The biggest timewaster for consultants revealed

It’s time for consultancy firms to close the gap between winning work and delivering it.

When you’ve got sales and delivery teams using disparate systems to manage client, pipeline and project data, it’s easy to miss opportunities, duplicate work and miscommunicate – all slow down your productivity and affect client service.

There’s a simple solution.

By using a CRM with built-in project management, you can connect your teams with one single view of sales and project data.

Check out our top five ways CRM and project management can help consultants succeed.

1. Smoothly hand over from sales to delivery

When your sales team wins the work, all of the information about that client needs to flow into the delivery phase. Combined CRM and project management helps you do this quickly and easily with accurate information.

• When an opportunity closes a project can automatically be created with key information like pricing, scope, and timelines
• View all client history in one place including project scope
• Compliance checks, contract generation, and project kick off can be trigged once a deal is won for a consistent onboarding process

2. Improve margin control

Keep on top of revenue so that you can uncover margin issues straight away and adjust mid-project.

• Easily track project overrun and act on underperforming projects quickly
• Assign budget to projects and track it
• Link projects to missed and actual revenue recognition
• Track overrun projects
• Approve recognized revenue invoice amounts and timesheets

3. Make clearer, more accurate forecasts

It’s hard to accurately forecast when your sales and delivery data aren’t connected. By combining CRM and projects, your forecast is more reliable and grounded in real data.

• Enable sales teams to see delivery workload
• Give delivery teams access to upcoming pipeline
• Forecasts can be based on sales and delivery data
• Compare forecasted revenue with delivery performance

4. Uncover missing information across your client lifecycle

Are your sales and delivery teams logging in to different systems to check your pipeline, project progress, and revenue information? It’s not just time consuming but likely means both sales and delivery teams aren’t getting the full picture. With combined CRM and projects, leaders can quickly see:

• What’s been sold
• What’s being delivered
• Which team members are available
• How much of the work has been done so far
• How much revenue has been generated

5. Spot new cross-sell opportunities

Turn your delivery team into revenue drivers with all of the information you need on clients. If your team uncovers a new need from a client, it’s easy to log opportunities and flag additional in the system.

• Give consultants access to full account history during delivery
• Easily see which services clients have and don’t have
• Log follow-on work as soon as it is identified and trigger follow-up tasks
• Create upsell opportunities at the right time, based on how engaged a client is

Check out our offering for consultancy firms or explore our project management and CRM software.