Skip to main content

Consulting thought

A few days back, a so called colour consultant visited us. From a reputed painting company, this service allows customers to work with a consultant and choose colours for their walls. They take pictures of your walls and show it will look with the new colours. All in all, a neat marketing experience.

However, the consultants job is not an easy one. He cannot upsell - as in, his objective cannot be to maximise selling paint. He cannot in any way 'underestimate' the colour sensibility of his customer - however low their sensibilities are. But he also has to respect his own sensibilities as an 'artist'. Turned out that this particular guy was an artist.

He gave us a few options - some which we liked, some which we did not and some which resonated with our thoughts completely. Now, the third option - the ones which resonated with us - is the sweet spot for the consultant and the company. The trick is to know what are those - but that is dificult to get - because it is the place where the customers thoughts, the consultant thoughts and artistic sensibilities come to play.

But to get there is a bit of a difficult path. The customer wants a particular colour or a texture on a wall where it is an obviously bad idea - due to a combination of factors - like light for instance. As a consultant you have to respect that idea, yet give the customer a different idea without rejecting the customers idea. How to steer the customer from their pet idea to a new idea - is a tough task. And he mentioned it to me at one point that "customers do not like my idea".

The trick there is to make your (the consultants) idea feel like it is building on the customers idea, so that at the end the customer feels that their idea is valued - that is an easier path to take than to resist the customers idea and show them another path. Kind of judo - where you make the most of the opponents moves rather than trying to resist. Or, as they say about life - go with the flow rather than against it.

And what about us? Well, he kind of told us that our idea of putting textures was a bit of over kill and given our thoughts, a little bit of simplicity and a dash of colour would be ideal. He recommended a few things which were thought were OTT and we asked him his opinion of some of our thoughts - which he thought was a great idea  - and yes, we are well on the course of implementing it.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Be Civil. Make nice!

Popular posts from this blog

The man who saved Pumpelsdrop

This was a story we had in college if I am not mistaken. Perhaps it was in school, but a delightful story it was. The story goes somewhat like this ( reproduced from here ), but the college version we had was slightly different from this.  I t was a dull, gloomy and a depressing morning in a town named Pumpelsdrop in northern England. The Great Depression had brought all the businesses to a standstill. The bored automobile dealer was spending time alone, as usual. But, this seems to be an unusual morning as an odd entity (customer) appeared on the horizon. A man in a bright suit walks up to the dealer and says, "I need to buy a Rolls Royce Phantom II. We have a business conference coming up and I need to impress my customers". Then proceeds to pay 10% of the deal with a single check for 2000 pounds. The rest he says will pay when he takes the delivery.   The auto dealer was stunned. He was delighted to hear that someone is holding a business conference of some kind and ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Zero to One

Zero to One by Peter Thiel is a nice read. (Yes - if I sit down to write a book review - the book has to be worth it - and usually good - so most of my book reviews are about good books.You can stop here if that's the information you seek.) Where this book scores is in contrarian thoughts and contrarian questions that make you think. It starts with a four big lessons learned from the 90s dot-com crash that is, Make incremental advances, Stay lean and flexible, Improve on the competition and Focus on product, not sales. Just as you warm up to it, he says, the opposite rules are more correct - which are: It is better to risk boldness than triviality. A bad plan is better than no plan. Competitive markets destroy profits. Sales matters just as much as products. And finally leaves with a simple definition of contrarianism - it is not to oppose the crowd (or follow a smaller or newer or older crowd) but to think for yourself. "All happy companies are different"...
Post a Comment
Read more

Anti networking year

I dont usually go out of my way to network. But over the last few years, I ensured that I spend some time creating new connections. It is a small fragment of my time that goes into it, but what I realised was that some of those networking events were not really working out. I also took time to post about the things I do (mostly on Linkedin) and here (nobody reads this - this is more of a note to myself).  It seemed to be the same set of people saying the same set of things. So, this year I have decided to step back.  Unless it is a truly unique event, I wont be going to any event - and thats how the unconference happened.  Unless it is a really significant update, I wont be posting about it.  And spend time creating and doing the things I like to do. Perhaps read more. Or write more. It is April now and I have done well so far.  Managed to read a few books. Actively working on a few creations. And then some. Lets see.  So for all I know, I might write less ...
Post a Comment
Read more