Metis Insights for Consultants: What can a CRM do for your consultancy?

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What can a CRM do for your consultancy?

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For consultancy firms, winning and retaining business depends on what, and perhaps more importantly, who you know. Your business has expertise for sale, and in order to best leverage the connections your consultants forge on a daily basis, you need to be constantly keeping track of the opportunities available for packaging and selling your knowledge.

Organising the intelligence gathered around existing clients and prospects is key to both strengthening core business and bringing in new contracts. In order to best manage and track this information, many consultancies look to a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to proactively maintain, monitor and develop client relationships as fully as possible. Used well, a CRM system will define and provide insight into people, businesses, affiliations and expertise, empowering consultants to use their skills and connections as an advantage in a competitive marketplace.

Working without a CRM For those yet to implement a CRM, you may currently be relying on spreadsheets, address books, calendars, documents and emails to record and share client data, with information spread across multiple sites and systems.

This disparate approach can leave your firm open to a variety of problems; information can be hard to find and it can be difficult to ascertain who the organisation does and doesn’t know. Worse, should an individual leave the business, the details of their working histories with customers may prove hard to locate or transfer successfully to other consultants.

A CRM replaces this fragmented way of operating with standard practices that ensure everyone has access to the same information.

Smaller consultancy businesses may feel that client information can be gathered and distributed informally; it may be discussed in meetings, or updates and opportunities may be passed on through the internal interactions of a small team. But as your firm grows, this human chain is no longer effective or sustainable, and a more formal technology-based system will be required to ensure that everyone has access to the aggregate of client and pipeline data as and when they need it. For businesses with ambitious growth plans, embedding the discipline of a scalable CRM system into your infrastructure now will reap dividends as your operations get bigger, when it may be harder to implement changes in the culture of your organisation. The fact that good CRM software is available for free means there should be no excuse to sticking to spreadsheets or your trusted notebook.

So, what can actually be done using a CRM system? CRM systems perform two main functions: the tracking and sharing of new and ongoing client relationships, and the management of active sales pipelines. With a CRM system, data is centrally accessible by the company as a whole in a single repository, where all interactions between the firm, and its clients, contacts and sales leads can be monitored and managed. The knowledge and networks of the individual consultants that make up your firm are shared so that everyone can benefit from them.

CRM software is far more than a fancy address book; used well, it helps track the history of your relationships with customers and leads over multiple emails, meetings and calls. As your business grows and employees leave and join, this invaluable information brings greater structure to your sales and marketing projects.

This system is not reliant on any particular consultant remaining with the firm or on choosing to disclose their contact list. Should a team member leave, details of their past activity are stored, and new joiners and temporary associates can be quickly and seamlessly brought up to speed without inconveniencing the client.

Having access to such comprehensive contact data also allows for targeted and personalised communications and marketing campaigns, improving your chances of positive engagement and responses.

Tracking new relationships with a CRM As many consultants know, a sales process may be lengthy, and leads will need to be carefully nurtured throughout an ongoing stage of deliberation. The right CRM will help you to keep in regular contact with prospects, and most systems also include intelligent automation tools that allow gentle follow-ups for leads that are slow to respond.

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What can a CRM do for your consultancy?

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What can a CRM do for your consultancy?

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Using a CRM to nurture existing client relationships Building long-lasting, valuable relationships is key for client retention, and a CRM system can help to improve the service that you offer to longer-term clients. Most CRM systems will bring together a client’s activity on Twitter and LinkedIn, along with any blog content they write, providing you with a complete picture for research. Having accurate and progressive information on clients and the tasks you are undertaking for them will help you to:

• Better understand the challenges regularly faced by customers• Prevent duplicate or unnecessary communications with clients when multiple consultants are involved in a project• Improve the relevance of marketing messages• Monitor the health of client relationships• Improve the allocation of resources and overall project management• Make managing your Christmas card and newsletter lists easier

Selecting a CRM for your firm With the decision made to implement a CRM solution, consultants will need to know what they’re looking for, and source the tools that are right for them. As every firm is different, there’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution. Some recommendations from us are:

• Unless you have very unusual requirements, you should only consider cloud options• There’s no need to head down the CRM route if you only want a shared contact list - Office 365 or Google Apps will perform that function perfectly well.

