7 Best CRMs for Consultants & Consultancies

How to choose and implement a CRM for your consulting business

Consulting is a true relationship business.

That's why for consultants a customer relationship management (CRM) system can be a real game changer.

We said "can" because, to actually make it work for you, you need to carefully choose and implement your CRM.

To help you succeed, let us introduce you to some of the top CRM software for consultants and then give you some advice on how to set one up and use it successfully.

Here’s what we’ll cover in short: 👇

1. What makes a great CRM for consultants?
2. The 7 best CRMs for consultants ranked
3. How to set up and use a CRM as a consultant
4. Frequently asked questions

What makes a CRM great for consultants?

Here are 10 core features a CRM software solution for consultants can offer you to help better follow up your leads:

• Visualize your leads in multiple drag-and-drop pipelines
• Add and manage your leads from LinkedIn (personal & Sales Nav) with a Chrome extension
• See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
• Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to and customer conversations that have gone quiet
• Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with
• Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures
• Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Gmail and Outlook
• Live sync your email inbox & calendar meetings to the CRM
• Send automated, personalized email sequences
• Digitize contact information with a built-in business card scanner

Now, these are all useful features that will help you (and your team) build better relationships and make more sales... but, to be honest, something else is even more important: whether you'll actually use the CRM (or not). 👈

Getting a CRM system that you won't use for your consulting firm is pretty useless after all. And with many CRMs being overly complex, work intensive and difficult to navigate, it's clear that you have to look out for that just as much.

Because of that, we include the current scoring for each software on G2 so you get a better idea of how they stack up. It’s broken down as follows:

• Ease of Use
• Ease of Setup
• Meets Requirements
• Quality of Support
• Ease of Doing Business With
• Ease of Admin

And to make sure the CRM also works well on the phone, as many consultants are quite heavy mobile phone users, we sourced a mobile score as well from Google Play.

To finally rank the different top CRMs for consultants, we'll take the average of the G2 review scores, and then combine it with the mobile score and the consulting CRM feature score, to calculate... the final score! 🥇

The 7 Best CRMs for Consultants ranked

Don’t want to read the whole comparison? 🤓

Here’s a quick overview of how the consulting CRM software stacks up:

1. Salesflare: 9.7/10 🏆
2. HubSpot CRM & Sales Hub: 7.9/10
3. Pipeliner CRM: 7.6/10
4. Freshworks CRM: 6.9/10
5. Zoho CRM: 6.7/10
6. Salesforce Sales Cloud: 6.5/10
7. Pipedrive: 6.4/10

Want to dig into the details? Read on!

1. Salesflare [9.7/10] 🏆

If we ask our consulting customers what they’re essentially using Salesflare for, the answer is usually: to better follow up our relationships.

Salesflare’s mission is to make following up leads super easy for you, without you having to input data to keep the system alive. And with a ton of built-in automation to make you more productive.

Salesflare (founded in 2014) is used by thousands of small and medium-sized businesses who sell B2B (mostly consultancies, agencies, development houses, tech companies, …). It’s top ranked across review platforms and is the #1 consulting CRM software on Product Hunt, the leading community for product enthusiasts.

Interestingly, Salesflare is the only CRM in this listing that is exclusively built for B2B sales. As it doesn’t need to support B2C use, the software is more tailored and easier to use if you’re a consultancy selling B2B.

The app is very tightly integrated with Gmail, Outlook and LinkedIn, so you don’t need to switch between your inboxes and sales software while tracking sales leads. Plus it adds some handy features like integrated email and website tracking, email templates, and email sequences.

