How to Earn a Seat at Another Company’s Innovation Table

Innovation is the buzzword on everyone’s lips these days. It no longer matters only whether companies succeed, but also whether they do it in a more innovative manner than their competitors.

The rise of innovation consultancies has underscored this shift in mindset. But the talent space is wildly crowded right now, and a lot of vendors make impressive claims to their clients and prospects. It’s perhaps unsurprising that many “pure innovation firms” have been acquired over the past year and that the trend has even invaded firms serving the federal sector.

How do consultants emerge from the crowd as qualified partners worthy of trust? It all comes down to their ability to convince clients that they’re relevant, credible and differentiated.

When we founded Catalant, we realized that seats aren’t given in a crowded field — they’re earned. It became clear that we would need to make ourselves convincing and memorable as advisors to businesses looking to scale, increase their inventiveness and approach problems differently. We went to work tackling the relevant, credible and differentiated trifecta.

1. Relevant: Our first objective: to prove that we were solving problems that were extremely important to the people we were solving them for. This would convince prospects and clients that we had relevant knowledge of their field and could be trusted to tackle the right problem at the right time.

We gained insights into companies’ concerns by letting customers and prospects tell us about their industries, their competitors and their struggles and successes — we heard about everything from how they were dealing with price competition to how they were grappling with social media customer service. Rather than brag about our style of doing things or issue false reassurances about why our methods were best without any data to back them up, we wanted to frame our possible solutions in the context of how they’d impact the exact companies we were talking with.

Showing how our solutions would create a cause-and-effect relationship for our clients — highlighting how our steps would take them from Point A to Point B in a logical manner, taking into account any obstacles we may have to prepare for — convinced them that we had something to offer them in particular.

2. Credible: Once we’d persuaded prospects to take a chance on us, we were in a position to deliver results for them that earned credibility for us among others who could use our services. We solved problems for Procter & Gamble, GE, Staples and thousands of others, and those household names surely helped drive customers through our doors.

But most impressive was the historical record we built for ourselves. We focused on high-quality work, knowing that maintaining high standards would showcase more value and usability. Metrics are incredibly valuable in a crowded marketplace, quantifying the claims vendors make. By maintaining these standards, we built up a track record that showed that if we’d completed 10 projects for a company, there was a very high chance that all 10 had gone well.

That company would then stay on to keep consuming the service that drove great outcomes, and that long-term relationship established further credibility.