not good at all of it so what you could do is when you prepare for a meeting and when you know that you will present for instance some parts of a document or maybe a whole document some pages of a powerpoint presentation then already think about okay are there some pages where there are numbers on them where potentially you could do some little calculations on your presentation that would seem quite impressive because then what you can do is that you can fake the mental math so before you walk into the meeting you think of a calculation you already calculate the result with excel over the calculator and then you walk into the meeting you present the document and then live on the spot you pretend that you're calculating something saying ah okay so if you multiply this by this and then you divide it by this then this is the number that you will get so again yes this is probably more than just sneaky so take responsibility for your own actions and decide whether you really want to do this or not so now reflecting on these tactics and i also want to make it clear that these tactics are not only relevant for consultants but also for temporary workers for freelancers for other professional advisors these are just things that are to some extent necessary to bridge the so-called learning credibility tangent that the article is describing to bridge this tangent the from the very beginning you just need to be perceived as credible if you want to succeed in your job but at the same time you also need the time to get some learning from the client to really get up to speed and really understand what this whole project is all supposed to be about so i'd really love to hear your perspective on this topic how do you see this that you already apply similar strategies what is your experience with this as you know i will do my very best to answer every single comment that you write and yes every comment that you do write also helps me with the youtube algorithm if you want to continue your learning journey with this channel from learning check out my other video on how consultants solve tough problems for their clients i will link the video somewhere about fear trust it will be worth it check it out and if you took any value at all out of this video please hit the like button for the youtube algorithm and also hit the subscribe button to stay up to date on all my content i release new videos every single saturday also have an instagram my handle is firm learning so follow me there to see even more from me and indeed also have a firm learning newsletter sign up link in the video description and i want to end by saying thank you to all the members of this channel you're really making a big contribution to the course of this channel thank you so much for your support so if you watched until the end also let me know in the comments i very much appreciate that thank you for your support good weekend to all of you see you back next saturday this is heine from from learning all the best to you and bye bye