10 Essentials To Drive Effective and Profitable Consulting Engagements

Profitability and efficacy in consulting firms depend on more than just increasing revenue or managing workflows. Because you’re faced with fluctuating demand, the challenge of customizing your services and the pressure to resource engagements quickly, you need simple solutions.

This guide is your direct path to 360° visibility and control of your business, which are driving factors of operational efficiency and profitability. 

We’ll cover major drivers that often go overlooked in busy service firms. You’ll learn how the right technology can support you and your team in saving time and money and boosting efficiency.

The 10 Pillars of Effective and Profitable Consulting Engagements

Small changes can lead to monumental gains. Let’s explore the impact of 10 key areas on efficiency and profitability and how you can build a more resilient business by strengthening each.

1. Exceptional customer relationship management

Every client interaction has the potential to open new doors for your business, but there’s no guarantee that each one will be worth the time and resources you invest. 

Effective customer relationship management isn’t just about keeping a database of client contacts; it’s about turning every connection into an ongoing opportunity. If you store and reference data wisely using a platform with built-in automation and workflows, you’ll be in a position to understand and anticipate your prospects’ and clients’ needs.  

2. Predictive sales pipeline management

In a small to mid-sized service business, your pipeline is a snapshot of how well you’ll be performing in six to twelve months. The key to a well-oiled pipeline is ensuring that your message resonates with market demand and communicating the value of your offerings from the get-go. 

By implementing a system for tracking and analyzing your leads and sales progress, you can make this potentially time-consuming process less resource-heavy — and, therefore, more supportive of a quick handover to the client work stage.

3. Streamlined quoting

Quoting can either be a bottleneck or a breakthrough. With the right tools, you can turn it into an efficient process that not only saves time but impresses your prospects and clients with extensive customization and unmatched speed. 

Using custom templates, you can create quotes that are both professional and personalized. Tracking them with a client portal and workflow automation ensures that they’re easy to view and accept and that you’ll never miss a follow-up opportunity.

4. Efficient client work management

Managing client work is like juggling several balls at once. Drop one, and the show could be over. It requires a delicate balance of planning, communication and monitoring. The ability to adapt to changing requirements and unforeseen challenges is a must. 

Project management tools that connect task management and service delivery to other functions of the client journey help to keep your engagements on track and under budget — two core components of a healthy bottom line.

5. Precise time tracking

Recording hours is standard practice in consulting, but a simple countdown against a predicted total won’t cut it. Precision gives you an understanding of the nuances of how your team spends time and, more importantly, actionable data about operational efficiency. 

Meticulous tracking of billable and non-billable hours can reveal hidden inefficiencies and opportunities for process improvements. A sophisticated approach to time tracking directly impacts your consultants’ effectiveness and boosts your per-engagement profitability.

6. Optimized resource scheduling

To reach your operational and growth goals, you need to assign the right people to the right engagements. That requires flexibility in how you allocate people’s time and skills, especially if you commit to new clients before you’re sure you can fulfill promises. 

The key to adapting to both your current and upcoming commitments is to leverage advanced scheduling tools that give you an overview of team availability and expertise and how they overlap with scopes and timelines.

7. Transparent billing and systematic retainer management

Billing and managing retainers aren’t just administrative tasks. Done wrong, they can eat into your cash flow. Done well, they can uphold the financial health of your firm. 

Standardizing and streamlining your invoicing processes can increase efficiency by reducing non-billable time. And setting up automated retainers makes it easy to encourage and manage recurring work. A regular review of your client agreements and auto-generated profitability insights can help you determine the types of clients you want to continue serving.

8. Proactive expense management

Effectively managing expenses can have a significant impact on how much you make per engagement and per client — and how much time it takes to recover unexpected outgoings. 

Your team needs a way to accurately track expenses against specific work objects, and you need a quick and predictable approval process. When unplanned expenses affect your budget, it’s essential to transfer those costs to the client as soon as possible by expediting reimbursement. 

9. Automated payment collection

No matter how efficiently you deliver and bill for your client work, it’s not fully complete until payment comes through. For the sake of your monthly ledger, cash flow and operational efficiency, your payment collection practices should be tight and transparent. 

Standardized invoicing and easy payment methods signal professionalism to your clients and reduce the likelihood of questions and delays that lead to late payments. It’s also helpful to make it easy for your clients to update their own payment details.

10. Comprehensive reporting and insights

Data-driven decision-making is a no-brainer for all businesses today. To get to a place where you’re generating and using meaningful metrics, you should use a single tool that compiles insights about your clients and engagements in a central space. 

It should be able to display budget usage, team utilization, outstanding invoices, project profitability and more in easy-to-access dashboards. Reports about time, value, revenue, tasks and other key variables will give you the context to establish airtight business processes.

Get Fast and Measurable Results

Your team’s consulting services and the work you do behind the scenes are multifaceted yet straightforward. There are many potentially impactful levers to pull to positively transform your team’s processes — and, therefore, the outcomes of your client engagements.

By combining strategies in each of the above 10 elements, you can hit your objectives and then some. We invite you to see firsthand how Accelo, the only truly end-to-end client work management platform, can support you in delivering what your clients expect and deserve.

Book a demo to discover the power of Accelo.

About the Author

Chelsea Williams is Senior Copywriter at Accelo, where she shares unique insights with service professionals and tells user stories via blogs, eBooks, industry reports and more. She has over 15 years of B2B and B2C writing experience — primarily in tech, sales, education and healthcare. Chelsea is an AWAI-certified Master Copywriter trained in brand storytelling and microcopy.