Consultants spend a lot of time interacting with clients and providing services that meet their needs. When you have a customer-focused business like this, you always want to ensure you’re doing your best to keep your customer relationships strong. Loyal clients keep coming back when they need your help, and they also refer others to you through personal recommendations. One of the easiest ways to improve your customers’ perspective of your business and maintain a consistent audience is to utilize the customer relationship management (CRM) software available from Simple Sales CRM.
Whether you run a small consulting business or are an independent consultant, you can benefit from adding our CRM to your arsenal of tools. We’ll show you how to do so and what kinds of benefits you can reap from implementing this solution.
Why You Need a CRM for Your Independent Consulting Business
As an independent consultant, you deal with numerous clients every day. Even if you are just starting in consulting, you likely have a handful of customers. It can be easy for things to pile up and get overwhelming if you don’t keep an organized record of all your clients and the services you provide them. You need to stay in contact with them regularly, and if you don’t have a database of appointments and client wants, needs and concerns, you can quickly lose track of what you’re doing.
The process of pitching a project and selling your expertise looks different for every consultant, even if you and your competitors offer the same services within a given industry. Because you’ll likely be working long-term with various companies and clients, you want to be sure you can capture their attention from the beginning and build a lasting relationship.
That’s why you need to have a clearly defined sales pipeline and know where each of your leads or clients exists within it. For example, have you made it to the negotiation stage, or are you still drawing up a proposal to pitch? You must also find a balance between selling to customers and spending time with them to get familiar with their needs. Knowing how to balance these things is especially important when working independently, as you don’t have an entire firm to assist you.
As you gain more clients, it will become more vital to know which stage you’re at with each one. You can improve your forecasting abilities exponentially with a defined sales pipeline, so you always know which clients are close to closing and which still need more convincing.
One of the best qualities of our CRM for independent consultants is that you can see all your crucial data in one place on the dashboard. You can get a comprehensive look at your leads, prospects and customers in relation to each other and figure out how to improve your client retention strategies to draw in more business.
Benefits of a CRM for Small Consulting Firms
When you’ve decided you’re interested in adopting a CRM solution, how can you confirm Simple Sales CRM will provide a good return on investment for your company? You can dig into the benefits of our software to see how it can impact your business and integrate into your workflow. Our CRM for consultants and other businesses offers a range of advantages. The following is a small glimpse into these perks:
- Clear client data: With comprehensive data at your fingertips, you don’t have to play guessing games about who your leads are and how your outreach efforts are faring. You can create custom reports that detail the progression of your sales pipeline and your teammates’ activities.
- Team management:Simple Sales CRM lets you customize your security protocols and decide which team members have access to certain parts of the program. You can also assign client tasks and prospects to your team members so every lead has a customer representative looking out for them and serving their needs.
- Third-party integrations: Our CRM allows you to combine your relationship management platform with other software solutions, such as social media and marketing platforms. By rolling several solutions into one, you can spend less time switching between platforms and increase your productivity.
- Companywide settings: Our CRM allows you to change both the settings on your personal account and the overall company settings if you’re listed as an administrator. By acting as the administrator, you can manage your teammates’ account permissions, update your billing information, create custom fields for your leads and much more.
Why Simple Sales CRM Is the Best CRM for Consultants
You want to be sure your CRM will provide all the above benefits in a way that adds to your business model and helps you better serve your customers. Simple Sales CRM offers an excellent solution that provides these advantages and more. Our goal in creating this CRM was to empower businesses by developing a powerful and easy-to-use tool for managing customer relationships and closing more sales.
By implementing our CRM program for your consulting firm, you can enjoy features like:
- Contact management: Having a contact list of all your clients lets you record their information in one simplified location and access it whenever you need to. If you have an upcoming appointment with a client and need to pull up their information before or during the meeting, you can easily do so without sifting through piles of paperwork.
- Easy-to-use interface: We understand business owners are often in a hurry and don’t have time to sit down and learn an entire software solution from top to bottom. Because of that, Simple Sales CRM offers a straightforward interface and doesn’t take a lot of time to get up and running. It also comes in a mobile version for easy access while you’re away from the office.
- Task management: Our task management feature integrates with lead and sales pipeline management and contact management to enable you to keep up with all your tasks in relation to other aspects of your business. If you need to provide a lead a briefing of your services or talk with another company about a potential partnership, you can do so without losing track of your to-do list.
- Customizable features: Our platform offers customizable features such as custom fields, stages, logos and more. Simple Sales CRM can be tailored to your personal preferences so you can improve efficiency and spend more time satisfying your customers.
- Calendar management: When you choose Simple Sales CRM, you can take advantage of both shared and individual calendars to manage your appointments and tasks and help your employees do the same. By staying on the same page, everyone can benefit from smoother operations and more efficient communication.
Upgrade Your Consulting Firm With a Free Trial of Simple Sales CRM
If you’re ready to boost your revenue and better manage your clients’ needs, it’s time to implement one of the simplest and easiest CRMs for consulting firms or for independent consultants. Our 14-day free trial requires no credit card, and there are no hidden fees or costs for cancellation or sign-up. Additionally, you can opt for our monthly plan to avoid committing to any long-term contracts.
If you have any questions about our CRM, get in touch with one of our representatives by calling us at 1-586-343-1773 or stop by our support page for more information today.
