Hey, it's Samantha Hartley of the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. This season, we've been talking about consulting insights, and I hope to give you some today when we're talking about assessments. Assessments are one of the best ways to convince your clients to work with you, not because you convince them, but because they convince themselves.

Years ago, I worked with a client who was referred to me. And when I had my first call with him, he was, you know, he didn't seem like he really understood why he was on the phone with me. He didn't really seem to have problems. I asked him some questions. He was like, I don't know why I would need that. And I thought, OK, cool, let's do this. At the time, I did brand work and I had a brand assessment and I thought, you know, go take the assessment, like, see what it tells you and see if you know you might want to talk further. He went away, took my assessment. It was like a 30 question assessment, gave you, you know, spout out kind of a little review or report on the strength and health of your brand. My second call with him, he was like, “Oh my gosh, I need the brand.” I was like, "This, this is what we need, right? So why don't we just start there?

So an assessment is amazing and I love self-assessments. I think of them as a way for, you know, you're not convincing the client you are giving them the opportunity to evaluate themselves in this way. Is this something I need or not? Or, you know, is something broken for us? That's the beauty of what assessments can do.

And I've a number of clients who use these as like a starter, a way in a kind of a taster project before they do larger transformational engagements. So I wanted to just explore with you today kind of the ways assessments can look and how you can use those in your own consulting business.

So in that example you've heard, I had put together a little bit of technology. It was PHP programed. I'm not even sure if they do that anymore, and that's about all I know about it. But I had 30 questions that I thought, you know, these are the determiners, the determiners of whether your brand is healthy, which is something I wanted to assess back then. So for you, it would be, you know, you can assess anything like if they want to have, you know, retention in their organization, you can go in and assess like, what are things like, you know, the working conditions of your employees. Like if you want to assess their financial situation, you can give them some kind of here's some qualifying questions, and it can be as complicated as you going in and doing a bunch of interviews or as simple as like, I almost felt like a Cosmo quiz, a cosmopolitan magazine quiz like you would just assess it. And it was like if you get a one to 19 year this and 2 to 29, you're this. And if you get a 30 or above, then you know that kind of broad, genera,l things like that. So it doesn't have to be a complicated technological thing. At minimum, it's just really good to say, Hey, on a scale of one to 10. Like, how are you in these 10 qualities? And then you have somebody you have a basis for conversation with someone where you're not saying, Well, tell me other things that are wrong with you. You're saying, Hey, how did you do on that assessment? And they're volunteering that information. So that's how it could look on an individual level. On an organizational level. I have a number of clients who use these assessments, as I mentioned. So one of the most interesting ones is a consultant who works with very large organizations to find out where there's financial waste. So either they have opportunities where they can make more money by being more efficient or whether they can save money.

And she did an assessment like this years ago where she went in with the organization and they spent, you know, several months.

So she did an assessment like this years ago where she went in and spent several months assessing the situation with this client financially, and then in the end they print out a report and this is the key thing for you to hear. The report is like here, all of the opportunities, all of this possible savings, all the possible earnings. And then here's a recommendation. So they basically right, you know, we the consultants basically write here's the action plan of exactly what you need to do. And what I love about these in of those kinds of assessments is, you know, here you go. You can take that dear client and implement that on your own, or you can hire us to do that for you. So very often a client will say, Oh my gosh, are you kidding? We can possibly implement that, and then they will hire you for additional work.

That's usually the assumption is, you know, you could go in and just sell the transformational engagement right away. And some of the reasons you wouldn't do that is, I'm not exactly clear what all is wrong here. Very often, this assessment is a natural part of your process, the beginning process of you coming in to work with a client. And so you just take that first six weeks when you're kind to be evaluating the situation and getting the lay of the land and you sell that as a separate thing. So it's valuable in its own right because they're going to get, I always call it the answer to the final exam. Like, here's what you need to do. We just give you the answers. You skip the process and you get the answers. Rarely, but sometimes they will say, “OK, thanks, we've got it and we'll either do it on our own or they'll throw it away and never do anything with it.” But most often they want to hire you to come in and do the work with them.

I like them also for consultants, because if you are not quite sure about what it's going to be like to work with a certain client before you go pitching like a three to five year engagement with them, when you're going to come in and do all the stuff and you feel like I kind of want to get a vibe for what this organization is really like, well, then you can do an assessment and assessment can take from, you know, 8 to 12 weeks. It can be less. But you get inside of an organization and you are really going to see the skeletons because assessments and audits and surveys and things like this involve you kind of getting in there and digging in and you're going to ask the kinds of questions that are going to reveal what I call reveal a need for your services. Ideally, an assessment reveals the need to work with you for the client. So how do you do that? I have done these in the past where I've done interviews, so I'm trying to come up with a, you know, the marketing or messaging status of an organization like how healthy they are in that sense. Or sometimes it's the culture like how clear everyone is on the mission of the company and what we're doing and things like that. So a lot of times you'll go in and you'll interview all of the key players who are involved. This is a really great way for you to see, are these people that you want to work with? Is this an organization as you learn more about the organization? Do you feel like, yeah, I'm excited to work with them. I think they have a lot of potential. Or do you feel like, yeah, because I just I'm going to run away at the first opportunity? So those kinds of interviews can be really helpful. And, you know, they don't have to be lengthy. You can do group interviews, you can do individual interviews. When I've done these a lot, I'll survey an organization and what I find is I talked to about 12 people. It takes me about 30 minutes for the first ones and then less and less time after that because you don't hear anything new. After a certain point, you start to confirm the things that you've already heard before. So those kinds of surveys you can do, you can do group interviews so that you can watch interpersonal dynamics. You can do survey questions where you can try to get something a little more quantitative. So you ask the same set of questions to a number of people. Ideally, 100 if they have an organization that size. So you can hear in this like we're really trying to do on, a scientific level, gather information and data and that would:

