What Is the Best CRM for Business Consultants?
As a business consultant, it’s important to value strong relationships and communication with your clients. After all, clients are the core of your business. And in order to effectively manage communication with your clients, your consulting team requires a comprehensive system that can help get the job done. To address this need, are you ready to implement CRM within your firm?
If so, where do you start in choosing the right CRM for your consulting firm? What does the ideal CRM system look like for business consultants? Let’s consider four tell-tale business CRM features that may help guide your next move.
1. The CRM is accessible and easy to use.
If you want your consulting firm to benefit from a CRM system, you must choose one that is easy to use with a simple, user-friendly interface. Why? There are thousands of CRM systems on the market today that promise advanced features and robust capabilities. The problem is that many of these advancements override their workability. Systems that are too complex to understand often provide measurements that are too convoluted to dissect. In fact, purchasing an overly complicated platform could potentially deter your team from using it, resulting in a loss of efficiency for your business consulting firm.
If your CRM is keeping your team from performing effectively and efficiently, then you likely haven’t chosen the best CRM system for your team. An easy CRM for business consultants will have a simple dashboard, automatic data capture, and clear, straightforward reports that are easy to interpret.
2. The CRM is business ready, or ready for your business.
In other words, your next CRM system should be built specifically for your industry and your sales processes. It should also be customizable, flexible, and adaptable to your consulting operations.
As a business consultant, your day-to-day revolves around new and existing clients: anticipating their needs, solving their problems, selling relationships, and nurturing those relationships long-term. Your CRM should work very similarly. It should support every stage of your process, from selling a relationship to closing a deal to keeping up with ongoing relationship management.
If your CRM does not fully support your firm’s existing processes, your firm can’t possibly full value out of the investment. The fact is, the more a CRM strays from your processes, the more time and money you’ll spend trying to make it work. But investing in a business consulting CRM system with customizable reports and data fields will lead to greater success.
3. The CRM syncs automatically with your consulting tools.
Keeping track of all client communication can be tedious. And constantly bouncing back and forth between email platforms, online chats, social channels, and client calls can quickly become inefficient and unreliable. Without a centralized system in place, you are at risk of missing important emails, deadlines, or client contact information.
By choosing a CRM that automatically syncs with your existing consulting tools, you can rest assured that your CRM will never miss a beat. Every client conversation, interaction, and action made by your team will be captured through one integrated platform.
4. The CRM provides real-time insights.
As a consultant, you are constantly strategizing for both your business and your clients. To effectively build a strategy, solve problems, and improve, you need data. You need to know what is working and what is not. Your CRM software should provide these insights for you.
A business consulting CRM that compiles reports in real-time will prove to be most valuable to your consulting team. This type of CRM will not only allow you to easily access, collect, and evaluate analytics as data comes in, but also respond to client issues quickly. With real-time reporting CRM features, you will gain insights into accounts, project statuses, and relationships requiring action.
From a user-friendly dashboard to syncing capabilities, there are many features that consultants should look for (and expect) in their business CRM. If you are interested in learning more about choosing the right CRM, download Bullhorn’s free CRM Buyer’s Guide for Humans.
