Evolve Your Salesforce Consulting Business With Klient PSA
Are you responsible for igniting growth in your business? The pressure to keep a Consulting business thriving can be a challenge. It’s definitely not easy.
At Klient, we see Consulting businesses all the time who say they feel stagnant – or they’re backsliding. If you’re on a plateau, it’s time to break out of that rut and unlock these 4 key drivers of growth:
- Proposal & Forecasting
- Project & Resourcing
- Revenue & Invoicing
- The Customer Experience
These are areas we see the biggest challenges with our customers and in the market today. Tackling these Consultant Challenges is our favourite way to ignite growth in a Salesforce Consulting business.
Watch our latest Success Series (Episode 2, Season 2) to learn about how we can tackle common Consulting Challenges with Klient.
The 4 Consulting Challenges
Proposal & Forecasting
1. The Missing Link Between Opportunity & Project
Watch the webinar from 3:05 to 10:51
For most Consultancies, success is signing a Statement of Work.
But that’s only half the story. For a Statement of Work to be a winner, your business has been feeding it info for days, if not weeks prior. From details on the sales Opportunity, to the billing requirements on the Project itself, your different teams need to share a lot of information to make good estimates.
Making one good estimate is one thing, but at Klient we’ve identified that a key driver of growth is consistent and accurate estimates. Along with good info sharing, that means starting estimates early so your Sales and Delivery team are aligned from the beginning – which is the first Consulting Challenge we want to address.
An evolved Consulting Business starts estimates early, ideally as soon as you start talking about a deal. That’s where Klient Proposal comes in.
Download the PDF of the Success Series S2.E2 webinar.
While you’re working on an a sales Opportunity in Klient, you can connect it to a Proposal. In that Proposal, you can import a successful Project Template from a past project that will set the framework for what you can deliver. This is the missing link between Opportunity and Project.
Using a Proposal, you can ensure that your Sales team is selling something that your Delivery team can deliver from the very, very beginning of a sale. This sort of alignment between Sales and Delivery ensures you’re starting on-time and ending on-budget.
The brilliance of the Klient platform is that all the information you need to make & update your Statement of Work, including Proposal, Project and your customer Account, is all in one place. No more delays when a prospect requests a revision to a Statement of Work. With Klient Proposal, accurate and consistent estimates won’t be a Consulting Challenge anymore.
The second Consulting Challenge we want to look into is recruiting Resources and onboarding them efficiently.
An evolved business gets their new hires billing as quickly as possible. That’s where Resource Planner, Klient Job Portal and structured onboarding come in.
If you’re using a tool like the Resource Planner, you should have good visibility over your staff hours. If you see that you don’t have enough Resources, you can go about hiring more.
Of course, once you figure out that you need Resources, don’t forget to check out the Klient Candidate Job Portal. It’ll help you post job openings, take Applications, sift through Candidates and their skills, and plug a successful Candidate straight into your current Proposals and Projects.
But a lot of Consulting Businesses run into a real problem at the onboarding stage. It can take weeks, if not months to onboard if you don’t make your process consistent and structured. And if your new hire isn’t ready to bill against the Project you hired them for, then your Consulting Business’s profit margins and timelines will suffer.
To solve for this, you can create an Onboarding Project in Klient. Build out all the key tasks and milestones and simply use this as a Project Template for onboarding every new hire. You can shave weeks off your onboarding, and the joy of a structured process is it can be improved with every pass. The faster you can onboard that new staff and get them billing – well your bottom line will thank you.
Revenue leakage. You do not want to see those words next to each other.
All Consulting businesses face challenges when it comes to managing their Revenue. The sheer amount of Invoices and Timesheets needed to manage your business can be staggering. Inevitably things fall between the cracks, and that’s called Revenue leakage.
An evolved Consulting business takes their cash flow seriously. That’s the third big Consulting Challenge that every successful business needs to tackle. How many days does it take you to close your end of month? If it’s more than a couple days, you’re losing big on your cash flow.
We help so many of our customers tackle revenue leakage with a combination of Klient Revenue, Invoicing and Timesheets.
We really can’t overstate the benefit of working on one platform, from Opportunity at the start to Analytics and Reporting at the end.
Because your Projects and your Invoices are all managed in Klient’s PSA, there’s no more lost Invoices. Helpful team collaboration tools like Chatter mean that your Finance team and your Delivery team are closer than ever. Plus all the accounting Integrations mean your Finance team don’t need to give up the tools they know and love.
Word-of-mouth is a key sales tactic for nearly all Consulting businesses. You customers are your ambassadors, and you want them to be your number one sales team. But it’s not always easy to keep them happy. Even the best intentioned Project plan can start to creep in terms of scope, or get delayed and squish your timelines.
Life happens. There’s only so much you can do in this fast-paced Consulting business space. So you need to be proactive. That’s the final Consulting Challenge we want to talk about today.
Starting Projects at the Proposal stage and being proactive with Klient Surveys are key ingredients in providing that 5-star experience.
With Survey Scheduler in Klient, you can survey at any step in your Project plan. Surveys aren’t just for the end, you can:
- Survey at the start to assess their unique customer needs
- Survey in the middle to check for any issues your customers may be too shy to bring up on a call
It’s this attention to detail that will make you shine in front of your customers. Project Details are also a great way to be transparent with customers. If you start your Project plan early enough that it’s linked to in your Proposal, it’s easy to update customers on the changes they’re requesting in the estimate. Make sure you’re both happy with any changes to a Project, particularly to Resources and costs, with Klient Project Details and Proposals.
Evolving Past Consulting Challenges
We’ve shown some of our favourite ways to tackle these common Consulting Challenges. They’re not always easy, but overcoming them is an important step in becoming a top Consulting business. From customer experience to streamlining your processes, the Klient PSA platform can be your partner on the way to top. If you want more details, you can always check out the Klient Success Series Webinar: Evolve Your Consulting Business.
To schedule a discovery call and a demo with our team, please don’t hesitate to connect on LinkedIn at yanick-abraham or contact us on the Request a Demo page.