Time-to-value: Speed gives firms a competitive advantage in an unreliable world

We’ve written extensively about value in the past. In doing so, we often talk about what we call “the value gap”: While around 80% of clients have positive views of the quality of work delivered by consulting firms, the proportion of those same clients who think that the firms they’ve worked with have created value has been roughly half that for as long as we’ve been collecting this data.  

The gap between the perceptions of quality and those of value widened in 2024, chiefly in response to tighter budgets for consulting services that prompted much greater scrutiny of what clients would get for their money in practice. Asked what the biggest disincentives were to using external support, 26% of clients said it was because they got plenty of ideas but no actual change and 22% said it was because they weren’t sure what they’d get for their money.  

This year, the value gap has narrowed. We suspect this is largely because firms are charging less, so the value delivered in relation to price paid—which is how we frame the question—is higher. Under unprecedented pressure on fee rates, which was roughly 10 times higher in 2024 than it had been before the pandemic, consulting firms have offered bigger discounts. Surveyed earlier this year, 46% of clients said they’d been offered a discount of 30% or more, compared to just 17% in 2022.  

But this situation is patently unsustainable. Our latest research on value suggests that, although there’s further to go, consulting firms have been making efforts to engage clients in more conversations about value—69% of firms discuss the value to be created during the scoping period of a project, and 82% do so during the course of the work—and this, too, will have helped to bring perceptions of quality and value closer together. 

All this is very positive news for the consulting industry as a whole. But, in the current unreliable environment, it may not be enough.  

In the context of consulting services, value means different things to different clients, but for just over a fifth of clients the single, most important way in which consultants can create value is by reducing the time it takes to get things done. But our data shows that only 8% of clients see an immediately positive impact from consulting work, and 27% say that it can take at least a year for them to reap the benefits. 

This delay creates two problems. The first is that the clients most likely to spend now—those frightened into action by economic unreliability—are looking for tactical but not necessarily small-scale solutions that can be delivered right now. Focused as they are on the very short term, if they think that it will take a year for a piece of work to have a transformative impact, they may decide it’s not worth doing. The second problem is that only 17% of consulting firms talk to their clients about the value they’ve created after their work has been completed, so most firms won’t know what they’ve really achieved.  

Of course, every problem is a theoretical opportunity. In a very challenging market, the firm that can deliver value more quickly than its rivals and has a comprehensive understanding, not just of how value is delivered, but when it is delivered, will have a competitive advantage.  

What can firms do next? 

Our forthcoming Emerging Trends report, How to talk to your clients about value, brings together almost a decade of research into how clients think about value. Filled with practical insights into how to better communicate value, it’s a must-read for firms looking to succeed in a challenging market.