No news is bad news. Probably not!

One of the toughest aspects of being a marketing research consultant is to provide bad news to a client. The bad news could be in the form of declining scores of certain metrics or a discovery that one of their key strategies is 'ineffective'. Fellow consultants will probably agree that this is not the best situation to be in.

I was in a similar situation recently. One of my clients saw their satisfaction scores and other performance metrics decline significantly and to be very honest, this freaked the hell out of me at first.

If handled inappropriately, such situations can easily become a you vs. the client contest, one that you certainly don't want to be in. The key lies in taking the client on a journey with you - a journey of discovery and opportunity identification.

From my own experience of such a situation, I have learnt the following: 

• First the foremost, keep the client in the loop. If you discover something potentially negative, it is probably a good idea to let them know and involve them in the process early. You don't want the news to be a 'shock' to them, which will ultimately pose questions to the validity and accuracy of your claims.
• Leverage the client's insights for hypothesis building. The value of this cannot be  emphasised enough. Clients know their business better than you. In my case, I benefited immensely from bouncing ideas off the client and this eventually led to the identification of certain potential triggers of the problem.
•  Know the data and context backwards. This is probably even more important when reporting something negative to the client. You need to build and demonstrate confidence, which comes from having an in-depth and expert understanding of the problem.
• Try to find solutions through innovation. Situations like this demand more innovation and creativity than usual. Try to find potential triggers of the problem through unique approaches and analysis. Don't be afraid to experiment. In my case, I found value from using a new approach and combining it with interpretation, based on the context and existing hypotheses. Upon doing this, the root cause of the problem was clearly evident.
• Know your communication strategy. By this, I mean your strategy or approach of communicating your findings to the client and their wider stakeholders. You can take one of two approaches : the subtle approach or the 'hard facts' approach. Having done both of these (in two different situations), I think this is purely a function of the nature of the client. If your client is extremely skeptical and aggressive, you probably want to take the subtle approach! (Caveat: Ensure that the essence of the problem is not lost due to the subtlety). Our job as consultants is to accurately reflect the depth and breadth of our findings. 
• Finally, sell the problem as an opportunity. In every problem lies an opportunity. Make sure to communicate this to the client. Demonstrate how your identification of the problem could lead to better opportunities for improvement and re-assessment of some of the key strategies, which could potentially have tremendous long-term value for their business. In order to do this, we need to sell a solution, and not just report on the problem.

If we can follow the above, we can ensure that we not only solve our clients' toughest problems, but also ensure that they come back to us, when they have another one!