Do The Constanza To Get The Next Deal

There are many engagement models designed by great business minds of today as well as concepts based on philosophical approaches such as Kaizen and Ikagi.

We recently introduced an engagement principle that proved effective, albeit novel to gain buy-in from new clients. We called it The Costanza.

The Costanza is based on the long-running sitcom, Seinfeld, where George Costanza laments he can never make the right decision, so opts to go against every instinct and chooses to do the opposite.?And much to his surprise it all works out, at least as sitcoms go.

As a small consultancy, our original approach prior was pretty simple. Do good work and be rewarded with more / bigger / impactful work.??But we were challenged with maintaining momentum and securing the next engagement with clients.?The feedback we received from every client was very positive and there was never a question about the quality of our work so we were confused. We felt we earned the opportunity to secure the bigger engagement but we could not convert.?

We discussed it internally and I even had a chance to discuss it, in confidence, with one of our champions for another client. He was equally confused as he saw measurable value in our partnership.

After losing some sleep and out of some frustration, we made the conscious decision to simply do the opposite of what we thought was best for our company. So rather than chasing the big budget projects we decided to recommend SMALLER engagements. We turned down the opportunity to add scope and made a very simple request to each of our clients. Let's continue to work together and focus on a small, discrete workstreams that will drive results.

This "opposite" approach proved successful and we secured the next engagements with all of our clients. In fact, it resulted in establishing long term partnerships with many of our clients as they chose to move to our managed services offering.

The lessons for us were very simple.

1. Never allow any level of entitlement drive business decisions. You have to earn clients' trust with EVERY interaction
2. It's more than okay to change your approach to remain consistent with your goals
3. Counterintuition is a legitimate way to challenge current thinking
4. Client behaviour is a great barometer for whether you are on the right track

There are all sorts of sources for inspiration, if you remain open to them.

Links:

1. The Constanza : shorturl.at/nvS59
2. Kaizen : shorturl.at/dk489
3. Ikagai : shorturl.at/gDFHK
4. The Costanza Rule: When To Ignore Your Instincts And Do The Opposite : shorturl.at/cdUW9
5. Add Capabilities Through Managed Services : shorturl.at/cfpIZ