Getting into politics

This is the second in a series of three posts about common sales mistakes that independent consultants make. Read the first one here.

Manchester, 2018: a high-profile meeting with a new client’s Board. We had won the bid. We had prepared the agenda in forensic detail, liaising with the lead client along the way. We had our ingenious workshop exercises up our sleeves. We were ready.

The meeting began.

“We are here in support of an important conversation about how your business should organise itself to take advantage of an increasingly digital marketplace,” we announced.

A beat, then a raised hand.

“Well, I don’t think that makes any sense at all. Why are we wasting a day on that?”

Uh oh.

What became obvious to us in the 30 seconds that followed this interjection — 30 seconds in which the Board managed to arrange itself with dazzling speed into two warring factions, and start a huge argument, ignoring us altogether — was that the problem we thought we were there to solve was not the problem that actually needed solving.

By precisely 9.01am it had become clear that this Board didn’t need our help with a conversation about digital transformation. In fact, it needed some deep, relationship-oriented coaching work as the foundation for strategic conversations that it was currently unable to have.

How had we missed this? It was not our first rodeo. We had long operated on the principle that clients are rarely well-placed to self-diagnose their issues. We had challenged the original brief. We were confident that we had sold this client the right programme of work.

But what we had failed to take into account was a simple truth: all sales are inherently political.

Death, taxes… and office politics

Politics are an inevitable fact of business life. All businesses have them — they’re a consequence of the different and often competing agendas that an organisation needs to balance in order to make progress. Tension between agendas can be healthy: it can force open debate about priorities, keep people on their game, and inspire new ways of thinking. But when politics aren’t managed correctly, huge, momentum-sapping inertia is often the consequence.

Where inertia arises, clients start seeking a means of unblocking progress. 

Enter the consultants.

At this point you might be thinking, what’s the problem? Every project needs a commissioning client; every commissioning client has an agenda. Supporting a client with their agenda isn’t a bad thing. As long as you are aware of the politics, there’s no problem.

And you would be right. But the catch lies in that last sentence: as long as you are aware.

What lies within

Awareness of the politics in most client organisations is harder to achieve than it might appear. While in the main being all too happy to discuss broader organisational problems with consultants, people have a habit of playing their personal cards close to their chest — and often misleading others about their true intentions. This is especially the case when people perceive a threat to their career prospects (or proxies for it, like their social status within the organisation). It is those personal cards that determine people’s real agendas: we are hardwired to act in our perceived self-interest. 

It is worth remembering in this context that consultancy has a category trust issue. The problem merits exploring in greater detail (I will address it in a future post), but the point here is that consultancies generally have to earn the right to full disclosure with their clients.

Then there is the fact that a consultant’s relationship coverage is often unequal: it is hard to gain proximity to every important actor during a sales process. This renders it all too easy to hear a biased narrative, or an incomplete one.

Again, you might be thinking: so what? Get the sale, worry about the political machinations later. You might go further than this and argue that understanding and smoothing over the politics is part of the work: building consensus is something that consultants should be paid to do.

There is some truth in this. But political awareness is not a binary state: it’s not a case of having it fully or not having it at all. Somewhere in the grey area between these two extremes lies what we might term the ‘scope of potential political awareness’ for a consultant engaging with a prospective client. 

A failure to maximise this during the sales process is the root cause of many mistakes that can cause all sorts of commercial issues for consultants down the line. Before agreeing to work with that Board in Manchester we might have asked our sponsor, for example, “to what extent does everyone on the Board agree that digital transformation is imperative for the organisation’s success?” The answer — even the tone of the answer, or the lack of a clear answer — might have pointed us in a different direction.

Selling yourself down someone else’s river

If you do not seek to maximise your awareness of your client’s political landscape from the outset, it becomes too easy to sell the organisation the wrong thing — which is exactly what we did in Manchester. A whole set of undesirable consequences can flow from this: from the uncomfortable sensation of meetings spiralling out of control (have you ever tried to intervene to stop a warring Board?), to the need to revisit your entire scope of work.

From an emotional and psychological perspective, being confronted with a political context that you had no idea existed can put you on the back foot from the start. This is precisely where you don’t want to be in any new relationship.

From the client’s perspective, a consultant’s failure to take account of their political reality can undermine trust (that word again). This is not least because those whose agendas haven’t been understood might feel that you are working against them. But, paradoxically, even those whose agendas you have understood — but who have failed to disclose the full picture — might blame you for the oversight. 

After all, clients hire you to identify and solve their problems. Consciously or otherwise, they are looking to you for a greater level of insight than they themselves are able to provide. They want and need help navigating through their own reality. In failing to demonstrate understanding of it, you are failing in your duty to provide effective navigation.

What’s the answer?

Maximising your political awareness during a sales process is tricky. It requires being willing and able to enter the zone of uncomfortable conversations: exploring, in the already sensitive pre-engagement period, what’s really going on in an organisation. 

It is about listening to your intuition, and being unafraid to challenge narratives where experience suggests they don’t stack up. 

It is about taking the often unpopular course of naming politics upfront as part of the problem — doing what Seth Godin terms ‘emotional labour’.

It is about practice, patience and the courage to fail. 

The good news is that developing your political antennae contains zero downside for you and your business. It is the route to bigger contracts, better quality work, and longer-term relationships. This is for the simple reason that it is the route to work that stands a chance of working, rather than getting ripped apart in a political tug-of-war.

Political mastery in selling involves developing a set of skills. These skills aren’t always obvious, but they can be taught. 

If that sounds useful, learn more by listening to our podcast.

What to take from this post

Political mastery is an essential part of the sales process. While you can’t expect to have a full spectrum view of an organisation’s politics, the more you know, the better protected you — and your client — are.

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