Enterprise

The right CRM system 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 CRMs are more than just platforms to store phone numbers and assist teams with task management. Consulting CRMs provide a centralized location to manage your client base while delivering deep insight into your team’s hundreds or thousands of relationships, allowing you to find warm introductions and accelerate business development.

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, you want to build client relationships that will last beyond a single engagement. Unfortunately, most generic or sales CRMs have been designed for sales teams focused on sales activities to move prospects down a linear sales funnel. Although they might have excellent forecasting and sales management features, these products will not help you foster long-term relationships and accelerate your business development process.

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 can make you more efficient by:

• Creating a Better Opportunity Pipeline: How are you creating, tracking, and managing your pipeline?
- A Consulting CRM can help you manage every deal by empowering you with complete visibility into each opportunity from initial engagement to close, including capturing all the communication related to the deal, its status, details, etc., allowing you to spot and rectify inefficiencies across the process and provide clients with the best service.

• Increasing Internal Collaboration: Providing your entire team with visibility across relationships and projects ensures team members are aligned and on top of all communication with every client, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
- A  consulting CRM like 4Degrees allows teams to share knowledge and work together so that any new team member or external expert can quickly get up to speed with the project and start adding value to the client.

• Providing a Top-Notch Client Experience: When a prospect becomes a client, it’s your firm’s job to deliver results and retain the client. With the right CRM, your business development and project teams are aligned by automatically tracking all client activities and communications. If someone leaves your or the client’s team, your firm still has a complete record of the entire relationship in your CRM, which helps provide a seamless client experience and retain loyalty.

• Consolidating Institutional Knowledge: By relying on email inboxes, spreadsheets, and other manual tools, your firm’s high-value institutional knowledge becomes siloed and lost as people leave the firm. A CRM keeps all the customer data and every detail from every deal centralized in a central source of truth. Ensuring you are always providing clients with top-quality service.

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.

By providing you with relationship intelligence, a mass email platform with email templates, and the ability to collaborate across your firm, a consulting CRM will help develop stronger relationships resulting in more deals and repeat clients.