The margin between success and just getting by comes down to one key element: visibility. It’s simple: What you can see, you can manage. What you can manage, you can improve.
Consider the times you’ve struggled to resource quickly and adequately for a new consulting engagement. Often, this issue stems from a lack of standardized processes and clear, real-time insights into your operations.
Visibility over everything from sales cycles to client payment timelines empowers you to preempt problems, apply data-driven strategies and capitalize on revenue-driving opportunities the moment they arise.
This guide is your compass for navigating the path to profitability by making each stage of your consulting work more visible and trackable.
We’ll dive into common struggles, potential outcomes and actionable advice in four core parts of the client work lifecycle with the power to elevate your firm’s bottom line:
The sales process is a critical driver of success in consulting, as it’s the entry point for new client engagements. Efficiently managing your sales cycle will accelerate revenue generation and support stronger client relationships.
Below are three common sales-related causes of inefficiency and how to remedy them to drive greater profitability.
Automating sales and quoting streamlines all facets of new client acquisition and closing new work for existing clients.
A long and inefficient sales cycle inflates customer acquisition costs.
Build an automated playbook with custom triggers for actions such as:
✅ Creating new contact records and sales via request forms.
✅ Changing sale statuses.
✅ Sending email check-ins.
Moving quickly from sales into client work can significantly increase your operational efficiency.
Miscommunications and improper handover from sales to consultants and contractors can cause delays in onboarding and service delivery.
✅ Templatize quote delivery, sales and work planning.
✅ Convert quotes to projects in one click to ensure all milestones and tasks carry over.
Knowing how much money you’re going to bring in is essential for viable growth.
Relying on historical data leads to inaccurate predictions of costs and cash flow.
✅ Track the right data in real time, including lead status and conversion rates.
✅ Monitor the live funnel to know how much pipeline you need.
Shortening the sales cycle is a recipe for faster revenue generation. Combined with the power of stronger relationships, the changes you make to your sales process will make it possible to increase your average deal value.
Read how proper CRM implementation and pipeline visibility contributed to one marketing consultancy's doubled team size and a 90% increase in client commitment.
If you want to maintain high-quality services and retain talent, you need quick and accurate ways of ensuring your team has the capacity and availability to take on work for each new engagement.
Here, you’ll find three ways to revolutionize your resource management processes.
Spreading out work fairly and wisely is crucial for providing first-rate consulting and scaling your operations.
Staff are often overextended, creating stress and uncertainty about fulfilling contracts.
✅ Use a system that provides a bird’s-eye view of availability.
✅ Adopt a platform that can house data about employee skill sets.
As in many industries, consulting requires that you expect the unexpected — and have the flexibility to adapt to keep your clients happy.
Inflexible scheduling, often a result of quick, short-term decisions, hinders efficiency.
✅ Track all consultant and contractor availability in one platform.
✅ Leverage dynamic auto-scheduling to save time with reallocation.
While you may know how many clients you have at any given time, it’s tough to get a true sense of how much work each will require unless you have tech that offers sufficient visibility.
Difficulty predicting future workload creates challenges in committing to new engagements.
✅ Make use of a smart schedule dashboard to view group or individual capacity.
✅ Consult utilization reports to improve team availability predictions.
When you increase your team’s efficiency, you end up with less operational waste. Plus, when you have the right tools to forecast workload, you’ll be more confident selling your services to the next prospect.
Discover how a digital product consultancy scaled by 11x in seven years using Accelo’s timesheets and schedule dashboard to properly predict and allocate its team’s time.
Careful tracking of your tasks, milestones, billable time and client communication is important for achieving your objectives and keeping workflows moving.
Find out how to drive profitability with small but impactful changes to your engagement tracking.
Your team’s ability to fulfill engagements efficiently depends on how you choose to organize day-to-day work.
Consultants often waste time finding information across disjointed tools.
✅ Choose software that pulls all contacts, emails, calendar events, internal activities and more into one feed.
✅ Connect client work to sales, ticketing and billing.
With accurate data about and control over your employee utilization, you can achieve significant expansion of your margins.
Billable and non-billable time is often muddled due to insufficient or improper time tracking.
✅ Implement automated time tracking.
✅ Attach time and rates to clients and work objects, which translate to invoices and retainers.
When you know almost exactly what you’ll spend for a particular type of consulting engagement, you’ll be better at pricing future work to support your bottom line.
Unexpected costs and/or inaccurate scoping impede profitability.
✅ Carry budgets over from quotes automatically.
✅ Use a platform with the flexibility to apply fixed or calculated budgets and roll them from tasks to milestones to projects.
Correcting cost overruns in the client work management phase boosts your profitability per engagement. And if you improve workload distribution, you can increase billable time.
Learn how an accessibility consulting firm experienced 20X growth and 3X productivity by implementing time tracking and connecting time to client billing.
Solid client billing practices are fundamental to the financial health of your consulting firm. Accurate and timely billing and meticulous retainer management, simple as they may seem, are two of the most effective strategies for staying in the black.
Read on to discover three chances for profitably changing up how you handle these key parts of the client work lifecycle.
Your invoices should be accurate and easy to understand to avoid revenue losses and client disputes.
Your invoices don’t always fully capture all billable time or may fail to detail the exact work you’ve performed.
✅ Integrate granular time tracking with billing.
✅ Create invoice templates for each service.
Recurring work can be a huge source of reliable revenue — if you ensure your retainers are set up, billed for and renewed correctly.
Manually managing retainer work and renewals is time-consuming and prone to error.
✅ Connect time and rates to retainers.
✅ Set up truly automated retainers — not just recurring tasks.
Giving your clients an easy way to make payments reduces the unnecessary roadblocks that can creep up after you’ve delivered on your promises.
Complicated payment methods and expensive surcharges can discourage quick payments and create cash flow issues.
✅ Offer automated bank transfers and send payment reminders.
✅ Integrate billing with preferred payment platforms.
Timely client payments give you more accurate monthly financials. A lower risk of non-payment also gives you predictability, mitigating unexpected losses.
Explore the power of efficient billing processes in the story of a tax consultancy that increased profits by 93% while increasing productivity by 20%.
In consulting, your expertise is your service. With the right tools and strategies, you can gain the visibility and control necessary to apply that expertise and showcase it to your clients.
A comprehensive client work management platform will help you make confident decisions.
Accelo shines as the ultimate solution, synchronizing every facet of your business from sales and people resourcing to delivery and billing. Redefine your approach to operations and find out how all of the above prescriptions can be obtained in a single platform.
Book a demo to explore Accelo’s power for yourself.
Accelo helps thousands of consulting professionals around the world do their most efficient and profitable work. For more stories about why they choose the platform, check out What Consulting Businesses Are Sharing About Accelo on G2 and How These 4 Consulting Firms Use Accelo.
