* Consultants.

Consultancies comprise the sales and marketing functions. They provide the link between clients' business needs and the organization's products and services.

Everyone knows that a company needs a sales and marketing organization. But many internal service departments lack an equivalent function.

While people may not like the thought of sales internal to the company, this building block is absolutely critical to every internal support function. It's the one that spends most of its time with clients, getting to know the people and the business issues. It helps clients discover their needs for its products, linking the organization to clients' business strategies. It helps peers within the organization understand clients and their needs. And it facilitates healthy relationships between clients and the rest of the organization.

Strategic alignment is a key deliverable of this building block. Consultants do more than act as client liaisons and broker projects with other groups within the organization. They diagnose clients' business strategies and link mission-critical opportunities to the right subset of the organization's products and services. In this way, Consultants translate clients' strategic business opportunities into "sales" for the organization.

Although many internal support functions leave this critical function to their senior managers to perform in their spare time, it deserves a separate place on the organization chart.

To align itself with its clients' business strategies, an organization must be prepared to flexibly offer any subset of its products and services as required by the business challenge of the day. But it's not easy to be business driven when you're also a provider of a specific subset of the product line. Therefore, to build strategic alignment, organizations need a business-oriented professional who is independent of any of its specific product lines.

There are four types of Consultancies:

* Account: high-level account representatives who are the default points of contact for a set of clients (their territory). They produce a stream of strategic opportunities by serving key opinion-leading clients with comprehensive strategic analyses. They are proactive, and do a lot for the few. In a company, they are a direct sales force for major accounts. In an internal service provider department, they are the liaisons with client business units.

* Function: experts in the clients' professions, available to help Account Consultants (in any territory) with business analyses. While the Account Consultant is the primary representative to a client business unit, when working in, say, the procurement and manufacturing areas, the Account Consultancy may call in a Function Consultant who specializes in supply-chain issues to help diagnose their strategic requirements.

* Retail: available to anyone on demand for business advice and unbiased business diagnoses. They are reactive, and do a little for the many. They are analogous to a retail store for walk-in clients. They may even manage a showroom or demonstration center.

* Marketing: the one-to-many functions that coordinate communications with the client community, for example, with brochures, newsletters, awareness events, and public relations. They also offer peers within the organization help with marketing planning. And they offer market research services that answer questions about what groups of clients think (eg, customer satisfaction surveys).

In all its forms, Consultancies facilitate partnerships with clients, and link clients' business challenges to the organization's various products and services.

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