a) reveal the need for your services and,

b)would help you to put together a plan of exactly what you need to do with this organization to help them to achieve whatever result they would call you in for.

And again, that plan at the end is going to be incredibly robust. It would probably be, as I said, the beginning of what you would do for them anyway. But now you know what that is. I have talked to really experienced consultants before who have told me I already know what they need like I can do. I can go in and do that assessment. And sometimes that helps actually to get them on your side. But a lot of really experienced consultants can take a glance at something and be like, Already got it. I already know what this thing needs. I already know that that problem or that person or that department is going to be the problem. I already know that these are the things that we're going to need to do because those things won't work if that's you. Awesome.

You might just do assessments for kind of marketing purposes because they're a quick, simple, understandable thing to sell, you might find those easier to sell than transformational engagements. Honestly, I find everything equally easy or difficult to sell, so keep that in mind. One thing just because it's fallen short isn't easier to sell than anything else unless that's the case for you. So a lot of organizations realize that and are curious to have an assessment or an audit of themselves because it's going to reveal, you know, in black and white on paper, a very concise and clear snapshot of their organization and the action steps they need to take. So I really love this in that sense as being really a win-win for that organization and for the consultants so that, you know, the next step is let's work together to achieve what this thing says.

If you're wondering how to price an assessment because you're really going in and you're doing a standalone thing instead of a transformational engagement, what I would probably do is look at if you were to do a transformational engagement for them. Where do you think you would be pricing that now? A lot of times, where would be pricing that is dependent upon the information that comes out of the audit? But, you know, go with your gut on this and figure out what approximately you think that is. So I have clients who do $10,000 assessments. The one that I told you about that was the large one where she went in and looked at the savings in the earnings. That was a $250,000 assessment phase. I think that one lasted probably about four months where people went in and were embedded with the organization and exploring things. Well, what does that mean? That means if that's about 10%, maybe it's 25% in some cases of that longer engagement. So then that $250,000 engagement could go on and be, you know, a million dollar one in this case, I think that was the $800,000 when that I talk about often. For you, you know, is this a $25,000 assessment thing? And then you do the rest of the work, you can price an assessment as kind of a loss leader, like charging slightly under charging and making it up on the back end. It's only a risk because they might not continue to do the work with you, but you might find that in most cases, they do, so the one thing I don't want you to do is benchmark your rates at something that is lower than they're going to have later on.

So the only thing I don't want you to do is to price this so low that the client expects to have the actual engagement be also a low priced thing. So I like the 10% of the total cost of the whole engagement. I also like 25%. So an assessment should really compensate you fully, even if the client does not continue to work with you. So keep that in mind. Twenty five thousand two and fifty thousand, whatever it is, going to be the right number for you in that range you can go with.

So my assignment for you today, I want you to think about if you were to bring an assessment into your business, if you're not using one already. What can that look like? It's going to reveal a need for your services. So what would the client need to believe or have facts that proved in order to say, Wow, this information means that we definitely need X and that X are your services? OK, so you kind of want to back out of what you're going to do for them, what you want that information to reveal.

So if you're doing back to retention, if you're doing retention of leaders, then this assessment should say that they are, you know, they're in danger of not holding onto all their leaders. It should kind of quantify that a little bit for them. It should give them some ideas of levers that they could pull in order to improve the retention rates. Things like that, like information that they wouldn't normally have access to, that you're going to be able to get because you're an outsider. And a funny thing happens when an outsider comes in and starts interviewing the stakeholders in an organization, you're going to find that they'll tell you things that they won't tell anybody else in the company. And you can use that in order to help that client and help yourself get the client. So think about what that version would look like for you. And if you are already doing assessments, then you know things to consider are how are you using those, can you market those specifically as opposed to as a part of transformational engagements already? So a few ways that could look. You market specifically and exclusively assessments, and that's the only thing that anybody can buy from you. And then on to that after they passed the assessment phase, then they get an offer for the work, the implementation phase for you to come in.

What else can that look like for you? Do you want to always bolt them together in the beginning of any process for you is an assessment that is already part of the transformational engagement. Those are questions to ask yourself about what role assessment can play in first your marketing and then in the services that you're offering.

I hope what you've heard today has given you some ideas and insights into how you can use assessments to grow your business, whether they look like evaluations, surveys, audits or anything else, whether they last from one week to the length of a Cosmo quiz that someone takes on their own, to four months. And however, you're going to use them to sell your consulting services. I hope I've given you some more ideas for how you can do that, both profitably and joyfully.