The Difference Between Vendors and Consultants

Hi guys. I’m Rhea Drysdale, CEO of Outspoken Media, and we are an internet marketing company that specializes in SEO, reputation management, link development, and social media marketing. I’m here today in the SEOmoz office, because our team is attending SMX Advanced. Many of you probably know of Outspoken Media because we’re doing live blog coverage of the conference, and I hope to meet many of you here today.

I want to go ahead and talk a little bit, with this Whiteboard Friday, about the difference between vendors and consultants. For us, that’s a really big thing. At Outspoken Media, we’ve been doing a lot of organizational development over the last couple of months, and it’s really turned our entire business model inside out. The reason that we got there is that we were recognizing that there is a lot of turnover with some of our clients, where there’s a situation that a middle manager would, perhaps, leave the organization, and in those cases, we would often get replaced. Why did that happen? It usually happened because we were just seen as a vendor. We were basically like the McDonald’s of link development, where someone came in and said, “I want X number of links and I want to improve my rankings and that’s it.”

But for us, we took ourselves much more seriously. Just because the client didn’t, there was some communication breakdown that was taking place, and we had to say, “Okay. How do we position ourselves to be much more trusted, establish a long-term relationship, really get to know their business model, and work with them to grow that business, not just meet, link and ranking metrics?”

So with that in mind, we brought on an organizational development consultant ourselves. His name is Shem Cohen, of Change Events. He’s phenomenal, and he sat down and said, “Well, you’re a vendor.” It really struck me, because I said, “No, I’m not a vendor. I’m not a vendor, because we’re actually ranking on our site with SEO consulting, and for years we’ve been calling ourselves SEO consultants.” He said, “I hate to tell you, you really are a vendor.” Finally I kind of let that settle and admitted it.

Once I recognized what a vendor was, it helped me to see where we had to get to, to become a consultant. So let’s talk about that today, because you might find yourself in the same situation as us, or maybe you’re the client and you’re not quite sure who you should be hiring. What makes more sense for your business?

On the vendor side, there are a couple of things that make you a vendor. With a vendor, you’re probably really good at doing something, which is great. However, that something is probably a highly specialized skill, maybe link development or content creation. It’s one kind of area. It’s not necessarily informing a full business strategy. So with the vendor, you’re usually responsible with taking strategy in from the client, and once you have that strategy, it informs the tactics and the tools and the implementation and the reporting that you’re going to do for that client. You’re responsible for those areas of your business, but the strategy is coming from the client. It’s not coming from you. So that’s kind of the main, main thing there is that you’re not really informing that strategy, except in rare cases. But for the most part, you’re kind of there on a project basis. Maybe there are certain rankings they want to achieve. They really want to bulk up the on-page optimization for a certain category or a new product launch. So you’re there for kind of a short-term thing, and maybe you actually do have a long-term contract of a year or more, but in those cases, you’re still on reporting on links or rankings. You don’t have full access to data. You’re not there on an executive level. You’re not informing the business strategy on their end. You’re just kind of managing your project.

So that’s kind of the main thing. What the client is typically having to report to you, and as a client you should remember this, you need to be holding the vendor accountable for the metrics that they have in place and for communicating with a single point of contact. Otherwise, things can kind of get a little bit confusing.

Vendors are great because everybody needs someone to get a job done with highly skilled labor. But, again, that vendor doesn’t really maybe have that long-term relationship where, if you’re a consultancy, you want to have the long-term relationships that you’re building up trust with. You can do a lot more in terms of SEO, and I feel better at the end of the day when we’re a consultant. So that’s a vendor.

Now what makes you a consultant? A consultant is someone who receives the business goals from the client, but then they communicate the strategy back to the client, and say, “What we’re hearing from you is this is what you want to achieve, but in order to do that we’re recommending that you pursue these different methods, which we’re going to help you with or maybe we’re going to actually bring on different resources or we’re going to help manage resources within your own organization and staff this project.”
You’re going to manage, potentially, other vendors if you’re a consultant. So you might be bringing other people in on projects that you’re in charge of, based on the overarching strategy that you’ve created for the clients.

This is also going to be something that’s usually relationship-based. You’re probably getting invited to communions for your clients’ kids and weddings and anniversaries, and all those things, because you love each other. So that’s much more relationship-based.

You’re also informing, on the consultant side, the tool selection for the client. What I mean by that is that, with the client and the vendor, the client will usually just go to the vendor and say, “Hey look, this is our CMS and this is what we have to work with.” With a consultant, they’re saying, “Hey, we’re not thinking that our current CMS is working. What do you recommend?” They’re asking you to actually tell them that. That’s a really powerful place to be, because now you can effect so much more change.

So internal tool selection and then on the ultimate side of the consultant relationship, you’re informing business decisions with the client. That’s really the most major thing, is that you’re changing their business. You’re there. You’re in this trusting relationship. On the client side, what you have to remember, with the consultant, is that in addition to communicating your business goals and your resources and your time frame and being truly honest and forthcoming with them, you also need to give them access to your different departmental resources and really let them know what you can truly do and what you’re capable of. More important, you need to give them access to your data. Sometimes that can be scary, but we can’t come up with a strategy or improve your business unless we have full access to that data. It’s reliable and we can help, maybe, sculpt that in analytics and choose the right program that’s going to give us the data that we need.

Then lastly, there are probably going to be multiple contacts on the clients’ side that the consultant is communicating with. We’ve probably met IT. In my case, I’ve probably bribed IT with donuts and gone down and visited them. In addition to that, we know your SEO team. We know your community managers. We know the executives. We’ve been there. In certain organizations, I know Distilled loves to go down and work out of the office. That’s a much more, kind of mutually beneficial relationship. Everyone’s on the same page. So there are multiple contacts and that’s okay, because you’re getting paid to do that kind of work.

So that’s the real big difference between vendor and consultant, and hopefully that helps give you a better understanding of where you lie in the hemisphere of SEO, from vendor to consultant, and independent consultants and big consultancies. There are all kinds of different terms out there. So let me know what you are, and hopefully this was helpful. Thank you so much.