Most CEOs and CCOs have experience working with external consultants. Some engagements have delivered significant improvements. Others have resulted in analyses, strategy presentations, and recommendations that never translated into meaningful business results. The difference rarely lies in the quality of the advice alone. It lies in whether the engagement leads to better decisions, genuine organisational change, and a stronger ability to deliver results.

When another consulting project isn’t the answer

Consider a company that has struggled for several years to achieve its commercial ambitions.

A new sales strategy has been developed. The organisation has invested in CRM, introduced sales training, and perhaps appointed a new commercial director.

Yet the challenges remain largely unchanged.

Win rates are too low. Sales cycles are long. Growth within existing accounts is disappointing, and performance continues to depend heavily on a few strong salespeople or leaders.

The leadership team is therefore considering bringing in external consultants.

But this raises a fundamental question:

After more than 25 years of working with commercial strategies and transformations, our experience suggests that the latter question is often the more important one.

Because if the underlying causes of the challenges are not identified, the company risks investing in yet another initiative that fails to change the results.

The greatest value often comes from asking the questions the organisation isn’t asking itself

Leadership teams are usually deeply familiar with their own businesses. They understand their customers, employees, organisation, and markets.

But that familiarity can also make it difficult to challenge the assumptions underlying their decisions.

When growth falls short of expectations, the explanation may be that the sales organisation lacks the necessary capabilities.

But it could also be that the company is prioritising the wrong customers, that its value proposition is insufficiently differentiated, or that its sales process does not reflect how customers make purchasing decisions.

Similarly, disappointing growth within existing accounts may be caused by ineffective Key Account Management.

But it may also result from unclear account priorities, fragmented responsibilities, or commercial incentives that discourage collaboration across the organisation.

If leadership has already concluded that the problem is insufficient sales capability, a traditional sales training programme will probably appear to be the obvious solution.

But it may not be the right one.

This requires experience, commercial insight, and the ability to connect strategic choices with the structures and behaviours that drive performance in everyday business.

Three situations where external advisory support can make a significant difference

In our experience, there are three situations in particular where companies can benefit substantially from external advice.

1. When results fall short despite significant effort

The company has a strategy, a sales organisation, and several commercial initiatives in place.

Yet performance is not developing as expected.

An external advisor can help establish a more objective and systematic diagnosis of where the connections are breaking down.

Are the strategic priorities sufficiently clear? Is the sales organisation designed to deliver them? Do leadership behaviours reinforce the desired results?

It is not uncommon for the underlying challenge to lie in the connections between these elements rather than within any single area.

2. When the company needs to execute significant commercial change

A new growth strategy may require the company to change its go-to-market model, strengthen Key Account Management, enter new customer segments, or shift from product-oriented to more value-based selling.

The challenge is rarely just to define the right strategy.

It is to translate that strategy into an organisation capable of delivering it.

This may require new roles, different sales processes, new capabilities, clearer accountability, and a different approach to managing commercial performance.

An experienced advisor can contribute methodology, execution capabilities, and lessons learned from comparable transformation programmes.

3. When leadership needs an independent perspective on difficult decisions

Some of the most important commercial decisions are also the most difficult.

Which markets should the company prioritise? Which customers should receive fewer resources? Does the organisation need to change? Is the current sales leadership equipped to execute the strategy?

These decisions may challenge established structures, relationships, and interests.

External advice can create value by bringing facts, experience, and an independent perspective into the leadership team’s decision-making process.

But it is important to emphasise that the advisor cannot take over leadership’s responsibility.

The decisive choices must still be made by the people who will live with the consequences.

Why some consulting projects do not create the expected impact

When a consulting project does not deliver the desired value, the explanation is not necessarily that the analyses or recommendations were wrong.

The problem may be that the assignment was defined too narrowly, that the organisation was not sufficiently involved, or that responsibility for implementing the changes was never clearly assigned.

We see three recurring challenges in particular.

But the real value emerges only when the organisation begins to work differently and this contributes to better results.

That is the difference between completing a project and creating a commercial transformation.

From advice to genuine commercial transformation

In How to Harvest, we describe how lasting commercial improvements require alignment between three disciplines.

Commercial Architecture is about making the right strategic choices. Where should the company compete, how should it win, and which commercial priorities are decisive?

Commercial Transformation is about designing the organisation to deliver the strategy. This includes go-to-market, sales processes, Key Account Management, performance management, and the commercial operating model.

Commercial Mobilisation is about developing and sustaining the leadership behaviours and employee capabilities that translate strategy into results.

Our experience is that many commercial challenges arise when these three disciplines are not sufficiently connected.

A company may have made the right strategic choices but lack the organisational capacity required to implement them.

It may have invested in new processes and systems while continuing to lead employees according to old principles.

Or it may have developed strong sales capabilities but apply them to the wrong customers and opportunities.

A valuable advisory engagement should therefore do more than improve a single element.

It should ensure that the relevant parts of the company’s commercial system work better together.

The best advice makes the organisation less dependent on the advisor

An important question for leadership to ask when choosing an external advisor is:

If the primary answer is that the company receives a new strategy, a report, or a set of tools, the level of ambition is, in our view, too low.

The real value should be a stronger organisation.

This may mean that leadership has become better at prioritising commercial investments, that the sales organisation works more systematically with opportunity qualification, or that sales leaders have developed a more effective practice for coaching and performance management.

It also means that the organisation’s own leaders and employees must be actively involved in the change.

The advisor can contribute perspective, structure, experience, and execution capability.

But ownership of the strategy, the decisions, and day-to-day execution must remain within the company.

A successful advisory engagement should therefore leave behind both better results and a stronger internal ability to create them in the future.

Three questions every CEO and CCO should ask before the next consulting project

Before engaging an external advisor, we recommend asking three questions.

The answers provide a much stronger basis for assessing the need for advice and choosing the right partner.

External advice does not create results on its own. The organisation does.

After more than 25 years of working with commercial strategies and transformations, one of our most important lessons is that external advice creates the greatest value when it helps leadership understand the right problems, make better decisions, and implement the necessary changes.

The objective is not to produce the most analyses or introduce the greatest number of new methods.

The objective is to create a stronger connection between the company’s ambitions, its commercial organisation, and the way people work and are led.

At Harvest, we help companies translate commercial ambitions into measurable results through Commercial Architecture, Commercial Transformation, and Commercial Mobilisation. Our approach is described in the book How to Harvest and is based on more than 25 years of experience developing and executing commercial strategies.