Consultancies

Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG) helps leading consultancies deepen their stature and relationships with their clients, by providing an engine for conducting highly targeted primary research and managing a network of specialized front-line experts. Through interviews with these experts, consultancies can sharpen their client service, business development, and knowledge development efforts.

Current clients:

Gerson Lehrman Group has deep relationships with several dozen consultancies, including leading strategy consultancies, agencies, audit firms, and IT consultancies.

How GLG helps:

Consultancies tap the GLG Councils^SM on several continents. GLG adds value during every stage of the client-service, knowledge-acquisition, and business-development processes.

• Client Service - At every stage of client service - from establishing initial credibility to testing final hypotheses - consultancies leverage GLG to conduct high-impact interviews with academics, former regulators, customers, and former front-line professionals in and around their clients' industries. The results of Telephone Consultations and Custom Surveys provide critical, granular insights to enhance the applicability and credibility of the consultancies' recommendations.
• Business Development - Consultancies use GLG to conduct industry-specific interviews while preparing for pitches, writing proposals, and developing marketing initiatives. Consultancies place a premium on their prospects' time. The better informed they are during pitch meetings and while writing proposals, the more accurately tailored their presentations are to their prospects' business needs. This, in turn, can be a decisive advantage in winning their prospects' respect and, ultimately, their business.
• Knowledge Development & Thought Leadership - Consultants leverage GLG to run custom surveys and conduct interviews to find crucial qualitative data. Throughout the knowledge development process, GLG can enable busy consultants to leverage their time and discover hard-to-find insights quickly and accurately.

Unique advantages:

Gerson Lehrman Group helps consultants find suitable experts for their research efforts, appropriately engage experts through a variety of methods, and manage the use and ongoing relationship with experts.

Find:

• GLG's organization of 170+ Council Recruiters and Managers use proprietary tools to identify, contact and evangelize the benefits of the GLG Councils to thousands of professionals from around the world each month. Consultants with urgent requirements can request accelerated recruiting of particular expert populations or individuals.
• Once enrolled in the GLG Councils, experts are categorized within unique taxonomies, with dynamic questionnaires canvassing their experience with and knowledge of niche subjects. This continuous profiling helps GLG clients access suitable experts, even on short notice.
• GLG assesses Council Member quality through a proprietary GLG CouncilRank^SM algorithm. By enabling over ten thousand consulting transactions each month, GLG has rich data on the demonstrated value of experts.

Engage:

• Consultants do not have time to manage contracts and negotiate consulting fees for dozens of independent experts. GLG puts industry-standard contracting protocols in place before every interaction. Pre-set hourly rates and integrated payment procedures serve as a seamless back-end platform for firms to manage their numerous outside expert relationships.
• Consultants vary widely on how they want to engage professionals. Some consultants will need a series of phone consultations. Others require a custom written report to prepare for a client pitch meeting. Others will want to conduct an executive survey to provide support for a forthcoming article. Consultants use all these tools and others (including in-person meetings, events, and travel programs) to tap the expertise in the GLG Councils.

Manage:

• Consultancies conduct massive volumes of primary research across many contacts and projects. Few systematically maintain the contacts and information for institutional knowledge. GLG provides easy-to-use Web-based software for team members to rate, tag, share, and search the expert contacts made. This eliminates the need to update personal address books and immediately improves the ease of communication, while enabling them to build their lists of contacts as firm-wide assets.
• Compliance professionals easily can block, screen or monitor consultations using the unique GLG Oversight Dashboard technology.
• For accounting staff seeking to allocate research costs to specific individuals, ideas, and practices, GLG provides tools to track usage and manage spending.

To learn more about Gerson Lehrman Group's services for consultants, contact: John J. Donoghue, Senior Vice President, at +1 212 750 2185 or jdonoghue@glgroup.com.