Features Salesflare offers: 10/10

• Visualize your leads in multiple drag-and-drop pipelines
• Add and manage your leads from LinkedIn (personal & Sales Nav) with a Chrome extension
• See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
• Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to and customer conversations that have gone quiet
• Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with
• Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures
• Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Gmail and Outlook
• Live sync your email inbox & calendar meetings to the CRM
• Send automated, personalized email sequences
• Digitize contact information with a built-in business card scanner

Features Salesflare doesn’t offer: none

Salesflare's G2 review scores:

• Ease of Use: 9.5
• Ease of Setup: 9.5
• Meets Requirements: 9.3
• Quality of Support: 9.7
• Ease of Doing Business With: 9.9
• Ease of Admin: 9.5

Salesflare's final scores:

• Consultant CRM feature score: 10/10
• Overall score (G2): 9.6/10
• Mobile app score: 4.8/5 → 9.6/10
• FINAL REVIEW SCORE: 9.7/10

Price of the Pro plan (includes 10 of 10 features):

• $49/user/month (billed annually)
• $55/user/month (billed monthly)

If you’re not consulting other businesses (e.g. coaching consumers instead) and don't actively follow up your relationships, one of the below CRMs might then be a better fit for you. But, if you do, give Salesflare a try.

It only takes a few minutes to start a Salesflare trial and follow up your leads in a better way.👈

We guarantee you won't find any better CRM for your consultancy! 👌

2. HubSpot CRM + Sales Hub [7.9/10]

HubSpot is a marketing automation platform turned everything platform. It was founded in 2005 to make marketing automation easier.

Nowadays, HubSpot’s main selling point is offering an all-in-one solution, including marketing, sales, service and operations. If you don’t like using different apps and integrating them (using tools like Zapier and native integrations), then HubSpot might be what you’re looking for.

To get functionality that is comparable to what you’re getting with the other consulting CRM software in this ranking, you need to get two HubSpot products: its CRM and its Sales Hub.

That makes the pricing to get all this handy functionality (8 features) a little steep, starting at $450/month billed annually (for 5 users, which is the minimum they impose).

Features HubSpot CRM + Sales Hub offers: 6/10

• Visualize your leads in multiple drag-and-drop pipelines
• Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures
• Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Gmail and Outlook
• Live sync your email inbox & calendar meetings to the CRM
• Send automated, personalized email sequences
• Digitize contact information with a built-in business card scanner

Features HubSpot CRM + Sales Hub doesn’t offer:

• Add and manage your leads from LinkedIn (personal & Sales Nav) with a Chrome extension
• See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
• Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to and customer conversations that have gone quiet
• Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with

HubSpot CRM + Sales Hub's G2 review scores:

• Ease of Use: 8.6
• Ease of Setup: 8.3
• Meets Requirements: 8.5
• Quality of Support: 8.5
• Ease of Doing Business With: 8.7
• Ease of Admin: 8.6

HubSpot CRM + Sales Hub's final scores:

• Consultant CRM feature score: 6/10
• Overall score (G2): 8.5/10
• Mobile app score: 4.6/5 → 9.2/10
• FINAL REVIEW SCORE: 7.9/10

Price of the Professional plan (includes 6 of 10 features):

• $90/user/month (billed annually - minimum 5 users)
• $100/user/month (billed monthly - minimum 5 users)

3. Pipeliner CRM [7.6/10]

Pipeliner CRM (formerly Pipelinersales) is a software company founded in 2009 with the goal of building better software for salespeople.

Although Salesflare hardly ever gets compared to Pipeliner by people who want to follow up their relationship in a better way, we decided to include them in this comparison because the software is used by many consultancies and focuses on “putting the “R” back into CRM”.

The software is relatively feature rich compared to the other platforms in this comparison, although also a little dated and not too easy to use.

Pipeliner’s pricing rises quite steeply as you need more functionality, which probably makes it a better fit for mid-sized companies with deeper pockets.

