Enough Excel: Why Your Consulting Tools Matter

Consider A Scenario:

Our company hires the industry leading consultant to improve the business.

Everyone is ecstatic as they ponder the positive changes that are now possible.

Modern digital tools offer hope that the clunky processes developed using Excel and in the worst cases—15 year old Microsoft Access files—will be made obsolete.

The busy work we all spend hours mindlessly doing could be eliminated once and for all!

Management has finally decided to invest in a consultant to drive innovation, and we couldn't be more excited for the promised workshops to identify nagging issues.

The day of the workshop arrives and the anticipation is palpable.

We've all prepared lists of the broken systems we'd love to eliminate and can't wait to share them with the group.

Then the consultant walks in, opens his laptop, and navigates through a deeply nested file tree to locate an Excel file equally as cluttered as the ones that make our lives miserable.

The buy-in from our team feels like a balloon that was popped by the needle of yet another old and broken system.

Where's the digital technology we were promised that would make our lives easier?

Looks like this will just be more of the same.

Consider A Different Scenario:

That same consultant in the exact same situation shows up with their A game.

As the group of eager employees sit around a projector or in a zoom call — the composed consultant opens his screen to a clean, user-friendly page that we’ve never seen before.

It looks like a social media but one built around solving problems, more specifically our problems.

He navigates to a QR code that he shares on his screen and instructs the group to either scan it with our phones or click on the link via our laptops.

In less than a minute, we are engaged in a timed ranking exercise where the company’s ten biggest pain points are being prioritized by every team member.

At the end, the consultant pulls up the averages of the results along with specific notes that we attached to our submissions.

We then begin an open discussion on how or why we should go about solving these pain points.

Our group is blown away by how quickly we got down to the root of the issues using this new tool.

Now, the question is — which one of these scenarios are you and your company a part of?

Perhaps you’re still unconsciously leaving a stained impression on clients using your outdated tools.

If that’s the case, consider updating your approach with Amble and see how your clients’ eyes light up as they begin dreaming of new innovation opportunities.

In with new and out with the old — are you ready to upgrade to the consulting toolkit of the future?