Members of the Association for Consultancy and Engineering generate more than half of their revenues from repeat business, according to a survey carried out last year. This is great news for the consultancies and is a figure that professional services firms of all types would be delighted to emulate. Generating new business absorbs a lot of time, money and human capital so if consultancies can secure repeat business from existing clients it removes the effort of finding the next piece of work, requiring significantly less up-front investment and thus offering the potential for a higher return.

For consultancies, clients coming back to them time and time again can be seen as the reward for doing a good job - delivering the project on time and to budget. But more than that, it is the return from their investment in talented consultants with the experience and knowledge to add value to their clients’ business. People buy from people – and there is no doubt that recurring contracts are a result of the agency hiring high-quality, professional individuals.

However, nice as it is to get a piece of repeat business, it is not necessarily easy to secure, and it does come with risks. The consultancy needs to be confident that is can deliver work to a consistent standard again and again. And if the business is too dependent on a single customer, they are vulnerable if anything changes in the relationship.

Undeniably, repeat business is something to be desired, but consultancies do need to take a step back and look at the associated threats. The first is that people move companies or change roles. This can happen at either the consultancy or client end, and often a long-standing relationship means very little when staff change. Maconomy research has shown that 44 per cent of creative consultancies in the UK believe that a change in client contact is the main reason that they are asked to re-pitch for the business. Loyalty works in many ways – and not always in the incumbent’s favour. For the consultancy losing employees is always a risk – the more skilled, experienced and specialised your consultants, the more your competitors will want them.

In addition, placing the burden of responsibility for securing repeat business on the shoulders of certain individuals can really increase the pressure they are under, especially if they aren’t provided with the right tools, systems or infrastructure in place to support them. Good consultants should spend the majority of their time consulting – doing what they do best to add value to a project - rather than putting together the necessary evidence to ensure that the next piece of business is secured.

Finally, reliance on repeat contracts can often hide an organisation’s true abilities to win new ones. For most companies, securing a piece of new business is about selling a methodology as a way of getting from a to z. But underneath the language used to describe them, many of these formulas are rather similar. What does make the difference is the presentation and the evidence used to support it: experience, facts and figures from previous projects. The problem with a reliance on repeat business is that consultancies do not necessarily know whether their methodology and its supporting information is up to the competition.

Where does technology fit in?

Even with the negatives in mind, consultancies still want to generate a good percentage of business from existing clients. But it isn’t always easy – how can they tell what makes one client come back to them and another turn to one of their competitors? And how can they stack the odds in their favour?

An agency can have the best consultants and methodologies in place, but securing repeat business is still down to comprehensive self-examination. It needs to assess the way in which it does business, the value that it adds and the way that this is communicated to its clients throughout the project. This takes time, as it means going back to basics and understanding how things went in previous projects and what service the client received, which in turn requires all that information to be in place.

As part of this review process, consultancies could well benefit from looking at the latest management support technologies specifically developed for consultancy businesses. These tools can collect and analyse all the relevant data not only to review past projects, but to help planning and managing future ones, from invoicing to allocating resources to ensure the right consultants are available at the right time to help on the project. Technology by itself doesn’t win new business, or even secure a repeat contract, but it can supply the appropriate foundations to support those people that do.

Although there is technology available to help consultancies manage their business processes, many still use manual procedures that don’t have a shared technology structure or centralised management. But unfortunately these simply do not provide the required levels of support for either people or processes.

For example, when they are preparing a proposal for a client, the consultancy should factor in contingency plans. However, without the right information on team skills, available resources, lessons learnt from previous work, and the status of other projects currently underway, the agency risks including inaccurate information in the proposal.

The truth is that agencies can’t compete effectively, let alone pick up repeat business, unless their people and processes are underpinned by the right technology that lets them improve reporting and information visibility; increase and justify billable hours; accelerate invoicing; and reduce or even avoid IT costs.

Technology also enhances communication, both internally and between client and consultancy. The client can be given controlled access to records of time and materials, knowing that they’ll be totally accurate, making them feel that they are in control.

So where’s the problem?

For consultants who already generate a lot of business from existing clients, technology like this can be a difficult investment to justify – their current processes have always worked, so why should they change. Indeed, a demand for change can often be seen as a slur on previous activities, ability or acumen.

Perhaps this aversion to investing in technology is a reflection of the industry’s priorities. Because consultancies secure business on the quality of their intellectual capital and the experience of their people, they may not see the value that technology offers.

But the fact remains that even the most gifted consultants will be hard pressed to deliver a successful project and make a profit if they don’t have the appropriate technology structure in support.

What’s more, consultants rarely have just one main point of contact at the client who will make the decision to invest in outside support, instead procurement and finance people are increasingly involved in the process. This makes it harder for consultancies, meaning they have to be more accountable and be able to justify in more detail what they do and how they charge to people who may not understand the intricacies of the project in question. Flair, experience and creative brilliance are extremely hard to measure against the cold hard facts of budgets, schedules and deliverables.

Consultancies need to do everything they can to counter any arguments they face. And if specialist solutions can help address the needs of clients, then a refusal to adopt them can be seen as a lack of attention to the detail required to manage customers and their requirements.

All change

So management technology can enhance an agency’s ability to secure repeat business and deliver a consistent level of service to clients. But the real benefit is that the solution can help the consultancy transform its product offering. When used effectively and properly, these tools enable the management of intangibles like experience and talent and ensure that activities and thought processes can be replicated according to client needs. In other words technology is a consultancy’s route to transforming its business – or simply extending its range – to offer a branded product.

Technology enables the consultancy to build the infrastructure necessary to grow the business. Ad hoc processes become tried and tested methodologies, and these methodologies become the essential tools that enable skilled consultants to deliver their best work. The right tools deliver complete visibility over how projects are running, and indeed the state of the company overall. Indeed, they provide the foundations on which repeat business is secured and future success is built.