Best CRM for consultants: grow your firm, not your to-do list

Why should consulting companies care?

The consulting industry is expected to rise to $511.88 billion by 2028, and so does the number of new leads knocking into your agency’s door. But let’s be honest, lead management gets very chaotic when you have to manually capture leads, especially from multiple channels like email, messengers, social media platforms, and calls. Leads get overlooked, follow-ups get delayed, and potential customers move on.

The good news is that a good consultant CRM optimizes your lead management and capture efforts. A CRM software for consulting firms allows you to automatically capture leads from multiple sources and store their data in one place.

Why should consulting companies care?

18 % of businesses still use spreadsheets as the core tool to manage all their business processes.

That’s fine, we don’t judge. But when contacts get scattered across spreadsheets, emails, and business cards, your contact management turns into a nightmare. Details get lost, follow-ups are inconsistent, and opportunities slip away.

A CRM for consultant solves the problem. Need to recall a past conversation? It’s there. Want to segment your consulting clients by industry, project type, or business? Easy. With the right CRM for consulting business in place, you can store the data on every client, prospect, and partner in one place — complete with interaction history, project details, manager notes, client-related documents, and more.

Why should consulting companies care?

Every consulting firm operates differently. For instance, a small consulting business might need a very straightforward, highly user-friendly CRM option for consultants compared to a larger enterprise.

Meanwhile, some projects go through multiple stages, regardless of whether you're a small-scale or a larger-scale business., while others follow a simpler, faster process. That’s why a rigid, one-size-fits-all consulting pipeline doesn’t work — deals stall, bottlenecks form, and revenue becomes unpredictable; and data-driven decision-making becomes impossible as well.

The best CRM for consultants offers fully customizable pipelines, allowing you to tailor every stage to fit your unique sales process and drive positive ROI in the end.

Why should consulting companies care?

Office employees spend around 2 business days (12.6 hours) on low-priority tasks that can be automated. With a consultants CRM, you can fully automate repetitive tasks that slow you down, such as manual follow-ups, data entry, proposal tracking, and client check-ins. Why spend time on admin when you can automate things and focus on building strategy and smarter customer relationship management?

The robust workflow automation that a consultancy CRM offers frees up your time for high-value work. Custom workflows in CRM tools help you schedule follow-ups, auto-assign tasks, trigger reminders, and send status updates without lifting a finger.

Why should consulting companies care?

Our research says that inefficiency (40 %) and limited functionality (32 %) are the top reasons why businesses switch to a CRM for consulting companies after struggling with other tools that just don’t cut it. And guess what, that other software with limited functionality definitely didn’t include smart reporting.

When you don’t have the best CRM software for consultants, it’s hard to forecast revenue, track project progress, know which sources bring the most new business, make data-driven decisions, or measure client conversion rates. However, a CRM for consulting firms with reporting features and a comprehensive analytics suite helps you stop acting on a whim as you always know what works and what doesn’t.