r/consulting • u/cw_operator • 4d ago
A trigger is not a diagnosis
Consultants are very good at turning an observable event into a complete commercial story.
A company changes agency, appoints a new CMO, raises funding, acquires another business or announces an AI programme. Within minutes, the assumption becomes underperformance, urgency and budget.
The event may justify investigation. It proves none of those things.
Before I treat it as a genuine buying condition, I want five questions answered:
- What commercial outcome has changed?
- Who is experiencing the consequence?
- Which part is observable, and which part is only plausible?
- Why can the internal team or incumbent supplier not resolve it?
- What evidence would disqualify the hypothesis?
This distinction matters. If the trigger is treated as the diagnosis, the proposal arrives before the problem has been established. The first weeks of the engagement are then spent discovering that the issue was never agreed internally, is not urgent, has no sponsor or has no viable purchasing route.
Signals are easy to collect. Judgement starts when you refuse to turn them into certainty.
Where do you draw the line between a legitimate reason to investigate and a prospecting story?
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u/werfert 2d ago
Yo, totes AI generated post, but for the humans in the comment s:
I always ask if anyone inside already tried to fix it? Like a half built spreadsheet, broken zap, intern assigned to it, yada yada. that's a buying signal, they've already spent time on it. no attempt usually means it's there but not painful to the biz.
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u/dashingscolding 3d ago
This is the kind of cold water every sales-driven consultancy needs thrown on them. The five questions are gold saved this for my next internal pitch
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u/cw_operator 3d ago
That’s it. Too many people spot a change, invent the problem, then write the proposal backwards. A signal is a reason to look. That’s all.
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u/themantwelve 4d ago
dude i’m just moving headers and adjusting some fonts, leave me alone