Consulting CRM

The right consulting CRM will help you leverage your and your team’s relationship network to find, manage, and close more consulting engagements while empowering your firm to provide a high-quality client experience.

The best CRM features go beyond storing contact information; they enable you to track client interactions, uncover potential clients, and streamline your sales cycle. By centralizing communications and providing visibility into your network, a consulting CRM drives business growth and creates a foundation for repeatable success.

Relying on siloed spreadsheets documents and other software to manage relationships and business development processes leads to inefficiencies and missed opportunities. Teams that spend hundreds of hours per year manually entering data spend less time working on high-value client work, affecting the overall customer experience while missing out on potential revenue opportunities.

A consulting CRM empowers your firm to automate data entry, build better opportunity pipelines, leverage the power of your team’s relationships, and unlock growth by relying on repeatable business development processes.

As a consultant, building client relationships that last beyond a single engagement is essential. However, most generic CRMs are built for sales teams focused on short-term sales activities and moving prospects through a linear funnel. While they may offer strong forecasting and pipeline management, they often fail to support long-term business development, lacking the ease of use and specialized custom fields that consulting firms need to manage relationships effectively.

Implementing generic CRMs, such as Salesforce, Pipedrive, Hubspot, etc., will result in a costly and lengthy deployment and onboarding process to try and adapt a sales-focused product to your unique consulting needs. At the same time, your team will still need to spend hundreds of hours constantly entering data into the system.

On the other hand, a CRM designed for consulting and other deal-driven teams serves as a complete, end-to-end business development and client management platform that leverages relationship intelligence, automatic data entry, and activity tracking to engage with prospective clients and support existing ones.

This article details why generic sales CRMs are not the best option for consulting firms.

CRMs with relationship intelligence allow you to quickly find new connections and understand who is connected to whom in your team.

Relationship intelligence algorithms give you the power to see your entire network of contacts across your firm, complete with a relationship score. Allowing you to see who on your team has the strongest relationship with a particular person.

With a relationship intelligence CRM, you eliminate time-consuming back-and-forth within your team and the need to ask questions like “Do we know anyone at this company”? Or “Do we know any subject matter experts that can help us with this project”? With relationship intelligence, you can reach out via a warm introduction instead of sending a cold email.

By showing you these oftentimes hidden paths, relationship intelligence can help you find your next opportunity and gives you instant access to experts, allowing you to provide a better client experience.

A consulting CRM improves efficiency by:

Streamlining client interactions across every project and engagement

Supporting invoicing and document access to keep operations smooth

Supporting invoicing and document access to keep operations smooth

Ensuring your processes are user friendly and scalable for ongoing business growth.

How many hours a year does your team spend on administrative non-billable work? Are you spending hours manually entering data? Can these hours be devoted to more productive client work? If yes, your team will benefit from a CRM with workflow automation. Automating data entry ensures your CRM data is always current and clean.

By automatically capturing all activity and communication with prospects and clients, you can maintain timely follow-ups with potential deals to create a repeatable process to source, manage and close more consulting engagements.

Please visit the pricing section of our website for the most up-to-date pricing information.

Compared to other generic sales CRMs 4Degrees is priced competitively and includes access to expert customer support and a customer success team that understands the intricacies and workflows of a consulting company.

Consulting CRMs are end-to-end business development systems designed to scale your BD process with comprehensive customer data management, custom fields, and intelligent segmentation for tracking opportunities.