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When I was at the university enrolled on my E-Commerce degree, I had very good teachers, that at the same time where working for huge consulting firms, well known worldwide. I will never forget that one of these teachers once told me that when you are working on the consulting firms business you must the company’s brand and not the personal brand of the consultant.
The corporative brand as a vital element of the traditional model
This idea my teacher shared with us is very logic in the traditional consulting firms business. The reason is that these firms have armies of people, from which just a few of them are really senior consultants very experienced – who normally leads the projects- but the majority of their employees are young people, even some of them recently graduated from their bachelor degrees.
In this way, with the traditional model of consulting firms, they are not interested in selling the talent of each of their consultants because in the same way in which they can send employee A for a project they can also send Employee B or any other. Additionally the clients have accepted this model and they pay for hiring the company and for them it is irrelevant who are the employees that will be sent to work on the project. They trust the consulting firm will send trained personal.
What I have just stated is neither good nor bad, it is just the model of traditional consulting firms, that as my teacher mentioned, brings some benefits. In the first place on this model no one is indispensable in the team. In this way if some one gets sick or quits, he can be easily replaced. In the second place the brand will be as powerful even though time passes and the generations of employees change. Finally the hiring company will just be informed about the profiles of the consultants and experience of the group that is part of the project but will not compromise with specific people.
However on the last years this traditional model has been questioned and new proposals have appeared changing elements from the traditional one. On my next post I will talk about the Personal Brand and how unlike of what my teacher stated it is also a way in which we can sell consulting projects.
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