Collaboration: Yes, Your Clients Care217
When we do new contracts with professional service
firms, we put in a value-add clause. Most firms come back
with very standard offers, like a couple of secondees or a
software upgrade. Of course that’s valuable and important
to us, but it doesn’t differentiate the firm. Maybe it distin-
guishes ones that won’t do it. But the real opportunity to
stand out is through collaboration. [What we] really want
to know is, “What new are you bringing to the table?
How will you go above and beyond to help improve our
business?” We now expect firms to deliver a clear plan
outlining how they’ll deliver their expertise across our
company. Increasingly this planning discussion impacts
our decisions about short-listing, or giving additional
work to existing providers.
Highly traditional firms are wary about agreeing to these
clauses—fearing any kind of open-endedness in their contracts—
and that skittishness may well be held against them. Clients want
to work with firms that relish the opportunity to add value above
and beyond the existing piece of work.
Most clients also understand that having new people arrive on
the scene increases the chance of adding value through innovation.
They doubt that something new and exceptional will arise through
the individual who’s been on the account for years. (Why wasn’t
he or she being exceptional already?) They want to see fresh blood.
And they want to see evidence of what you’ve done that exceeds the
terms of a contract with another client. If you can meet these cri-
teria, you are far more likely to get short-listed when the next RFP
is drawn up, or—better yet—you may be the only firm considered
for that new work.
How do you foster innovation, which by definition is a departure
from the tried and true? The very best professional firms are start-
ing to take a “design thinking” approach to innovating within their
client service offerings. Simply stated, you start small, test, discard
the failed experiments while you pursue the promising ones, revise,
test again, and so on.
4
This process is described explicitly in the
contracting phase. The firm starts with X as the scope proposed by
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218SMART COLLABORATION
the client, and says in response, “Yes, of course we can quote for
X. But we think that doing X+Y+Z—as a series of small and related
experiments—holds way more promise for what you’re trying to
achieve.”
5
Clients get this. Yes, they understand that what you’re proposing
will benefit you, because it’s a bigger assignment. But if they see the
merits—with your help—then they may well modify the scope, at
least to test the viability of an idea through a pilot project.
Collaboration leads to high-quality
results and mitigates risks
As a rule, “more eyes on the work” assures quality and prevents
avoidable errors. The bigger the business opportunity or challenge
at hand, the more advantageous it is to bring multiple perspectives
to bear—and clients understand this.
Of course, you have to avoid overdoing it. As an audit client put
it: “There comes a point where ‘collaboration’ crosses the line into
‘cover your ass.’ I mean, I don’t want to wait to have it checked,
rechecked, and re-rechecked. Like on a draft report, I expect that
the senior manager can show me the figures without sending it
off to multiple partners for review. Or for that matter, that the
partner I usually deal with can give me an opinion on a routine
issue without consulting his tax expert. But for new or complicated
questions? Yeah, sure.”
You may recall the dabblers and lone wolves—two kinds of non-
collaborative partners—whom I referred to in chapter 1. (Dabblers
are partners who have a clearly defined area of expertise, but
when their client comes to them with a problem outside that area,
they decline to locate a colleague with the relevant expertise, and
instead, “give it a go.” Lone wolves are what they sound like: solo
operators, often with sharp teeth.) Clients may not use these terms,
but they understand clearly that there are downsides to working
solely with noncollaborative representatives of your firm. Your job
is to show them a more attractive alternative—and in the process,
reduce your own risk of malpractice or rogue behaviors.
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Collaboration: Yes, Your Clients Care219
Peer collaboration signals your
broader collaborative capacity
You may not realize it, but clients view your interactions (or lack of
them) with your own colleagues as a signal of whether you’re will-
ing and able to collaborate more generally. Working with your own
partners ought to be relatively easy, they reason, so if you can’t pull
that off, then you’re unlikely to collaborate in trickier situations.
