If you are a consulting company, your clients are the lifeblood of your business. It’s not simply about acquiring new clients, you also want to ensure they’re delighted by your services so will likely retain them. Nevertheless, if you have a piecemeal sales process and lack a clear perspective of all the deals in your pipeline, you cannot achieve the best results. If you’re using a jumble of Excel spreadsheets and documents to track deal flow including the leads coming by, you could be failing to benefit from dozens of opportunities; that means losing out on hundreds if not thousands of dollars.
The solution to address this clutter? Get yourself CRM software for consultants. In this blog, you’ll learn about the need for a CRM software for your consulting company, and how to use it to build an optimal sales and business development system.
Why The Need for A CRM for Your Consulting Service?
In your consulting business, you tend to juggle several clients and prospects all at once. In other words, depending on the complexity of your service offering and sales cycle, you need to keep abreast of opportunities daily. While it has its challenges there are of course rewards for your effort. The consulting market is flourishing, being worth a massive US $320.37Bn in 2022. New business is ripe for picking.
So how to organize and stay at the top of your selling game in a growing industry? In consulting sales is an inherent part throughout the customer journey, but you can separate this into two components:
New business: Opportunities coming from your sales, marketing, referrals, or business development efforts.
Client development: Upselling or cross-selling clients on additional services and retainers
Staying versed in these two areas without an organized system can be overwhelming. Firstly, as a consultant, business development executive or account manager, you should determine the activities you’ve executed with each contact. Secondly, the process for either case is different. If you don’t track your customers, clients or leads properly, you lose the opportunity to bring in more revenue for your business.
At this point CRM software for consultants can be priceless.
Let’s quickly go through the benefits of having a consulting CRM:
Automated sales processes
Your consulting service needs new business to survive and thrive. If you can’t answer the below questions, then you probably have a sales process that leaves money on the table:
- What happens when a new lead is referred/captured?
- What follow-up process is followed?
- What’s the duration of our sales cycle?
- What’re the individual sales stages in our sales pipeline?
With a CRM you can automate various areas of your routine activity. For instance, when a referral is generated, you can inform your sales team and assign the lead to a particular account manager.
The Bottom Line
When handling several leads, you’re possibly sending the same emails over and over again. Rather than writing them from scratch, use CRM software for consultants that enables you to store and send templates off-the-cuff.
