Data isn't polite
Ask ten people on your sales team how your lead process works and you’ll get ten plausible answers. All of them sound reasonable. All of them contradict each other. And none of them explains why the forecast missed by 30 percent yet again.
That’s exactly what the classic consulting model is built on: six weeks of stakeholder interviews, workshops, a target picture. Sounds thorough. But it’s mostly one thing, a collection of opinions. The head of sales describes the process as it should be. The AE describes it as he experiences it. The CEO tells the version he signed off on two years ago. Everyone is honest. And still none of it is true.
The system doesn’t lie. It can’t.
Five days with admin access in the CRM find more truth than six weeks of interviews, because data isn’t polite. There’s the automation that’s been failing for 14 months without anyone noticing, because the error emails go to a former employee. There’s the required field that gets filled with “tbd” 80 percent of the time because it’s in the way when saving. There’s the forecast built on close dates nobody has touched in three quarters. No interview in the world surfaces any of that, because nobody knows it. Or nobody wants to admit it.
An interview delivers what people believe. An audit delivers findings. Timestamp, field history, execution log. You can’t argue with that, you can only fix it.
And yes, of course we talk to people too. But only after we’ve been inside the system, and then with very different questions. Not “how does your process work” but “here are 340 opportunities with no next step, what happened there.” The first conversation takes an hour and produces an org chart of wishful thinking. The second takes twenty minutes and produces a decision.
So why do so many consultancies sell the interview tour? Follow the invoice. Six weeks of discovery are six weeks of day rates, and interviews delegate beautifully to juniors who have never debugged a flow. A five-day audit at a fixed price can’t be stretched. It has to deliver, or there’s no follow-up business.
Whoever sells interviews sells time. Whoever goes into the system sells findings. On the next proposal, just ask on which day someone actually logs in.
