Over the last three years, we’ve asked clients to tell us the top two reasons why they need external support.

Two years ago, in the buoyant aftermath of the pandemic, 43% said that one of their top two reasons was that they were dealing with new issues of which they didn’t have experience. That percentage has been falling, down to 36% in 2022 and to just 26% this year, perhaps because some of the innovation that took place during COVID—hybrid working being the most obvious example—has been assimilated into the everyday, or perhaps because the issues clients are now facing are more familiar—rising costs, for example.

Clients are also less likely to cite an increase in their workload as a reason to bring consultants in: Only 23% said this was one of their top two reasons this year, compared to 33% and 36% in 2021 and 2022 respectively. Our research elsewhere shows that clients are just as likely to say they feel overworked as they were in previous years, but it appears that this in isolation is less of a justifiable reason to bring in outside help. By contrast, not having sufficient specialist expertise is a more common reason, cited by 22% of clients this year. The one thing that hasn’t discernibly changed is the use of outside help to get work done more quickly, which has stayed around the 35% mark for all three years. Staff augmentation remains important, we infer, but the key to its importance is speed of delivery.

But this is only part of the picture. For instance, this year we also asked about the extent to which regulatory compliance was a reason for bringing in external support. Only 3% of clients said this was one of their top two reasons, which reinforces other data that suggests that, when budgets are tight, clients assume they can manage compliance using their own, in-house resources. The significance of this to professional services firms lies less in its long-term financial impact—we expect, as we found in late 2020, that clients will find regulatory compliance much harder to do in house than they anticipated—than in highlighting the extent to which most clients are operating in crisis mode. They prefer to use internal resources where they can, and professional firms need to be very clear about the differential value they can bring.

The other striking thing about this data is how much it varies by client segment. Take functional role as an example. Getting work done more quickly tops the reasons for using outside help in the finance and IT functions, and in sales & marketing and strategy. A CHRO is more likely to say they’ve used outside help because they’re short-staffed and are less likely to cite the need to transform technology and the fact they’re dealing with new issues. There’s a certain irony in this: At a time when organisations are looking at automation and AI as a means of dealing with their talent crisis, the HR function doesn’t see the use of technology or the new challenges they face as good reasons for hiring consultants and other advisers. IT executives share similar priorities to strategy ones: Both are more likely to bring in outside help because they’re dealing with new issues, but strategy executives are less likely to be swayed by the argument they don’t have enough staff and are more likely to be concerned about specialist expertise—something they have in common with operations executives.

All of this is a reminder, if one were needed, of the need to recognise the differences between different buyer groups. The professional services sector has proved surprisingly resilient in the last 18 months, but many of the firms we speak to are concerned about tighter budgets, softer pipelines, and delays in signing off and/or starting projects. In such an environment, it's important to stay close to your clients to keep a finger on the pulse of their needs, and the reasons why they turn to outside help can be fundamentally different from one segment—and one individual—to another. Being clear about why a specific client needs your help may make all the difference in the coming months.