The industry
Management consulting firms partner with businesses across various industries to help improve their performance. They provide expert advice and frameworks to solve companies’ business challenges from finance and HR, to marketing, operations and more. When advising clients, consultants must deliver data-driven insights to win new pitches, execute projects and tackle ad-hoc client requests.
The world’s largest and most distinguished management consulting firms use AlphaSense. We interviewed Partners, Managing Directors, and Managers at Tier 1 firms to understand how the platform has changed the way they conduct research for proposals, strengthened their client strategies, allowed them to efficiently execute on a diverse breadth of cross-industry projects, and ultimately win more deals through increased organizational efficiencies.
The challenge
Consultants are often tasked with multiple, distinct client projects within short time frames. Because teams are constantly shifting contexts, consultants have a persistent need to conduct landscape analyses, quickly get smart on how macro trends are impacting their clients, parse through executive commentary and industry developments to understand potential shifts in strategy, and tackle incoming ad-hoc requests. During these research sprints, consultants must search through research reports, company websites, internal company databases and journal and newspaper articles to produce comprehensive analyses and proposals on a deadline. Major pain points are:
Wasted time finding and synthesizing information
Consultants need to uncover specific information like market size, competitive outlook, risk factors and growth trends as they create both new business proposals and service their existing clients. As one manager describes it, “tedious and time-consuming Google searches to find a needle in a haystack” mean that consultants spend a lot of time creating complex search queries to scour for relevant insights.
Not having the complete picture
“We did not have a lot of information on what was going on with the client”, shared a senior manager. Gaining a complete and up-to-date picture to ensure the strongest client strategy is challenging for many reasons. At the top of that list? Consulting teams don’t always have access to analyst reports, and if they do, the research usually lives in a PDF within an email inbox, making it difficult to search and share information.
Inefficient research process
When speaking to a Partner, he shared that “we have to jump through hoops to get information, either through many subscriptions/sources or centralized research teams which takes a lot of time.” Consultants spend time repeating the same manual research processes, jumping between platforms to find the data they need. This inefficient process means that consulting talent spends too much time searching for information, rather than analyzing the implications of the insights.
Results
More intelligent proposals and client strategies
“We don’t have to just settle for what we have,” shared a Managing Director. Because AlphaSense unifies typically disparate content sets – company documents, transcripts, premium news, trade publications, broker research and more – all in one platform, consulting teams are creating “deeper, more comprehensive and more insightful” reports, and are able to “get more in-depth with our clients.” Ultimately, increased access to information allows firms to build trust and credibility with their clients, and win more deals.
“We did a head-to-head comparison and AlphaSense was the clear winner as it gave my team 7x more comprehensive results.”
Director
Expert insights build confidence in research
Not only are consulting teams seeing more comprehensive results, they’re also finding “information which we probably wouldn’t have found otherwise” and impressing their clients as a result. With broad access to AlphaSense’s broker research collection, Wall Street Insights®, consultants are mining these expert reports for deep insights they use when having C-Suite discussions. One Partner shared that they were able to “find information about Dean Foods that I wouldn’t have found elsewhere” and provide a valuable new perspective.
Redistribute time to client work and new business
While the curated content available within AlphaSense is building confidence in the depth and quality research, the intelligent search technology is allowing consulting teams to be more productive. “AlphaSense really helps with savings at a large scale – time savings translates across the whole team; we can get more work done and complete more engagements in the year”, shared a Managing Director. One manager shared that AlphaSense’s Smart Synonym technology has allowed him to “spend my time thinking about the search results rather than thinking about new and different ways to search for the information.”
Not only are time-savings helpful when tackling ad-hoc client requests, efficiency at scale means that the talent consulting firms spend millions to grow and retain are now able to spend more time on value-add work. From a strategic perspective, these time-savings are a growth fly-wheel, with efficiency gains translating into more engagements each year, “which means more revenue.”
In partnering with AlphaSense, consulting firms have gained access to new information, accessed more comprehensive search results and automated much of their research process, building confidence in their ability to win more deals and allowing them to efficiently deliver results for their clients.
“AlphaSense really helps with savings at a large scale – time savings translates across the whole team; we can get more work done and complete more engagements in the year”
Managing Director
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