In March 2026, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani canceled a $9 million McKinsey contract at the Department of Social Services. It was part of a $1.77 billion savings plan that cut external consulting contracts across multiple city agencies. The message was clear: stop paying outsiders to do what your own people should know how to do.
It’s the right instinct. But it raises a question nobody is asking. If you fire the consultants, who picks up the diagnostic thinking they were hired for? Where does the structured problem-solving go? Because the work doesn’t disappear when the contract ends. It just stops getting done.
This is the exact skills gap that revenue enablement leaders face every day. Not in the city government. In every B2B sales organization that treats enablement as a training function instead of what it actually is: internal consulting.
Most enablement leaders have a credibility problem. Not because they lack skill. Because the organization doesn’t understand what they do. They see you as the person who runs onboarding. The person who manages the LMS. The person who schedules training sessions and uploads content to the portal. And as long as that’s what they see, that’s all you’ll ever be asked to do.
I’ve built enablement departments at five companies. At every one, I walked into the same perception. Enablement was a service function. A support team. Something adjacent to the real work of selling. And at every one, the moment I changed how I operated, the organization changed how it treated me.
The shift wasn’t about working harder. It was about thinking differently. It was about adopting the same diagnostic frameworks that McKinsey charges $9 million for and integrating them into how enablement operates every day.
The Missing Shoehorn
In the opening chapter of my book, Strategic Revenue Enablement, I tell the story of a young salesman in an upscale shoe store who couldn’t find a shoehorn. He searched, came back empty-handed, and asked if there was anything else he could help with. I was sitting there with my foot half into a narrow-fitting shoe.
What struck me wasn’t the missing shoehorn. It was the missing instinct. A salesman with curiosity and ownership would have predicted the problem. He would have run to the women’s department to grab one, or improvised with a piece of cardboard, or flagged it to his manager as a gap that was costing the store sales every single day.
That instinct is what separates an order-taker from a consultant. And it’s the exact instinct that most enablement teams never develop.
What Internal Consulting Actually Means
When I say “think like McKinsey,” I don’t mean buy a suit and build a slide deck. I mean, adopt the diagnostic discipline that makes consulting firms effective.
An internal consultant is a revenue architect and risk mitigator, not an advisory bystander. They’re the person who sees the systemic gaps that cause revenue to leak. The salesperson failed because the system let them down. The internal consultant’s job is to fix the system.
Think of what an internal consultant would have done on HealthCare.gov: mapped the 55 contractor dependencies, identified the integration gaps before launch, and flagged the coordination failure when there was still time to fix it. That’s the mindset. You’re not waiting for someone to tell you what training to build. You’re diagnosing where revenue is breaking and designing interventions to fix it.
MECE: The Diagnostic Tool You’re Missing
McKinsey formalized the MECE (Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive) framework for structured thinking. It draws from decision tree logic and systems thinking, but what matters is what it does in practice.
Here’s what it does for enablement. Instead of reacting to every request that comes through the door, you first diagnose the actual problem. Performance barriers typically fall into five mutually exclusive domains: buyer dynamics, seller capabilities, content and knowledge assets, process and technology, and organizational alignment.
When your CRO walks into the QBR and puts one number on the screen (the team committed $8.2M and closed $5.1M, a 38% miss), everybody has an explanation. Sales says legal was too slow. Marketing says the leads were qualified, but reps didn’t follow up. Customer success says two renewals churned because onboarding was botched. Nobody is wrong. But nobody is diagnosing the system.
A MECE breakdown changes that conversation. It isolates where the failure occurred, prevents overlapping blame, and points to specific, testable interventions. Instead of “we need more training,” you get “pipeline quality was the problem: $2.4M of the committed pipeline never should have been at Stage 3.”
That’s the difference between being asked to build a training deck and being asked to sit in the QBR.
Hypothesis-Driven Problem-Solving
MECE tells you where the problem is. Hypothesis-driven problem-solving tells you why. Instead of gathering all possible data and hoping an insight emerges, you start with a hypothesis about what’s causing the problem and then test it.
“We believe new hires are missing quota because the onboarding program doesn’t include enough product-specific roleplay.” That’s a testable statement. You can pull the data, run the comparison, and either confirm or reject it.
This is how consulting firms work. They don’t boil the ocean. They form a hypothesis, structure an issue tree to break it into components, and test each branch with data. Leadership gets a recommendation they can act on immediately, not a 40-page deck they’ll never read.
The Minto Pyramid: How You Sell Your Findings
You can diagnose the problem perfectly and still lose the room. You also have to sell the solution to leadership, often in ten minutes or less. That’s where the Minto Pyramid Principle comes in.
Created by Barbara Minto at McKinsey, the principle flips how most people present. Answer first. Supporting logic grouped and ordered underneath. Evidence layered below that. Start with your recommendation, not your research.
It’s the difference between an email that gets filed and one that gets a meeting. Most enablement leaders bury their recommendations at the bottom of a ten-page deck. The Minto Pyramid puts it on slide one.
The Career Shift Nobody Talks About
Operating as an internal consultant means shaping strategy instead of simply taking orders. You move from waiting for directives to delivering diagnostics, shifting from asking, “what training do you need?” to providing, “here’s where revenue is leaking, and here’s how we fix it.”
That shift changes everything. Your title might stay the same, but the conversations you get invited to won’t.
Go Deeper
Chapter 8 of Strategic Revenue Enablement covers the Internal Consulting framework in full. The MECE diagnostic model, hypothesis-driven problem-solving, the Minto Pyramid in action, two case studies (including a MECE breakdown of Microsoft’s $900M Surface RT write-down), and practical scenarios you can adapt to your organization.
The book is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indigo, and Foyles.
If you’re responsible for how your organization sells, this book is your reference.
*Neil M. O’Connor is the author of Strategic Revenue Enablement: The Tactical Execution of Your Go-To-Market Strategy (FriesenPress, 2026). He has 15 years of B2B sales and 10+ years of enablement experience. He is available for speaking engagements, consulting, and workshops at [neilmoconnor.com]
