I was talking to a couple of new clients last month, and both had the same problem. Their assessments were going nowhere.
Every consultant I know starts an engagement with some kind of assessment – whether it’s a readiness review, systems audit, maturity assessment, or business diagnostic of some kind.
The problem for both my clients was that most of their assessments remained one-off engagements. They didn’t spark curiosity, they didn’t motivate action, and they don’t naturally lead to the next engagement.
If you’ve got a solid outreach plan in Q4, chances are you’ll get invited to do more assessments and audits this quarter. So you want to be prepared with a strong process that turns those conversations into meaningful partnerships.
I’ve done hundreds of assessments as a consultant, and here’s what I’ve found worked for me:
👉 1. Treat it as a business conversation, not a report. Don’t just dump findings into a PowerPoint or virtual whiteboard. Frame the assessment as a dialogue that helps leaders see their business more clearly. Use their goals and language so it feels like their story, not yours. Bring up 3-4 key insights: positives, negatives, observations and questions.
👉 2. Quantify the impact. Executives don’t move on vague statements – they act when they see how their current processes are affecting their business. For example, If you find that throughput is down, show how it delays revenue every quarter or increases overtime costs by 20%. In one assessment, I told a client their pricing approach was costing them roughly $500k a year in missed margin — that single number reframed the entire conversation.
👉 3. Provide detailed next steps. I see many consultants hand over light recommendations because they’re afraid of “giving away too much.” But the truth is, clients rarely hire consultants just for ideas — they want meaningful change. When I did strategic business assessments, I gave them a roadmap aligned with a well-thought out client journey, with quick wins (what to fix this month), medium-term moves (the next 6–12 months), and long-term plays (structural changes). The clients who were serious about change always leaned in.
👉 4. Make it visual (and where possible, interactive). A slide of bullet points can be ignored. A heat map that shows operations in red, customer experience in yellow, and leadership alignment in green sparks discussion instantly. Scorecards, maturity models, spider charts — these help leaders make faster decisions.
If you want to see a great example, check the comments of this post.
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Image credit: Dalle-3
