What is Asset Based Consulting, this growing trend in consulting?
With an insolent growth rate of 12% last year, the consulting sector has confirmed its good health, and industry leaders are enthusiastic about the future of their industry.
But consulting is constantly evolving, and is not spared by the technological transformations that are profoundly changing society and the world of work. A recent trend is beginning to gain ground in consulting: Asset Based Consulting.
What is Asset Based Consulting? Here's an overview of this new form of consulting and the benefits it brings customers.
1. Selling made-to-measure
Wanting to sell a packaged product because it's 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 course, for example. But it's not always what a customer wants. The easiest way to sell a consulting assignment is to offer the service the customer really, truly and totally needs.
Selling a project is not like selling a product with non-modifiable functionalities; on the contrary, a consulting assignment can be totally adapted to the customer's needs. You have to listen long and hard to the issues, discuss the project, understand the customer's objectives in depth, and then offer the service they really want. In a word, tailor-made!
What is Asset Based Consulting?
Before going into detail on the concept of Asset Based Consulting, we must first define it precisely. Asset Based Consulting is a category of consulting in which tools and products represent the main asset of the offering, as opposed to the human capital generally emphasized in traditional consulting offerings.
The first firms to develop this new form of consulting were McKinsey, KPMG and BCG. In Asset Based Consulting, it is the intellectual property contained in products and technologies that is sold. Whereas traditionally it is the talents of consulting firms that are offered, here it is the solutions and tools that will be offered to meet customers' needs.
The aim is to create products capable of doing what consultants might be called upon to do in traditional consulting assignments, and to enable the customer to re-use the product. KPMG, for example, has introduced financial consulting tools that replace certain auditing missions that they tended to carry out themselves until now. Thanks to artificial intelligence, their tools analyze customers' accounting data and provide them with analysis and advice on the basis of this data.
Customers can access this tool whenever they like, and benefit from real-time analysis. This tool, which KPMG sells on a subscription basis, is much less costly for its customers, while providing them with value all year round.
Asset Based Consulting does not call traditional consulting into question, as many jobs cannot be done by technology, even with the most powerful artificial intelligence, but it is an important trend in the consulting sector, and one that needs to be taken very seriously by the management teams of consulting firms. Numerous startups are beginning to offer solutions capable of analyzing large amounts of data and providing insights to their customers for sums far below the cost of consulting assignments.
It is important that consulting firms start developing tools to automate some of the repetitive tasks their teams perform, and redirect their value proposition towards the part of recommendations and actions that artificial intelligence cannot perform. A few years ago, for example, PwC launched its Cloud Transformation development department, which offers all kinds of automated solutions to its clients, while retaining its mission of executing strategic plans, where the human element is of paramount importance.
The benefits of Asset Based Consulting
1. Mastering geographical challenges
Whereas most consulting projects require a visit to the customer's premises to get a full picture of the situation, Asset Based Consulting enables us to sell a highly scalable solution: once developed, it generally requires only minimal adjustments to be deployed at the customer's site, and to bring value to the customer. Installation and management can be carried out remotely, as can training and support for the customer.
2. Responses to new customer issues
Companies have increasingly easy access to information on their competitors, their markets and market trends, thanks to the content offerings that have flourished in recent years (CB Insight, Forrester, etc.). Information, until now the preserve of consultants, is now being called into question. Customers have new expectations for which they hope to measure ROI. Solutions that move away from Asset Based Consulting make it easier to calculate and monitor this ROI.
3. Responding to a new form of demand
Customers are increasingly looking for self-service solutions. This need for independence is reinforced as software solutions multiply and become more intelligent. Customers now want the right information, at the right time, at the right price. Companies have less patience for lengthy transformation projects, multi-month deployments, etc. As with our society in general, immediate and repeated consumption is preferred to waiting for a more exhaustive but lengthy result.
Asset Based Consulting is not just a trend in consulting, it is profoundly changing the entire consulting industry, as it responds to a strong demand from traditional consulting clients. Consulting firms that are rapidly taking the lead in this transformation still have time to differentiate themselves and take advantage of it, because the offer is still in its infancy.
