consulting methodology

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✔ What are Consulting Frameworks? ✔ Why Use Consulting Frameworks? ✔ 7 Consulting Frameworks for Case Interviews & Client Sessions ✔ Over to You

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7 consulting frameworks that win big clients.

Consulting frameworks are the keys that open doors to successfully solved business cases.

Whether you’re preparing for your first case interview or need a refresher before a big meeting, these tried-and-tested blueprints will help you make your session effective.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll cover seven fundamental consulting frameworks and how to apply them. Use it as your cheat sheet to impress your consulting clients.

What are Consulting Frameworks?

Consulting frameworks are tools designed to solve a business problem.

They can be used as ready-made cheat sheets to work with various businesses across industries or customized to more specific cases. Once you know how to apply them confidently, you can combine or tweak them based on your client’s needs.

These frameworks break down problems and challenges your clients face into what we call an issue tree. It maps out where that business stands and looks further into the branches of the tree to find the root cause of problems.

It’s common for consultants to uncover multiple issues in their first session with a client, which may either be disjointed or all connected to the same theme.

Consulting frameworks are based on the principle MECE (pronounced as mee see), which stands for “mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive”.

It means that, while segmenting an issue, you need to:

Separate all influencing factors without any overlap
Make sure you cover all areas without exception

Consulting processes build upon this fundamental logic so that no important details are missed. Despite the common misconception, MECE isn’t a framework but the driving principle upon which all consulting frameworks are based.

[ Read: 34 Different Types of Consulting Services (And How to Pick Your Specialty) ]

Why Use Consulting Frameworks?

Consulting frameworks provide templates as a starting point for your sessions. They give you a roadmap to find clarity about an aspect of a business, no matter the size.

They can immediately simplify the complexity of a problem and draw attention to what may be overlooked in client interviews. Never underestimate the simplicity of a modeling strategy, even if you feel like you’ve already covered every area in a case.

On the other hand, you can’t solely rely on these frameworks when solving business issues. Analytical thinking and asking the right clarifying questions are equally important for a successful case.

These consulting tools provide a great starting point but must often be customized or combined with other frameworks to be efficient.

[ Read: The 17 Life Coaching Skills That Every Top Coach Has Mastered ]

To master these templates, practice them in as many situations as possible. The more confident you become using them, the sooner you can develop your own frameworks on the spot for an individual business case.

7 Consulting Frameworks for Case Interviews & Client Sessions

Profitability framework.

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The profitability framework is one of the most common models used in financial consulting cases. It’s designed to mathematically analyze a business’s profitability, identify flaws, and inspect its qualitative aspects.

Here’s how it goes:

Break down the profits of the business into revenues minus costs.
Break down the revenues into price per unit times the number of units sold.
Break down costs into variable costs and fixed costs.
Break variable costs further down into cost per unit times units produced.

Once the math is mathing, you can investigate the cause and effect of the numbers with qualitative frameworks or further questions.

3Cs Framework

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The 3Cs framework was developed by Japanese organizational theorist Kenichi Ohmae. It focuses on the three key drivers of success in business: customers, competition, and company.

Here’s how these elements can be broken down:

Customers: Customer demographics, customer needs, size and growth rate of customer segments, and price sensitivity.
Competition: The value proposition and brand of competitors, their market share and growth, and their financial health.
Company: Product offering, profitability, core competencies, unique selling points, financial performance, and resources.

The 3Cs provide a broad overview of the business’s strengths and weaknesses, making it a great starting point for analysis. They help you gain a bird’ s-eye perspective on a business and uncover more potential issues than what’s initially visible.

After you have mapped up the three key areas, you need to dig deeper into the ones that might be the root cause of the central problem. Consider using further frameworks related to the individual functions to solve issues within them.

Mergers and Acquisitions Framework

There are various factors to consider before acquiring another business. The mergers and acquisitions framework helps break these components into a clear thought process.

There are two versions of this framework. The first one considers the following:

The organizational values of the two businesses and their compatibility
Their synergy in terms of operation
Other variable factors that might influence the decision, such as feasibility, legal issues, or other cultural attributes

The other way to apply this model is to look at these four aspects and their different components:

Market: Market size and growth, market profitability, threats imposed by the competition, and market regulations.
Target business: Financial position, assets and advantages, the quality of the management team, and the target-buyer culture fit.
Buyer: The reason for the acquisition, financing, the buyer’s acquisition experience, and the acquisition timing.
Synergies and risks: The value of individual and combined entities, cost synergies, revenue synergies, and the biggest risks of failure.

If these are other components worth looking at for a client, you can expand these clusters with them.

4P/7P Marketing Mix

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The 4P Marketing Mix is a classic marketing consulting framework first proposed in the 1960s by E. Jerome McCarthy. The four components it stands for are:

Product: The product or service marketed.
Price: All pricing plans defined for the product being sold.
Place: Geographical location of the product sold and channels of distribution.
Promotion: The strategies used for promoting the product.

Later, this model was expanded into the 7P Marketing Mix with three extra elements to analyze service-based products. These three additional components are:

People: The customers or clients as well as all other stakeholders involved.
Process: The flow of activities or the mechanism between customers and the business.
Physical evidence: Everything visible from the packaging to the service environment.

This is an excellent framework for planning and implementing marketing strategies , especially for product launches in competitive markets.

Porter’s 5 Forces Model

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The Porter’s 5 Forces Model is a framework developed by Harvard Business School professor Michael E. Porter. It’s designed to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the industry surrounding the business. The five components of this model are:

Competitors: The rivalry surrounding the business.
Suppliers: The bargaining power of suppliers.
Customers: The bargaining power of customers.
New Entrants: The threat of new players entering the market.
Substitute Products: The threat of new products being launched on the market.

By mapping out these five forces, we can understand the industry’s level of competition and project the company’s long-term profitability.

Market Entry Framework

The market entry framework analyzes the characteristics of a new market the business plans to enter.

It takes a closer look at the business’s capabilities and the potential financial impact of entering that market so the right strategies can be developed for it.

This framework can be broken down into four components:

Market: Market size, profitability, products present on the market, the level of competition, and regulations.
Client capabilities: Differences between the current and new markets and the client’s experience in market entry strategies.
Financials: Current financial position, the cost to enter the new market, ongoing costs after market entry, and expected revenues and return on investments.
Entry strategy: Timing, speed, entering a single region versus the entire market, merger opportunities, and management approach.

There might be more than one potential solution to a market entry case. Prepare with as much research as possible so you can propose multiple market entry strategies for your client and compare them.

Pricing Case Framework

This framework considers all important factors when creating a pricing plan for products and services.

It combines both qualitative and quantitative aspects under these three pillars:

Cost-based pricing: Fixed costs of all products, variable costs and number of units produced, and profitability targets.
Value-based pricing: Product features, as well as the financial, emotional, and additional value these features bring to customers.
Competitor-based pricing: The pricing plans of competitors, substitute products available, and value comparison.

These elements can be combined into an overall pricing structure for different product variations, including upsells and special offers. Note that the business’s profitability and market share strategy will probably also influence rates.

Over to You

Each consulting case can be broken down into an issue tree, from the broad overview to the nuances. Even if it seems like you’ve reached the end of the road, new segmentation methods can always help your analysis to the tip of those branches.

You can consider internal and external factors, qualitative and quantitative data points, and financial and non-financial attributes. The opportunities with consulting frameworks are virtually endless.

Ultimately, you should be selective and pick one or a few that bring new insights and turn complexity into clarity for your client.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in February 2022 and has since been updated for accuracy.

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