Customers are the lifeblood of your market as a consulting firm. It’s not only about getting them, but you do also need to make sure your offerings attract customers enough to keep them. When you have a piecemeal sale cycle without a fair assessment of all the transactions in the queue, the desired outcomes will not be obtained. When you use a hodge-podge of Excel spreadsheets and records to chart transaction progress and new leads, you may miss out on millions of opportunities — which means hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars losing out on it.
CRM For Consultants Is The Need
As a consultant, you juggle many clients and opportunities at once. It means you have to keep in touch with prospects on a daily basis, based on the scope of the service delivery (and the revenue cycle).
Sales are important in the client experience when it comes to consultancy but you can divide that into two key parts:
- New business: Prospects from your activities in sales, promotions, referrals or company growth
- Client development: Client upselling or cross-selling of additional services and retainers
This can be challenging to keep up with those two things without a coordinated system. First of all, as a consultant, exec market growth, or account manager, you have to know what operation you have done for any touch.
Second, the method is unique for each. If you don’t carefully monitor your clients, clients or leads, you risk losing an opportunity to get more profit into your company.
Let’s run over some of the typical advantages, and why you should take care of them.
1. Sales procedures are streamlined
To live and prosper, the company needs new business. When the following questions can not be resolved, you can have a selling cycle that leaves money on the table:
- What happened when we refer to / capture a new lead?
- What’s our follow-up & tracking process?
- How long is our round of sales?
- What are the common objections/questions we hear from prospects?
- What are the concerns/questions from prospects that we hear?
A CRM helps you to simplify certain aspects of your everyday life. For example, you will alert the sales staff when a request is created, and delegate the lead to a particular rep or account manager.
2. Engineering the pipeline
Every organization, along the way, depends on a promotional plan with different steps. Such pipeline phases may include for a consulting firm:
- New lead generated
- Discovery call
- Solution development/proposal
- Pitch
- Negotiation
- Contract
- Deal won or lost
Using a CRM, you can map every stage and retain a high-level view of where all the new future customers are located within the pipeline.
When you will see, it is obvious that the entire cycle has every chance. This means that every month or quarter, you will estimate revenue and resources depending on how close a lead is to closing.
3. Proposals
When dealing with multiple leads, you probably send emails of the same proposal over and over again. Rather than writing them from scratch, using a CRM that lets you submit predefined email content on the fly.
4. Keep up selling practices
A popular difficulty for salespeople and account managers is to keep up with all the activities which leads and customers are nurtured. It can be like rotating plates: When you need any help, you can end up with broken crockery without an effective means of visualizing.
Metaphors aside, the opportunity to monitor and schedule operations and projects at any point in the cycle must include in a strong CRM for consultants. You will be reminded of what needs to take care of when, from the purpose of the job to when it will be done (and who will do it).
5. Analysis & Projections
This can be time-consuming to keep your eye on the pulse of the events, possibilities and tests. Especially when you copy-and-paste all the details into a document.
A strong CRM program can integrate both analysis and projections features, showcase high-level dashboards, and detailed information on how well the sales process performs. Here’s what an internal Pursho piQLE CRM business projection do like, showing market gaps and future income segmented by individual sales reps.
Getting that high-level perspective would show you the quality of your consultancy company with those looking to expand their consulting firm. This also allows the senior management to express success and outcomes, explaining where you put your budget.
