Want to Sell More? Go Touch Grass.

Let’s get something straight right out of the gate, because this is probably the biggest complaint I hear from all Data & AI consultants I regularly talk to:

IF YOU WANT TO SELL MORE, YOU NEED TO GO TO WHERE YOUR CLIENTS ARE.

PERIOD. THERE ARE NO SHORTCUTS.

That may seem dumb to you, but it’s by far the most obvious fix that basically every consultancy I’ve ever talked to can do if they’re struggling to sell more work and expand.

Particularly because we’re all huge nerds, we get really wrapped up in things that happen online: content, demos, social media metrics, and stuff like that.

But the internet isn’t real life. Real life is real life, and real life is where your clients are.

To prove this to myself, I set a very ambitious goal for 2026: attend 12 conferences in 12 months.

That number is not arbitrary. I picked it because it forces me to both spread out the amount of events I’m attending in person (so my wallet, wife, clients, and mental health all don’t hate me), but also because it’s actually fairly hard to find 12 relevant events where other Data & AI consultants will also attend, one per month.

This past week, I attended my 7th conference of the year (CDOIQ in Boston), and the truth is that it’s forced me to confront the message of this newsletter in very real ways.

When you only sell online, you get a really weird perception of what matters. But talking to so many of my potential ideal clients in person has made two things clear to me:

There really is no silver bullet for getting better at sales as a consultancy. You have to be an expert and be able to prove your expertise, but really you just have to listen to the people you want to sell to. They hold all the answers.

But only if you ask.

The point of touching grass regularly as a consultant is to help you get out of your usual cycles and to see that everyone you want to sell to is a human as well.

Which means if you want to really know what they’re thinking, you need to go find them, talk to them like a normal person (AKA don’t be an asshole), and build a real relationship that will lead to work later.

As always, consulting is a longgggg game, and this is step #1 to generating the opportunities you want for yourself.

So if you got this far, put down the keyboard, close down your computer/phone (after you finish reading this 🫠), and go touch grass for once if you want to learn what the people you serve really need.

(And if you want help to figure out the best way to do so, let’s talk about it.)

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the realities of why Big 4 consultancies tend to take on a lot of projects that lead to, let’s say, suboptimal results for humanity as a whole.

Since we already covered that topic in detail (check it out here if you missed it!), today I want to tell you a very personal story as part 3 of my series covering what makes Big 4 consultancies successful:

I remember early in my career at Accenture, I would have frequent debates with my mentors and bosses about the value of our work, and there was a project in particular that really broke me.

That client (a F500 health insurance company) had hired Accenture to help them save 90 million dollars in insurance claims that had been inefficiently or sometimes incorrectly paid out to their Medicaid and Medicare members.

If you’re not in the US, that means the very needy and very old.

For about a year, I didn’t think much of it. I was just doing my job building dashboards to help track our progress towards that goal, and I was quite good at it!

Shortly before finishing that project, I was telling a friend what we did, and I’ll never forget what he said:

Which obviously sent me into an absolute tailspin. I think I’m not a huge asshole, so why did I not see this for what it was?

Because, again, I was just doing my job.

I covered this pretty heavily in my post a few weeks back (and in the article I linked above), but you have to remember that big consultancies are machines, and machines require a lot of fuel.

And despite what you might think about them, these same consultancies succeed because they’re willing to take on extremely difficult problems and solve them very efficiently.

I’ve spent my entire career since that moment trying to balance the need for us to make money with doing good in the world (a topic which I’ll cover in a future post closer to Thanksgiving here in the US), but the point of telling you this story is to say:

Instead of you landing in the same spot I found myself, you need to find what the line is that you will not cross in your own work, and you need to stick to it.

Because, after all, you don’t have the same needs a big consultancy has. Which, again, means you don’t have to work with assholes if you don’t want to.

The day before we recorded our episode, a client sent Christian a Google Sheet with 75 extremely poorly defined KPIs for him to build into a dashboard.

He knew he had to say no, because six years ago he got the same spreadsheet from a previous client, said yes without thinking, and paid dearly for it.

Christian spent days building tables, only to walk the results over to their marketing team to get told "that doesn't look right" by people who had no way of knowing what right looked like. Massively annoying.

In this episode of This Is Fine, Christian breaks down what he calls metric explosion: how the habit of being agreeable (which once made him a great employee) nearly sank him the moment he started consulting, and what it took to become what he now calls a “strategic no man”.

Check out the full video above, leave a comment to let me know what you think, and subscribe to my YouTube channel for more episodes just like this one!

Every consulting firm you know has two natural predators: scope creep and procurement teams.

The former is a very avoidable problem that can be prevented through diligent and transparent work with our clients.

The latter, I’m pretty sure, is just an elaborate revenge scheme designed by the sloths from Zootopia to spite service providers everywhere.

And there’s nothing we can do about it but be very nice to them and hope for mercy so we can actually do our work 😭

If you’re working with your clients and struggling to get their rank and file to tell you the realities of their data needs or the politics behind why the AI tool you’re building them won’t actually stick, it’s likely not because they don’t want to tell you.

It’s because they can’t get a word in.

The one thing that any consultant that’s been around the game for a bit can tell you is that influence kills ideas.

When the most senior person in a meeting speaks first, the whole room goes quiet. Ideas get framed by the leader (often to their detriment). Teams start doing instead of creating.

So if you want your discovery efforts to be effective, you need to make sure the leader in the room always goes last.

This allows junior team members to share pragmatic perspectives that reshape how Data & AI strategies get implemented, for solutions to emerge that no single person could’ve created, and for unnecessary disagreements on implementation plans to get settled before they become project risks.

Remember: your job as their advisor is not to please the leader of the team, it’s to build something that works.

And doing so often requires telling the person that bought the project from you to shut up for a bit and let their team speak.

I once again lied to you last week and told you we were going to be covering a topic we actually didn’t cover at all, so this time I promise I’ll try to stick to the actual focus of our next newsletter article: why value-based pricing is so hard to achieve, despite it being all the rage these days!

Make sure to join me next Monday to find out why!

If you’ve enjoyed the topics I talked about today and want to learn more about my work - let’s chat!

I specialize in helping founders of boutique Data & AI consultancies that have brute-forced their growth and feel like they need an external perspective to get unstuck.

So if you’re stuck yourself, I’m here to help!

Want to talk about a problem internal to your company that you’re struggling with? Sign up for a free therapy session with me, and let’s talk about it!

Want help to expand, ideate, and scope Data & AI projects with your clients? Sign up for a demo workshop to see how we can help you!

And if you want more details about either, check out my:

Otherwise, thank you so much for reading, and see you next week!

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