SELL IT BETTER

Issues & Strategies for External Practitioners

Here are practical points for promoting the value of O.R. and selling your services, drawn from the input of INFORMS members who work as external O.R. practitioners.

Sell the value

  • Tame the chaos: O.R. veteran Harlan Crowder likes to say that today's business world is fraught with complexity, uncertainty, and chaos – there are too many choices and too little information. Tell your potential clients that we operations research professionals have the special gift of confronting and taming that complexity, uncertainty, and chaos.
  • Provide reliable information: Make clear that your product is not computers, application software systems, user interfaces, or database connections. Your product is reliable analysis and techniques that help answer compelling business questions.
  • Emphasize the bottom line: Tell them the powerful, bottom line potential of O.R. early in your presentations to show why they need to work with you.
  • Measure: We provide something that no one else can: a quantitative framework. That's so important because if you can't measure it, you can't manage it.
  • Be consultative: Keep in mind that most decision makers don't really know what they want; part of your value is helping them figure it out.
  • Sell the solution: You're going to address their problem and provide a solution. Tell them that. Don't dazzle potential clients with a value proposition tied to technology or optimization; dazzle them with the quality of the solutions you can provide.
  • Simplify, simplify: It's all right to impress a potential client with the fact that you are using advanced methods to solve a complex problem that only you are qualified to tackle. But from that point forward, phrase the problem in the simplest, most easily grasped way. For example, if you are working on scheduling an entire airline's crews, demonstrate the more easily grasped challenge of getting one group of pilots and flight attendants from point A to point B.
  • Go beyond the dollars: Tell them about the benefits that are quantifiable, and also about the benefits that aren't a mere matter of dollars and cents: faster production time, productivity savings, cost avoidance, and strategic value.

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Learn from the Lone Ranger
In an article for OR/MS Today, INFORMS Vice President for Chapters Jack Theurer offers encouragement and advice for lone practitioners like himself.

  • You have to believe: Remember that while you are looking for a project, the project is also looking for you. Your task: make yourself visible enough for the project to find you.
  • Train: During his days at a major corporation, Jack received sales training so that he could work with company clients. It came in handy when he started his own company.
  • Start networking: After leaving his corporate position, Jack sat down, wrote a list of everyone he knew, and was surprised at the size of his instant network. He let everyone on the list know about his practice. He didn't expect business from specific people, but was pleased that the list as a whole led to callbacks.
  • Don't put all your eggs in one basket: Don't become engaged full-time with a single client for too long. It's bad business; your network will dry up. Accept extra work and keep several projects going at once. If necessary, subcontract to other isolated practitioners.
  • Generate repeat business: Work in a way that makes the client want to call you again. This can even work when the contact at your client firm changes. Jack remembers one client company that dumped its management team – but kept him on to train remaining staff. Instead of losing the account, he kept it and developed future assignments.
  • Know why you're hired: There are three reasons that companies will hire you:
    1. They don't have expertise in-house and need outside expertise.
    2. They have expertise in-house, but are overextended and simply need more of it.
    3. They have the expertise in-house, but the person hiring the consultant doesn't want to use it for political reasons and brings in his own independent expertise.
  • Tips for becoming a lone practitioner:
    • Get solid corporate experience before going out on your own.
    • Warning: Go out on your own if you like change and trust yourself. Don't do it if you want cradle-to-grave security.
    • Don't remain isolated. Join a professional society like INFORMS and be active.
    • Consider the status of lone practitioner as a possible stepping stone to building a large organization.

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Strengthen your general consulting skills
John Ranyard and Robert Fildes have observed successful – and failed – O.R. groups in the United Kingdom. They come away urging us to improve our consulting skills, concentrating on:

  • Interacting with client management at all levels. Let's resist the desire to isolate ourselves in our rarified world.
  • Writing effective reports and giving good presentations – in plain English that the average person at our organization can understand.
  • Understanding the complexities of our clients' problems, and the prevailing organizational culture. Remember what Gene Woolsey has been telling us for years: We've got to spend time as forklift operators before we can tell forklift operators how to make improvements.

