14 Ways Clients Resist to Consultants' Ideas and How to Handle Them

by Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan, Organisational Provocateur

One of the most frustrating parts of consulting is to deal with clients’ resistance to some of our recommendations. We have all heard excuses that “We’ve already done that and didn’t work”, or “Our industry doesn’t operate that way”.

The fact is that it is not about being right or wrong, but what works and what does not work. It has nothing to do with certain methods or certain industries. When clients present their problems to us, it is just natural for us to suggest some ideas for improvement. However, just because we understand a concept, we may not be able to communicate it to our clients in a clear, easy-to-grasp fashion.

And when they do not understand something, they rebel against it. What we must understand is that resistance is an emotional process, and we cannot handle it with more facts and logic. We must be ready to handle it with emotions. Resistance is the natural reaction to the fact that we have discovered some shortcomings in the client’s organisation, and the client’s conditioned (also called the ego mind) mind cuts in to defend the current situation.

However, resistance is a normal part of any learning experience, and hopefully your engagements are learning experiences for your clients with specific learning objectives. Before we are ready to learn something totally new or willing to look at certain issues from a new perspective, we all show some resistance. It is important to understand that showing resistance is not the client’s way of questioning our competence, so do not take it personally.

Let’s see 14 of the most common forms of resistance.

1. Overwhelming with Details

In this situation clients try to steamroller you with lots of - often irrelevant - details. Every time you meet, hoping you can make some real progress, you receive even more details to the point of confusion. If you feel bored and confused with the amount of details that have been showered upon you, you can reasonably suspect resistance from the buyer.

2. More Realistic Answers

Clients demand more realistic answers from you. They believe that your recommendations are far too far-fetched and are not fit their specific companies. Sometimes there may be some reality in this statement, but you have been brought in to provide a new perspective, and there is a good chance that this new perspective sounds counterintuitive to your clients. So, you do your best to explain the situation from several angles. However, if your clients do not get it, then just move on. It takes a certain level of open-mindedness to see things differently, so the best bet is not tot waste your time on these people. They are simply allergic to innovation.

3. Blunt Attack

Sometimes clients are so resistant that they attack us with words. The typical response is to respond in kind, but I think that is the wrong response. It means we have taken the attack personally, and we are likely to react - not respond - to the stimulus. These clients are in need of psychological treatment for low self esteem and self-worth, and most of us are not qualified to provide that kind of help.

4. Timing

In this situation the carrot is being dangled in front of you, but due to some mysterious “timing” issues, clients are not ready to start the project. These clients actually try to impress you with how busy they are and have no time left for putting a new item of “busy-ness” on their plates. You can also experience this kind of resistance in the form of interruptions at meetings, being hard to reach, not returning phone calls and email messages. In some cases clients use busy-ness to impress us about their importance, “Look, I’m so important that I don’t even have one spare minute”. If this is the case, you can legitimately question the client’s readiness for the project, and you had better just to pull out. If this is how these clients operate now, this is exactly how they will operate once you start the project, and that is a call for disaster.

5. I Know That

- These are the people who know everything and do not get surprised by anything. If you say something negative could happen anytime, they say they would not be surprised if it happened. They are also so busy not being surprised that often get totally paralysed and are unable to take any action to prevent the problem from happening.

6. Confused Clients

Every time we seek help, we are in confusion of some shape or form. So are clients. Normally confusion is just a lack of clarity, but when you catch yourself explaining the same stuff three times and the client is still confused, that you can that as a form of resistance.

7. Silent Clients

This is when clients let you do your part of the show but refuse to join for collaborations. It is important to understand that silent clients are some of the most troublesome clients. They silence is not compliance. Keep asking them for voicing their opinions with more than just a yes or no. Make them speak. If they refuse, it may be a good idea to leave. Working with them is just like driving a car and looking at the road only once every half an hour. These people will not give you feedback on your work until everything has gone totally apeshit and then they tend to blame everything on you and demand their money back. Silent people are some of the most vicious fighters. They guide you into dark alleys and then unleash their attack dogs on you. You may be able to escape alive, but will carry lots of scars or even may bleed to death.

8. Wanting more Information

These clients want to know even the minutest details about the project. They want you to develop everything and have ready-made answers for any and every situation.

