What is value, and why don’t clients think they are getting it?
Clients consistently talk about value. Convincing a client that you can create or deliver it is a key factor in winning new work. But are firms successful? And what is value, anyway?
No buyer is going to part with their money for something they don’t think is going to add value for them in some form—and that applies to consulting just as much as a house renovation or a laptop. But what that value actually is, when it comes to consulting, is notoriously hard to pin down. Clients may be in broad agreement that they need to be able to measure the value-add of consulting in financial terms, but there’s little consensus when it comes to the underlying value-add that generates those financial returns. And even within one client organisation, different stakeholders in a project can have opposing views on what constitutes value in their eyes.
Previous research we’ve carried out has looked at the ways in which consultants enhance the project delivery process. Those who can be genuinely said to be adding value are those who enable a client to tackle a problem in a way that is different to how they would have tackled the problem on their own. We can group these areas of differentiation into five dimensions, as below, which helps in defining what value is.
Does this help us to understand what clients want when it comes to value? Not entirely…
We’ve often written about the value gap—the disparity between the proportion of clients who believe the quality of the solution they are getting is high and the proportion who believe they are getting a return on their investment that is greater than the fees spent. This gap has been persistent for as long as we’ve been gathering data and has widened in 2024.