Q. During Q4-2025 as consulting firms begin planning for 2026, most frontline consultants will be asked the inevitable challenge question of “How do you plan on breaking through to your client’s senior executive suite and building rapport with them?[1] Still, unless one works for the handful of Tier 1[2] and to a degree, Tier 2 consulting firms[3], securing even a 15-minute conference call with these prospective executive clients can be daunting. As your team is at the tip of the arrow when it comes to analyzing potential consulting offerings that could drive business value for J&J’s pharma unit, which contributes over 60% of the organization’s total revenue, why is it so challenging to build traction for such partnering, and what are some potential solutions for change?
A. (Troy Sarich)
For the large and established consulting firms that are already working with a company like J&J, there’s usually a path through the Procurement department to initiate engagement with senior executives. For consulting firms without an established relationship and/or master service agreement, there’s an opportunity for a paradigm shift to help break through and build rapport with these senior-level executives. First, it’s important to do some reconnaissance and find out if there are some departments that are permitted to engage in smaller projects with outside vendors. Sometimes there is a smaller dollar ceiling, perhaps under six figures, that can create a window of opportunity to start a project and prove your value. Invest the sweat equity to not only secure the quantifiable business benefits of the project for the company, but also ideally the specific KPIs of the analyst and/or manager who got you in the door. With many consulting firms preoccupied with focusing on just the top senior ranks, this mindset can jeopardize the delivery excellence of those smaller, but crucial projects. Indeed, that recent college graduate who has been empowered to be responsible for that five-figure project can be a potential strong ambassador for you, if you are investing the cycles to make sure that you over-deliver on the target outcomes of the statement of work.
Top biopharma executives tend to be most familiar with Tier 1 and Tier 2 firms, as these large organizations have the capacity to deliver solutions that can scale across the enterprise, thanks to their extensive resources and operations. Given the broad responsibilities of senior leaders, it’s understandable that they prefer working with vendors who have a proven track record with major firms and established master service agreements.
However, despite these significant barriers to accessing senior executives, tenacious consultants can still uncover opportunities. One should remember how the “Big Eight” accounting firms, once focused solely on auditing, expanded into consulting during the 1980s and 1990s. This ongoing evolution continues today, with some firms even entering new markets, like artificial intelligence services. The lesson: remain resilient and invest the sweat equity to grow your consulting opportunities.
Q. Given that smarter readers will follow up on your advice, what additional sweat equity pearls of wisdom would you recommend?
A. (Troy Sarich)
Given my 20+ years considering various consulting proposals as well as insights from friends who are consultants, here are five themes for your readers to consider, which form an underlying principle that is the backbone of deep partnerships.
Truth: Be honest if you don’t have the right digital solution and associated skills to deliver on an RFP. While I appreciate that partners need to close on new signings and front-line consultants must achieve their utilization targets, your integrity can be damaged by a single overpromised SoW.
Responsibility: Leverage AI tools to come prepared for client meetings and make the most of every minute. If you’re asking questions live that some basic AI prompts could have answered within minutes before the meeting, you are wasting everyone’s time. On that first interaction, arrive prepared with deep knowledge of a client’s business so that you can engage in depth on their prioritized goals, pain points, and target outcomes of a planned transformation.
User Experience: Create quality deliverables that are reliable and easy to use. While “MVP” drafts are fine for progress checks, a deliverable that will be presented to clients should be impeccable. A typo, a misspelled name and/or incorrect title, an incorrect assumption, and other similar mistakes can derail a presentation since many attendees will question the quality of the overall deck’s content. In turn, once the high-quality deck is completed, reconfigure the slideware so that the prioritized content can be easily presented during the allocated time frame.
Support: Focus 100% of your billable time on supporting the open items of your project’s SoW. While we recognize consultants clock in more than 40 billable hours during a typical work week, the math gets interesting when you tease out travel times on Mondays and Thursdays as well as potential practice give-back work where consultants are asked to “volunteer” (by their client partners) to invest in some after-hour cycles on new business development proposals, sometimes for other clients! This can reflect poorly if you come across as unfocused on the main mission.
Teamwork: Operate as one team with your clients. Be that client partner who can connect the dots across a Fortune 500’s global organization. Help us to see around the corner and provide pragmatic solutions that factor in other relevant projects your firm may be engaged in within the company, as well as constrained budgets, complex processes, and tight timelines to deliver value.
Finally, these five core themes are tightly connected to form the overarching importance of trust between the client and consultant. Trust-based relationships can be incredibly valuable for both organizations and the people collaborating with them, and they bode well for longer-term partnerships.
Bios:
Troy C. Sarich, Ph.D., is Chief Commercial Data Science Officer for Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine, where he leads teams that leverage the power of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies to grow the firm’s $57 billion worldwide innovative medicines business. During his 20 years at J&J, he has delivered business transformation and patient impact across global markets. He has authored more than 80 scientific abstracts and publications. He earned both his Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) and Ph.D. from The University of British Columbia.