Features Pipeliner CRM offers: 5/10

• Visualize your leads in multiple drag-and-drop pipelines
• Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Gmail and Outlook
• Live sync your email inbox & calendar meetings to the CRM
• Send automated, personalized email sequences
• Digitize contact information with a built-in business card scanner

Features Pipeliner CRM doesn’t offer:

• Add and manage your leads from LinkedIn (personal & Sales Nav) with a Chrome extension
• See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
• Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to and customer conversations that have gone quiet
• Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with
• Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures

Pipeliner CRM's G2 review scores:

• Ease of Use: 9.4
• Ease of Setup: 9.2
• Meets Requirements: 9.3
• Quality of Support: 9.3
• Ease of Doing Business With: 9.4
• Ease of Admin: 9.3

Pipeliner CRM's final scores:

• Consultant CRM feature score: 5/10
• Overall score (G2): 9.3/10
• Mobile app score: 4.3/5 → 8.6/10
• FINAL REVIEW SCORE: 7.6/10

Price of the Business plan (includes 5 of 10 features):

• $85/user/month (billed annually)
• $100/user/month (billed monthly)

4. Freshworks CRM [6.9/10]

Freshworks CRM (formerly known as Freshsales) is a popular CRM from Freshworks, the company behind / initially called Freshdesk. Freshworks was founded in 2010 to provide a better, cheaper solution for customer service teams.

The CRM’s main selling point is its feature depth. It has also managed to offer this range of functionality through an easier to use interface than its competitor/predecessor from the same city, Zoho.

What makes Freshworks strong is also its weakness: the interface is full of so many little buttons that common side-effects of using the platform include a mild headache, fatigue and dizziness. 😅

Features Freshworks CRM offers: 4/10

• Visualize your leads in multiple drag-and-drop pipelines
• Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Gmail and Outlook
• Live sync your email inbox & calendar meetings to the CRM
• Send automated, personalized email sequences

Features Freshworks CRM doesn’t offer:

• Add and manage your leads from LinkedIn (personal & Sales Nav) with a Chrome extension
• See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
• Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to and customer conversations that have gone quiet
• Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with
• Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures
• Digitize contact information with a built-in business card scanner

Freshworks CRM's G2 review scores:

• Ease of Use: 9.1
• Ease of Setup: 8.9
• Meets Requirements: 8.9
• Quality of Support: 9.0
• Ease of Doing Business With: 9.1
• Ease of Admin: 9.0

Freshworks CRM's final scores:

• Consultant CRM feature score: 4/10
• Overall score (G2): 9.0/10
• Mobile app score: 3.8/5 → 7.2/10
• FINAL REVIEW SCORE: 6.9/10

Price of the Enterprise plan (includes 4 of 10 features):

• $69/user/month (billed annually)
• $83/user/month (billed monthly)

5. Zoho CRM [6.7/10]

Zoho is a true household name in the CRM industry, so we couldn’t omit them from this ranking.

The company launched its small business CRM product in 2005 and has historically been positioning itself as a cheaper alternative to Salesforce. That is immediately its main selling point.

If you’re looking for a consulting CRM software, Zoho has many tiers (and products even: Zoho CRM, Zoho CRM Plus, Zoho One, …). Most of the four features below come on Zoho CRM’s Standard plan, which offers the lowest pricing of the platforms in this comparison.

Features Zoho CRM offers: 4/10

• Visualize your leads in multiple drag-and-drop pipelines
• Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Gmail and Outlook
• Live sync your email inbox & calendar meetings to the CRM
• Digitize contact information with a built-in business card scanner

Features Zoho CRM doesn’t offer:

• Add and manage your leads from LinkedIn (personal & Sales Nav) with a Chrome extension
• See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
• Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to and customer conversations that have gone quiet
• Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with
• Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures
• Send automated, personalized email sequences

Zoho CRM's G2 review scores:

• Ease of Use: 8.1
• Ease of Setup: 7.6
• Meets Requirements: 8.2
• Quality of Support: 7.4
• Ease of Doing Business With: 7.9
• Ease of Admin: 7.8

Zoho CRM's final scores:

• Consultant CRM feature score: 4/10
• Overall score (G2): 7.8/10
• Mobile app score: 4.2/5 → 8.4/10
• FINAL REVIEW SCORE: 6.7/10

Price of the Standard plan (includes 4 of 10 features):

• $23/user/month (billed annually)
• $35/user/month (billed monthly)

6. Salesforce Sales Cloud [6.5/10]

Salesforce is by far the biggest CRM company in the world, controlling about 23% of the market in 2023. It was founded in 1999 in California by an ex-Oracle executive.

