Seven Steps to Drill Your Client Recommendations in 90 Seconds

Consultants rarely lose a client because they lack technical knowledge. More often the trouble is a moment in a meeting when a recommendation fails to land: the sponsor nods, asks for “a bit more detail”, and nothing happens afterwards. Delivering a clear verbal recommendation is a craft, and as with any craft it improves through deliberate practice in DevOps consulting, not through simply attending more meetings. This guide gives you a seven-step routine for drilling one specific habit, explaining a technical recommendation to a non-technical decision maker in ninety seconds.

Step 1: Name the single weakness

Do not start with “improve my communication”. Look back at the last three client conversations and find one concrete failure. Perhaps you buried the recommendation after five minutes of background. Perhaps you used internal vocabulary the sponsor never learned. Perhaps you listed options without saying which one you would pick.

Write the weakness as a sentence you could check afterwards: “I state my recommendation within the first twenty seconds.” If you cannot tell whether you did it, the sentence is too vague. Rewrite it until a stranger watching a recording could answer yes or no.

Step 2: Build a small, repeatable scenario

You need a case you can run again and again without waiting for a real client. Use a past engagement with identifying details removed, or invent a plausible one: a retail firm whose releases take two weeks, and your recommendation is to automate the testing stage before touching anything else.

Write down the facts you would know, the person you are speaking to, and the decision you want from them. Keep the scenario on one page. A small fixed case lets you compare attempt three with attempt one, which is impossible if the material changes every time.

Step 3: Set a tight clock

Ninety seconds is deliberately short. A drill with no time limit lets you drift into comfortable rambling. With a timer running, you must choose what matters. Record yourself on a phone or voice memo app and keep the recording for later review; you will not need to share it with anyone.

Do three takes in a row. Each take should be a full, uninterrupted delivery, not a restart at the first stumble. Stopping to fix a mistake mid-take trains you to stop in a real meeting.

Step 4: Get honest feedback quickly

Listening back to your own recording is the cheapest feedback available, and it is also uncomfortable, which is a good sign. Use a short checklist rather than general impressions.

• Did the recommendation come first, before the background?
• Was there any term the sponsor would have to ask about?
• Did you state the benefit in the sponsor’s language, such as fewer late releases or fewer weekend calls?
• Did you say what you need from them, and by when?

If you can, send one take to a colleague and ask a single question: “What would you have to ask me after hearing this?” Their questions are the gaps. A reader or listener who can summarise your point in one sentence is the real test.

Step 5: Make one small adjustment

This is where many people undo their own progress by changing everything at once. Choose a single change for the next round. If the recommendation came late, move it to the front and nothing else. If jargon crept in, replace the two worst terms and nothing else.

Then run three more takes. Compare the checklist results. When only one thing changed, you know what caused any improvement, and you can keep or discard the change with confidence.

Step 6: Test it against a harder version

Once the clean scenario feels comfortable, raise the difficulty a notch. Add an interruption: a colleague asks “why not just buy a tool?” halfway through. Or shorten the clock to sixty seconds. Or change the audience to a sceptical finance lead. Difficulty should rise slowly, just beyond what you can do easily, because that edge is where learning happens.

Real engagements need more than a good explanation, of course. A sound recommendation rests on a sound assessment, and the site’s piece on an engagement that runs from the opening assessment through handing skills to the client team shows where the spoken summary fits in the wider arc. For security-flavoured conversations, a companion read is weaving security checks into delivery pipelines, which gives you scenario material for harder drills.

Step 7: Log the result and pick next week’s weakness

Keep a four-line note for each session: date, weakness, what changed, result. After a month the notes will show which weaknesses yield fast and which stay stubborn. Then pick the next target. Maybe it is handling a challenge without getting defensive, or summarising a risk without alarming anyone. The routine stays the same; only the target moves.

Avoid the temptation to run these drills for an hour at a time. Fifteen to twenty minutes with full attention outperforms a long, tired session, and the short length makes it easy to fit between calls.

What one round of improvement looks like

Here is a typical sequence from the retail scenario. Take one lasted a hundred and ten seconds and opened with two minutes of context about release frequency. The checklist showed the recommendation arriving last and three terms the sponsor would not know, including the name of the test framework. The adjustment for take four was only this: open with “I recommend we automate regression testing first, because it removes most of the waiting between a finished change and a release.” Take four came in at eighty-five seconds, and the colleague who listened asked only one follow-up question, about timing, instead of four. The framework name had quietly vanished too, since nobody needs it to approve the plan. Nothing about the consultant’s knowledge changed between takes; only the order and the vocabulary did, and the revised order alone shifted how the message landed.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Practising what you already do well. It feels good, and teaches nothing.
• Skipping the feedback step. A take with no review is just rehearsal of your existing habits.
• Making the scenario too easy. If the sponsor in your scenario always agrees, you are not preparing for real rooms.
• Altering many variables per round. Cause and effect become impossible to separate.

When outside coaching adds value

Self-run drills have limits. A good coach watches how you work and sees habits you cannot hear in your own recordings, then designs the next drill for you. If you want to look for one, the DevOpsTrainer directory lists DevOps trainers, instructors and coaches by skill route and format, including one-to-one upskilling. Use it as a starting point and ask any candidate how they give feedback in practice.

For wider context on why recommendations matter to the business side of the conversation, the discussion of how consulting work supports enterprise agility offers language your sponsors are likely to recognise.

A first session you can run today

Take twenty minutes. Write your weakness as a checkable sentence. Draft a one-page scenario. Set a ninety-second timer and record three takes. Score each against the four-question checklist. Choose one change, record three more takes, and note the difference. That is the whole method. Repeat it twice a week for a month, and the next time a sponsor asks “so what do you recommend?”, you will notice that the answer arrives first and the room responds with a decision instead of a request for more detail.

Kabir Malhotra