Over at Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants, they point to an interesting interview with Jeff Thull.

Mr. Thull talks about how management consultants can better communicate value to clients, and his observations are directly applicable to designers (and anyone else outside of traditional business silos) trying to communicate with clients. Two meaty bits get at his main point:

Most consultants present their solutions and expect clients to ?��Ǩ?�get it?��Ǩ�� on their own. But if the client doesn?��Ǩ�Ѣt comprehend the nature of the problem, which is often the case, your elegant explanation of solutions just flies over the client?��Ǩ�Ѣs head …. Consultants must know the indicators that point to problems they can help solve. For instance, what?��Ǩ�Ѣs the norm for service call response time in this industry? When a call comes into the client?��Ǩ�Ѣs service center, what?��Ǩ�Ѣs a typical resolution time? Does the call need to be transferred more than once? Does the client have an escalation policy? And what?��Ǩ�Ѣs the typical impact our solution has had on these indicators?

Worth a read if you’re sprucing up your ability to explain what you do and why it’s necessary to managers who don’t understand.

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