In March 2026, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani canceled a $9 million McKinsey contract at the Department of Social Services. It was one piece of a $1.77 billion plan to cut outside consulting across city agencies, and the logic behind it was sound. Stop paying outsiders to do what your own people should be able to do.
But there’s a question buried in that decision that nobody seems to be asking. When the consultants leave, who picks up the thinking they were brought in to do? The structured problem-solving, the diagnosis, the part where someone figures out what’s actually wrong before recommending a fix. That work doesn’t go away when the contract ends. It just stops getting done.
Unless someone inside learns to do it.
The bureaucrats are the ones left holding it now. The career staff, the program managers, the people who were there before McKinsey arrived and will be there long after. Cutting the contract only works if those people can pick up the diagnostic thinking themselves. Otherwise you haven’t saved $9 million. You’ve just stopped doing the work and called it a savings.
This is the same gap revenue enablement leaders live with every day, and most of them don’t have it named yet.
The trouble starts with how the organization sees them. You’re the person who runs onboarding. You manage the LMS. You schedule the training and upload the content. For as long as that’s the picture in everyone’s head, that’s the whole job, and nothing you do will pull you out of it.
The good news is that the way out is a skill, not a personality trait, and it can be learned. That’s what I want to teach you here.
I’ve built enablement departments at five companies, and I walked into that same picture every time. Enablement was treated as a service function, something adjacent to the real work of selling.
What changed the treatment wasn’t effort. It was a change in how I operated, and specifically in adopting the kind of diagnostic discipline that consulting firms charge millions for. None of it was innate. I learned it, used it, and refined it across those five rebuilds, which is exactly why I can walk you through it.
The Missing Shoehorn
I open my book with a small story that gets at this better than any framework.
I was in an upscale shoe store, one foot halfway into a narrow shoe, and the young salesman couldn’t find a shoehorn. He looked, came back with nothing, and asked if there was anything else he could help me with.
The missing shoehorn wasn’t the problem. The missing instinct was.
A salesperson with any curiosity would have grabbed one from the women’s department, or used a piece of cardboard, or at least flagged it to a manager as a gap that was quietly costing the store sales.
That instinct is what separates an order-taker from a consultant, and it’s the instinct most enablement teams never get the chance to build.
The chance is the whole point of this. The instinct can be trained.
What Internal Consulting Looks Like
So let me show you what it looks like in practice.
An internal consultant looks for the systemic reasons revenue leaks, not the individual ones. When a salesperson misses, the more useful read is usually that the system let them down somewhere upstream.
So when a CRO opens a QBR with a single number on the screen, say a 38 percent gap between what the team committed and what it closed, everyone in the room has an explanation.
Sales blames legal for moving too slowly. Marketing says the leads were fine and the reps didn’t follow up. Customer success points at two churned renewals.
None of them are lying, and none of them are diagnosing the system.
Structured Diagnosis Changes the Conversation
A structured breakdown changes that conversation. It separates the causes so the blame stops overlapping, and it points to a specific, testable answer.
You stop hearing “we need more training” and start hearing “pipeline quality was the problem, and this much of the committed pipeline never should have reached Stage 3.”
That’s roughly the line between being handed a training deck to build and being asked to sit in the QBR in the first place.
The Career Shift
Your title might not change when you start operating this way. The conversations you get invited to will.
Go Deeper
Chapter 8 of Strategic Revenue Enablement teaches you how to do internal consulting yourself, step by step, from the diagnostic models and hypothesis-driven problem-solving to case studies you can adapt to your own organization.
