It's well known that strong communication is a prerequisite for great consulting. Listening, asking the right questions, and presenting confidently and effectively are all foundational to client delivery. What about the skills that shape the substance of your work, though, not just how you present it? These are the skills that separate a good consultant from a great one.
- Deliver a product your client can actually use after you leave
It doesn't matter how sophisticated your charts or calculations are – if the client can't take ownership of your work once the engagement ends, adoption will be significantly hindered. By providing a short walkthrough of your work or explaining it in writing, the client will not only feel more confident using Tableau, but they'll be able to appreciate all the work that went into building it.
- Know when and how to say the data doesn't answer the business question
Some clients will insist on using a specific chart type or analytical approach even after you've flagged that it may not fully answer their question. As a consultant, part of your value is being honest about what's not working and why, while remembering that the client knows their business better than you do. Visual evidence is your strongest tool here. If the issue lies with the chart type, build an alternative using the same data and let them compare. If it's a data structure problem, put the data in a table and walk them through the discrepancies. Showing is almost always more persuasive than telling.
- Offer the client something valuable even when the client says they don't want it
As a consultant, it's your role to provide clients advice based on your professional judgment. That said, it's appropriate to respectfully push back. After all, if a client doesn't want to take your recommendation, that's their prerogative, but at least you've opened the door for them to be introduced to something new they hadn't considered before.
On a recent client project, my colleagues and I included a blank dashboard template in our deliverables even though the client had mentioned they were happy with their existing dashboard designs. After looking at those dashboards, we noticed they were built entirely using floating containers, which was likely costing the client significant formatting time with every update. At first glance, it may seem as if we were ignoring the client's feedback, but this is the kind of 2-step listening process that's key in consulting: hearing what the client explicitly says, followed by interpreting what they say in the context of their role, their technical proficiency, and how they approach their work. A one-step process would have left the client with the same dashboards they came in with. Instead, we left them with stronger Tableau skills and a new asset to present to their team.
- Get comfortable with ambiguity
There's no guarantee that client data will be clean, clear, or well-documented. In fact, it's part of the job to untangle all of that. The process to understanding client data is rarely linear: you might make real progress on analysis, only to learn a piece of contextual information that sends you back to the beginning. The sooner you surrender to the process, the less frustrating it becomes.