What is Asset Based Consulting, this growing trend in consulting?
With an insolent growth rate of 12% last year, the board confirms its good health and the sector's leaders are enthusiastic about the future of their industry.
But consulting is constantly evolving and is not spared from the technological transformations that are profoundly changing society and the world of work. A recent trend is starting to gain ground in consulting: Asset Based Consulting.
What is Asset Based Consulting? Here is a summary of this new form of advice and the benefits it brings to customers.
1. Sell custom-made
Wanting to sell a packaged product because it has already been successfully produced and executed can work when the requests are always very similar: an SEO audit of a website or a specific training for example. But that's not always what suits a customer. The easiest way to sell a consulting assignment is to offer the service that the client really, genuinely and totally needs.
Selling a project is not like selling a product that has non-modifiable features, a consulting mission can on the contrary be totally adapted to the customer's needs. It is therefore necessary to listen long and actively to the issues, discuss the project, understand the client's objective in depth, before offering him the service he really wants. In a word, make it tailor-made!
What is Asset Based Consulting?
Before going into detail about the concept of Asset Based Consulting, it must first be precisely defined. Asset Based Consulting is a category of consulting in which tools and products represent the main asset of the offer, as opposed to the human capital generally highlighted in traditional consulting offers.
The first to have developed this new form of advice were the firms McKinsey, KPMG and BCG. In Asset Based Consulting, it is the intellectual property contained in products and technologies that is sold. While traditionally it is the talents of consulting firms that are offered, it is here the solutions and tools that will be offered to respond to clients' problems.
The goal is to create products that can do what consultants may be required to do in traditional consulting engagements and allow the client to reuse that product. KPMG, for example, has set up financial advisory tools that replace certain audit assignments that they tended to carry out themselves until now. Thanks to artificial intelligence, their tools analyse customers' accounting data and provide them with analysis and advice on this basis.
Customers have access to this tool whenever they want and can benefit from real-time analytics. This tool, which KPMG sells on a subscription basis, is much less expensive for its clients while providing them with value throughout the year.
Asset Based Consulting does not challenge traditional consulting, as many works cannot be carried out by technologies, even with the most powerful artificial intelligence, but it is an important trend in the consulting sector and one that must be taken very seriously by the management teams of consulting firms. Many startups are starting to offer solutions that can analyze a large amount of data and provide information to their customers for much less than consulting assignments.
It is important that consulting firms start developing tools to automate some of the repetitive tasks that their teams perform, and redirect their value proposition to the part of recommendations and actions that artificial intelligence cannot perform. For example, PwC launched its Cloud Transformation development department a few years ago, which offers all kinds of automated solutions to its clients while maintaining missions to execute strategic plans where people are important.
The benefits of Asset Based Consulting
1. Mastering geographical challenges
While most consulting projects require you to go to the client's site to take the full measure of the client's problems and to have a complete view of the situation, Asset Based Consulting makes it possible to sell a very "scalable" solution: once developed, it generally requires only minimal adjustments to be deployed at the client's site and bring value to them. Installation and control can be carried out remotely, as well as training and support for the customer.
2. Responses to new customer issues
Companies have more and more easy access to information on their competitors, their market and the evolution of the latter thanks to the content offers that have flourished in recent years (CB Insight, Forrester, etc.). Information, which has been the preserve of the council until now, is therefore called into question. Customers have new expectations for which they hope to measure an ROI. Solutions that come out of Asset Based Consulting make it easier to calculate and monitor this ROI.
3. Responding to a new form of demand
Customers are increasingly expecting "self-service" offers. This need for independence is growing as software solutions multiply and become smarter. Customers now want the right information, at the right time, at the right price. Companies have less patience for long transformation projects, deployments over several months, etc. As with our society in general, immediate and repeated consumption is preferred to waiting for a more exhaustive but long to come result.
Asset Based Consulting is not just a trend in consulting, it is profoundly changing the entire consulting industry because it responds to a strong demand from traditional consulting clients. Consulting firms that are quickly taking precedence over this transformation still have time to differentiate themselves and take advantage of it because the offer is still in its infancy.
