Productized Consulting and Intrinsic Motivation: A Conversation with Jesse Hopps
Peter O'Donoghue
Business Development Expert
In this episode of the Consultants Growth Playbook, I talk with Jesse Hopps of Demand Metric. Jesse shares his insights and methods for generating new business through productized consulting.
Jesse discusses a live case involving a client struggling to implement a complex upskilling proposal, and elaborates on his approach to productizing solutions to ensure scalability and repeatability.
Show Notes
Find Jesse online:
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Do You Know Why Your Expensive Training Programs Keep Failing?
The uncomfortable truth behind why corporate transformation initiatives stall has nothing to do with strategies and everything to do with psychology.
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The Training Illusion Most Companies Fall For
A company spends six or seven figures on a beautiful strategy deck from a big-name consulting firm. Everyone nods appreciatively during the presentation. The leadership team feels good about taking action. You implement some training programs to support the new direction.
And then... nothing really changes.
If this pattern sounds familiar, you're caught in what Jesse Hopps calls "the consulting trap" — the false belief that if people just knew what to do, they would do it.
The Psychology Behind Failed Transformations
Think about your own life. Do you know what you need to do to get in the best shape of your life? Of course you do. So why aren't you doing it?
The same applies to corporate transformations. Knowledge isn't the bottleneck — behavior change is.
"People don't act differently until they think differently," Hopps explains.
The Three Requirements for Intrinsic Motivation
According to Self-Determination Theory, adults need three key elements:
- Autonomy: People must feel they have a choice
- Competence: They need to feel capable of developing the skill
- Relatedness: The training must feel relevant to their daily work
Why Big Consulting Firms Miss the Mark
Traditional consulting models are built on dependency, not transformation. They excel at diagnosing problems and prescribing solutions, but they're not structured to support the messy, human side of implementation.
The Holistic Growth Model That Actually Works
Hopps developed the "Holistic Growth Model" — a pyramid with three critical layers:
- Mindset: The foundation — resilience and how to harness adversity
- Skillset: Mastery through guided discovery and reinforcement coaching
- Toolset: The frameworks and techniques that most consulting focuses exclusively on
Most transformations fail because they only address the toolset.
The Guided Discovery Approach
You can't simply tell people what to think. Adults resist being told what to do. Instead, effective transformation programs use "guided discovery" — a process where learners arrive at insights in their own minds.
The Bottom Line
If you want your next transformation to succeed, you need consultants who understand psychology, not just business frameworks.
This episode connects to our thinking on consulting offer creation and the proactive framework. To discuss how to productize your own consulting services, get in touch.
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