Every year, we survey buyers of consulting to understand their perceptions of consulting firms in what we think is the largest annual survey of its kind, with over 3,600 responses this year. As part of that, we ask clients what\u2019s most important to them when thinking about specific firms they\u2019re familiar with, and\u2014as we\u2019ve explored before in our blogs\u2014we\u2019ve seen a big shake-up in what clients tell us.1 This year, brand and reputation has shot to the top of the charts, followed by subject matter and sector expertise. In contrast, the quality of thought leadership\u2014which perennially has been one of the four most important attributes to clients\u2014has dropped in importance. <\/p>\n
While getting access to expertise has always been a key reason for hiring external consultants, we think the radical change brought with COVID-19 has made it more important than ever. Of course, all firms claim to have experts, but expertise has become more of a differentiating factor for clients: They want consultants who have spent the pandemic working at the frontier of their subject or sector to understand what the latest thinking means to their organisation. Remote working has also made the depth of expertise (or lack of it) more apparent, as firms can put genuinely world-leading experts in front of clients wherever in the globe they sit, without the need to jump on a plane. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[128],"tags":[147],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sourceglobalresearch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8907"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sourceglobalresearch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sourceglobalresearch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sourceglobalresearch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sourceglobalresearch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8907"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.sourceglobalresearch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8907\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16507,"href":"https:\/\/www.sourceglobalresearch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8907\/revisions\/16507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sourceglobalresearch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sourceglobalresearch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sourceglobalresearch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}