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Strengthen your specialized O.R. consulting skills
Harlan Crowder has made his mark as an O.R. professional at IBM, HP, ILOG, and in his own consulting firm. He offers some worthwhile tips.

  • Help solve the problem that execs don't have a handle on. Clients always know best – except when they're describing their business problem. Your job is to help the client identify and understand the problem that needs a solution.
  • It's about the data. ORMS consulting engagements have little to do with algorithms and convergence rates. They have everything to do with data. And getting good usable data is the greatest challenge. You'll spend only 15% of your time modeling. The other 85% will be identifying, extracting, cleansing, validating, and formatting the data. Plan accordingly.
  • Limit your assignment. Determine if you're being asked to provide scheduling or planning, and make sure both you and your client agree. If your assignment is planning, don't let your client ask you to work on day-to-day operational problems like scheduling. And vice versa. You and your client should write a design document for the model so you're both in agreement.
  • Limit your assignment some more. Don't let "scope creep" bog you down and distract you.
  • No whispering, please. Don't be secretive about your methodology. Encourage your client to learn as much as possible about what you're doing. This approach gets more people in the organization thinking about modeling, and breeds enthusiasm if you do your job in the open with energy and gusto.
  • Under-promise, over-deliver. Promise whatever you will to your client, but always deliver more than you promise.

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Strengthen your business skills

  • Get training for you and your staff in general business skills, sales techniques, and presentation skills.
  • Hire staff who are not just good modelers, but good business people.

Market yourself and your firm
In an article about consulting in ORMS Today, John Ranyard and Robert Fildes remind us to come out of our O.R. cocoon and promote ourselves.

  • Keep a portfolio of success stories. The president of one company that sells O.R. products says he's seen potential clients swayed by examples of successful O.R. applications – especially when the client believes that competitors are using the same technology. An O.R. professional and health analyst says he keeps a file of examples both from his industry and others so they're handy if needed in a presentation. (Go to Success Stories for material on this site.)
  • Make presentations at conferences.
  • Publish papers and articles establishing your expertise.
  • Attend seminars, both those in O.R. and those in client industries.
  • Targeting a specific audience that is reachable, with a specific message that resonates with that audience. Irv Lustig of ILOG says his firm has been more successful when they talk to a specific industry target about a specific application, where they've built that application for another firm in that target industry. For example, it's better to say "I can balance financial portfolios" than "I can optimize anything."

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Develop sources for new projects

  • Maintain an active sales team. Invest in a strong sales team. Make sure they understand the products you can supply for your clients.
  • Respond to RFPs.
  • Research prospective clients. When approaching a prospective client, research where the company stands in its industry, its recent performance, and its stated goals in order to determine what will appeal to them.
  • Identify manual users. Look for companies that are using manual processes to do complex decision making. Look for magnetic white boards with tiles that people move around.
  • Network.
  • Sell your strengths. Irv Lustig of ILOG says that at his company sales people focus on understanding four aspects of optimization and other O.R. problems:
    • Choices: What choices does someone have for a decision?
    • Limits: What are the limits of those choices?
    • Targets: How does one compare the value of one choice versus another?
    • Data: Is data available that lets you compare the choices?

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Talk to the right people

  • Target the managers most likely to see the big picture and the big problems, like the CFO or COO – rather than middle management, who are much more concerned with day-to-day problems.
  • One successful O.R. professional says that on the supply chain side, he sells to the VP of supply chain, the manufacturing manager, or the head of a business unit. In very large projects, that decision has to go higher. The rest of his clientele are lower-level people with specific problems that optimization may help.

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Adopt the strengths of successful O.R. groups

  • In their research on the United Kingdom's successful O.R. groups, Ranyard and Fildes identify the characteristics of successful O.R. groups. They found that the two major success factors are high-quality staff (with good O.R. skills and good business skills) and project management skills. Your chances of success improve if you work at providing:
    • Good value for your internal client's money
    • Skill at client relationships
    • Good tech and IT skills
    • Good quality work
    • Innovation and wide-ranging approaches
    • Management talent
  • Another INFORMS Roundtable member says that his group ruthlessly selects projects based on potential impact and probability of success. By handpicking chances to succeed, they ensure that they will be offered the projects they desire in the future.

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More resources

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