This is important to them for at least two major reasons:
• As companies pull more high-end work in-house—a growing
trend in recent years—they lean ever more heavily on those
internal resources, who in turn need to draw on the exper-
tise of external advisers. They need confidence that you’ll
be an effective thought partner and low-friction technical
adviser for their internal staff.
• Conversely, as clients send more low-end work out of the
shop, through disaggregation and outsourcing, they need
their advisers to work seamlessly with other firms. Working
effectively across firms—especially those that are actual or
potential competitors—is obviously trickier than collaborat-
ing with colleagues; if you can’t do the latter, clients assume
you can’t do the former, either.
Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that your clients wear multiple
hats. For example, they have customers who are suppliers as well
as suppliers who are customers, which means that they absolutely
have to collaborate internally, and in a very disciplined way. “I’ll
give you a classic example,” one client firm executive said to me:
We were negotiating with the post office in the UK as both
a customer and a supplier. We took a very aggressive stance
when buying from them, and a very conciliatory approach
when selling to them. Quite frankly, we were talking to the
same person and giving them completely different messages.
It was completely stupid, but happened because in days
gone by we had discrete businesses with discrete targets.
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220SMART COLLABORATION
So from my perspective, collaboration is absolutely cru-
cial to the customer experience, yeah? We’ve cleaned up
our house that way. And so when we see law firms who
are pitching us, it’s quite obvious which of those organi-
zations are joined up, and which are just headed up by a
rainmaker with his or her own selfish targets. I’ve got no
time or patience for that anymore.
Remember that your clients, both current and prospective,
may well be sizing you up based on your proven ability to work
collaboratively—not only with them, but within your own firm.
Collaboration leads to consistency
in service levels
You already know how frustrated clients get when one partner fails
to follow billing guidelines, how much they push back on getting
billed for time spent re-explaining the same issue to multiple part-
ners, and how foolish you look when the client informs you about
work that one of your own partners is already undertaking with
them. So you might not be surprised at how often I hear clients talk
about the “consistency of the customer experience”—both locally
and internationally—as one of the key differentiators they notice
between firms.
Here are some relevant quotes from clients:
“I want assurances that the quality of the service will remain
high no matter where we are working with the firm.”
“Consistency across offices is important. I need to know a firm
has the mechanisms in place to ensure that across international
and multioffice lines, the firm is doing the work consistently.”
“Finding consistency from office to office and the ability for
a firm to deliver across markets is a problem. I can remember
using Firm XXXX in Mexico, and they were just terrible
there.”
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Collaboration: Yes, Your Clients Care221
“I asked my firm, ‘As you set up those firm offices in Brazil,
will you have a US-based partner spend time in that office to
make sure the culture is there?’ For me, I want to know that
when I’m calling that person in São Paulo, he or she is going to
understand where we are coming from. That makes me more
comfortable.”
Those quotes speak to geographical consistency, but consistency
over time is also key from the client’s point of view. Many clients
are actually very skilled at succession planning, at multiple levels
in the organization; they expect the same from you. In chapter 3,
we called out the reasons why firm leaders should pay attention
to client transition plans and consider implementing a system of
“laddering”—that is, matching up your professionals at each rank
with client counterparts of a roughly similar experience. Now we’re
giving you the rationale based on the clients’ point of view: they are
equally concerned about smooth transitions across generations of
their service providers. In fact, this issue is seen as so critical and
problematic in some companies that it has risen to the board level.
If they’re already that sensitive to the issue of intergenerational col-
laboration, they must expect you to pay attention to it, as well.
Collaboration promotes simplicity
In an increasingly complex world, clients seek simplicity wherever
they can find it. Purchasing a broader range of services from a
smaller number of providers is one way of getting there.
6
A decade
ago, this trend was mainly limited to the biggest, most sophisti-
cated clients with powerful procurement functions. These days,
many smaller clients are moving toward what is often called a
“core provider” model. When collaboration broadens how the cli-
ent views your firm, you reinforce or expand your position as a
core provider.
It seems clear that this trend will only expand and intensify.
Few single-service firms—even those offering bargain-basement
pricing or guru-level expertise—will be exempt. As one high-tech
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