Clients today expect consultants to reach results quickly, while consultants face difficulties such as personnel constraints and maintaining quality while working with shorter timelines.

Consultants have come to realize that they can increase both volume of work and profit margins by accelerating the client discovery phase of their engagements. In order to do so, many are turning to asset-based consulting, the process of using software tools that allow them to accelerate client discovery, shortening their timelines while gathering richer insights that lead to adoptable recommendations.

The 9Lenses digital consulting platform helps consultants achieve the speed and depth they need, better enabling them to demonstrate ROI to new and existing clients. To better illustrate how 9Lenses works, we’ve published this case studyof how Infinitive, a digital consultancy, used 9Lenses to gain deeper insights in a shorter timeframe and win new business.

Infinitive, a consultancy in the DC Metro area, focuses on helping clients build and improve their capabilities in digital ad solutions, business transformation, customer and audience intelligence, and enterprise risk management.

Related: 9Lenses improving selling in consulting organizations

An Online Digital Publisher Needed Consultant Help

An online digital publisher faced revenue declines and had specific concerns about sales processes and CRM platforms that were not delivering the expected results. The leadership team of the sales group held a variety of opinions around root causes and was unsure of how to improve, so the company decided to call in a consulting firm to assess the situation, inform them as to what was causing the challenges, and make recommendations to address the challenges going forward.

Infinitive’s Initial Proposal Exceeded the Client’s Budget & Time Constraints

Infinitive pitched a proposal for a 6-8 week engagement that included stakeholder interview time, correlation of all information, and recommendations. The client had budget concerns, however, and rejected Infinitive’s initial bid.

The client wanted to reduce the cost of the effort as well as the time needed in order to arrive at recommendations more quickly.

Thankfully, the story doesn’t stop there.

9Lenses Enabled Infinitive to Win the Contract

Jeff Puzenski, an executive at Infinitive, recognized the ability of the 9Lenses platform to reduce the time needed for client discovery, and he developed a streamlined program using 9Lenses to collect and analyze the perspectives of the client’s sales organization. Infinitive was able to reduce the overall timeline of the engagement by two weeks, meeting the client’s time and budget constraints and winning the contract.

“Using the 9Lenses platform for our initial assessments helped us create a bite-sized chunk to get us in the door . . . and allowed us to get back insights very quickly.”

~ Jeff Puzenski, Infinitive Media Industry Executive

9Lenses Provided Infinitive Consultants with Richer Insights & Quantifiable Feedback

At the same time, Infinitive was able to expand the scope of the engagement. Whereas Infinitive consultants would normally have interviewed up to 20 people, 9Lenses allowed them to reach the entire sales organization of over 150 employees, gaining a far more thorough perspective of the organization’s challenges. Because 9Lenses gathers both qualitative and quantitative data in tandem, Infinitive collected far more detailed and quantifiable feedback than the anecdotal feedback that traditional interviews provide.

Additionally, with the 9Lenses analytics platform, Infinitive consultants were able to easily home in on specific areas and segments that would have been difficult to single out with traditional methods, allowing them to better understand the minutiae of the data.

9Lenses Data Enabled Infinitive to Make Valuable Recommendations for Improvement

With the insights gained, Infinitive consultants were able to thoroughly educate the client around the root causes of the challenges the sales organization faced and recommend initiatives for improvement.

Contrary to what many of the client’s leadership team members had assumed, the challenges the sales organization faced were not due solely to the need for a better CRM system. Infinitive consultants did recommend a new system, but the data also revealed multiple issues with processes and people activities that needed to be addressed before the sales organization could function properly.

Because Infinitive’s recommendations were based on data gathered from across the entire sales organization, Infinitive consultants were quickly able to gain buy-in from the client leadership team. They enforced the idea that the recommendations were based on the reality of what was really going on, rather than on canned recommendations from an outside perspective.

“The [9Lenses platform] could be a way for us to have a repeatable, manageable approach to defining our criteria of what drives success and evaluating [each client] against that criteria.”

~ Jeff Puzenski, Infinitive Media Industry Executive