The decision to hire a consulting partner is almost always made on the wrong criteria. Firm brand. Slide quality. Seniority of the partner in the room. Whether the proposal felt tailored (it usually wasn't — the same deck runs for every prospect in the same sector).
These criteria are correlated with winning pitches, not with delivering outcomes. The firms that win pitches and the firms that deliver outcomes overlap, but they're not the same set.
The clients we work with who've had the best experiences — not just with us, but generally — tend to evaluate on a different set of questions. Not "how impressive was the pitch?" but "who will actually be in the room, and what have they done before?" Not "do they have a methodology?" but "can they explain what they'll do in the first 30 days without referencing the methodology?" Not "do they have sector expertise?" but "have they done this specific thing, in a context similar to ours, and can they tell us what went wrong?"
These are harder questions to ask, and harder to answer honestly.