At one point you will get fed up with all the questions and start spurring your clients for some kind of action. If they revert to more detail-gathering then you know that is a form of resistance.

From here on you have two options: 1) Provide more detail and hope and pray that one day clients have enough information to start doing something, 2) pack up and leave, knowing that is “project” will escalate into an endless information-gathering process. There is no real desire to improve the current situation, only to pile more and more data on the buyer’s desk.

9. Moral Defence

This is a great defence for some clients. They find some other people who stand in the way of progress and “those people” must be convinced about the validity of the project. They keep referring to people who are not in the room and who are “impossible to reach” because they are so busy.

10. Compliance

This is the hardest part. Compliant managers are always the most dangerous ones. You may have a hard time to see this puppy for managers agree with you all along the way. Every single consultant has something clients do not fully agree with. If it does not come on the surface early enough, it will surface later and it can be rather ugly.

11. Overanalysing

Once a French diplomat said to an English - known for their pragmatism - diplomat that it may work in practice but will it work in theory? Analysers are the same. In spite of driving a car on a daily basis, some of them may ask you to prove the existence of the wheel. For them there is no common sense.

They must analyse the living Jesus out of everything. With these people you can fight, but have no chance to win. They will ask you to write a detailed analysis on the very dialect you use to say good morning. What you can do is to attempt to bring the conversation to actions steps. If you succeed, carry on, but if the client goes back to theories and more analysis, then run away.

12. Problems with Methodologies

In this scenario clients expect you to have a one-size-fits-all answer, and if you do not have it - as you should never have one - they tend to kick up a fuss. Now they think they have to waste their precious time to work out a methodology with you to solve their problems and can also question the value of your help.

However, you help and value may not necessarily lie in telling them to dig a ditch, but showing them how to dig a ditch with a ditch-digger machine in 10 minutes, instead of digging one with a shovel in 10 days. They know the solution (dig a ditch), but assessing the situation, and circumstances, you offered a better method. However, before doing your assessment and interviews, you did not know that the machine would be better than the shovel.

13. Vanishing Problem

This is a “deep shit” problem. It is when some time into the project the client decides that you are addressing a solution to the wrong problem, and the situation was actually better before you showed up. The other side of this problem is that when you are about to tell the client to take action to solve a problem, the client starts bragging about drastic improvement in the previously “problematic” area.

What happens very often is that as companies get closer and closer to facing the impact of their problems, they also bury their heads deeper and deeper into the sand and fail to acknowledge the problem. Not the symptom, but the underlying causes. Low sales is not a problem, but when, for instance, the president buys a “company” Mercedes for his son and blows the money in the profit sharing pool, all people in the firm will take notice and subconsciously will act out their resentment for the boss.

But at this point it is still too easy to call in another sales trainer for another sales training programme. Facing the real issue would take some guts, and far too many service businesses do not have that crucial “organ” in their corporate anatomy. If the company’s x-ray shows cancer, it is unwise to admire the headshots of the senior partners. Challenge the client to see the real issue not only the surface.

14. Pushing the Solution

This is when the client’s company is in such deep yoghurt that they demand solutions yesterday. It is vital to hold back on the solution at this point. It is important that you let them see and realise what they have behaved themselves into, and then proceed to solve the problem.

Summary

As you can see some of these resistances can be dealt with quite effectively, but some are not worth wasting time and effort on. The idea is not to fight with prospects and try to overcome their resistance, but

Take some time and go through your list of new prospects. What are they like? How do they behave during the buying cycle?

Create some comeback statements to deal with some of these resistances. For example, to handle the "Pushing for Solution" issue, you can say, "Joe, prognosis without diagnosis is malpractice, and I don't think you would do a great service to your business by hiring one of those charlatans."

Copyright 1997-2011 Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan. All rights reserved. You are free to use this article in whole or in part. One favour though: Can I ask you to you include complete attribution, including a live website link. Also, would you mind letting me know where you plan to publish the article?

The attribution: This article was written by Organisational Provocateur, Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan of Dynamic Innovations Squad, a firm specialising in helping consulting firms to sell their expertise at the highest margins. Get Tom's free Practice Management Black Paper when you sign up for his monthly newsletter, Commando Consulting: Lessons And Practices From The Ultimate Professional Service Firm, The Military. Visit Tom's website at http://www.di-squad.com/black-paper.html.

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