Some features that we think you should be looking for include:

• Integration with email – this minimises the extra effort required to keep data updated• Easy importing and exporting of data• Ability to manage and integrate marketing campaigns, such as your firm’s newsletter and invitations to events

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What can a CRM do for your consultancy?

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Embedding a CRM into the culture of your consultancy A CRM is more than just a shiny piece of technology; it is a key tool which must be supported by the firm’s culture as a whole in order to maximise its potential.

In this area, some consultancies may face resistance from a minority of staff; not everyone will be keen to share their hard won ‘black book’ of contacts, as they may see this as proprietary information that is part of their personal value to the firm. The fact that CRM systems make sales activity levels transparent to all can also be uncomfortable. Some may see the additional steps involved as an unwelcome increase in workload, tasks which they will view with less priority than mission critical duties such as working on client projects, writing proposals and raising invoices.

The right approach to these issues will very much depend on the culture of the firm. Typically, opposition can be overcome by emphasising the positives, such as the fact that better data and tools can make everyone’s sales efforts more effective. Often, firms will also make compliance with CRM part of a balanced scorecard of objectives for individuals.

A CRM working in harmony with Metis Whilst CRM systems are great, they can add to the confusion of systems in a typical firm. Before investing in one, you should decide what you want to from it. If you simply want pipeline tracking then you should consider Professional Services Automation (PSA) software such as Metis instead.

Metis gives you simple tools to manage your sales pipeline that are integrated with job control, timesheets and resource management. The advantage of this is that Metis not only tracks the value of your sales pipeline but can tell you whether your sales activity is sufficient to meet your business plan and if you have the right people to undertake any work that you win - things a standalone CRM simply can’t do.

What Metis doesn’t do is record and manage the relationships that are the source of those sales opportunities, and that’s where a separate CRM is useful. Metis provides links so that you can connect every sales opportunity with the history of that deal in your CRM.

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What can a CRM do for your consultancy?

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Summary Forming strong relationships with new and current customers is key within consultancies, as is leveraging who and what the firm knows as a whole. A CRM system can help you to effectively centralise and manage this vital information, and we recommend that any consultancy with more than 10 people should use a CRM system to record its relationships with its clients. It’s a good practice to embed in your senior team early on, that will serve you well as you grow.

CRM systems will also track sales opportunities – whilst this can be useful, we suggest you consider PSA software such as Metis for this function, as the benefits of having sales data integrated with resourcing and job information are considerable.

Benefits you should get from using CRM software are:

• Easy to find, centralised client and pipeline data • The firm’s collective experience and knowledge in one place • Automatic visibility of recent and past interactions between firm and client • Find qualified leads and move them through the sales funnel • Track progress of opportunities and projects • Predict timeframes for seeing results and winning new business • Reduce risk of lost data and damaged reputation • Standardise practices and processes across departments and locations • Keeps client histories within the business should a consultant move on • Provides transparency and enforces accountability • Scalable as your firm grows When choosing CRM software, there’s no reason not to go for a cloud product. Things to consider are email integration (for getting data in) and what marketing capabilities the software offers you. There are plenty of good options that are cheap or free.

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Your clients and connections are your most valuable asset. Manage them more efficiently with a CRM complemented by Metis.

Metis was built by a small team of entrepreneurs who have founded, grown and sold companies like yours. We know what it’s like to manage all stages - from when there are just two of you, to when you’re dealing with hundreds of people in multiple teams. Metis is the distillation of the lessons we have learned along the way. Our mission is to make businesses like yours more successful. If you’d like to hear more about how we can help, get in touch.