Salesforce offers a huge platform to enterprises that basically consists of a set of building blocks with which you can build anything, gives the possibility to customize everything, and the promise to connect to whatever other software you’re using.

A Salesforce implementation typically requires a(nother) consulting company to map the business needs and workflow, build all this in Salesforce, connect with other software, train the employees and follow up with additional changes afterwards.

While the software is not a great match for small and medium-sized consultancies nor really built for sales follow up, no comparison is complete without mentioning the market leader.

Features Salesforce Sales Cloud offers: 3/10

• Visualize your leads in multiple drag-and-drop pipelines
• Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Gmail and Outlook
• Live sync your email inbox & calendar meetings to the CRM

Features Salesforce Sales Cloud doesn’t offer:

• Add and manage your leads from LinkedIn (personal & Sales Nav) with a Chrome extension
• See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
• Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to and customer conversations that have gone quiet
• Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with
• Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures
• Send automated, personalized email sequences
• Digitize contact information with a built-in business card scanner

Salesforce Sales Cloud's G2 review scores:

• Ease of Use: 8.1
• Ease of Setup: 7.5
• Meets Requirements: 8.8
• Quality of Support: 8.2
• Ease of Doing Business With: 8.3
• Ease of Admin: 8.0

Salesforce Sales Cloud's final scores:

• Consultant CRM feature score: 3/10
• Overall score (G2): 8.2/10
• Mobile app score: 4.2/5 → 8.4/10
• FINAL REVIEW SCORE:6.5/10

Price of the Professional plan (includes 3 of 10 features):

• $75/user/month (billed annually)

7. Pipedrive [6.4/10]

Pipedrive is an easy-to-use and easy-to-setup CRM software for small businesses, including many consultancies, and is therefore compared to Salesflare very often.

The company was founded in 2011 to launch a counterreaction to enterprise systems like Salesforce, which are built more for enterprise needs than they are for sales teams. Pipedrive set out to change that.

While the company is focused on helping you manage your sales in a better way, it keeps missing some of the more modern functionality offered by other platforms in this area, which unfortunately makes it land at the bottom of this ranking.

Features Pipedrive offers: 4/10

• Visualize your leads in multiple drag-and-drop pipelines
• Track whether people open your emails and click on the links in your emails sent from Gmail and Outlook
• Live sync your email inbox & calendar meetings to the CRM
• Send automated, personalized email sequences

Features Pipedrive doesn’t offer:

• Add and manage your leads from LinkedIn (personal & Sales Nav) with a Chrome extension
• See who your colleagues know and how well, with “relationship strength scores” based on their email traffic
• Be reminded of emails you haven’t replied to and customer conversations that have gone quiet
• Auto-create contacts for people you’re emailing or meeting with
• Automatically enrich your contact database by syncing your contacts’ email signatures
• Digitize contact information with a built-in business card scanner

Pipedrive's G2 review scores:

• Ease of Use: 8.9
• Ease of Setup: 8.7
• Meets Requirements: 8.4
• Quality of Support: 8.4
• Ease of Doing Business With: 8.7
• Ease of Admin: 8.6

Pipedrive’s final scores:

• Consultant CRM feature score: 4/10
• Overall score (G2): 8.6/10
• Mobile app score: 3.3/5 → 6.6/10
• FINAL REVIEW SCORE: 6.4/10

Price of the Professional plan (includes 4 of 10 features):

• $49.90/user/month (billed annually)
• $59/user/month (billed monthly)

How to set up and use a CRM as a consultant

Here are some basic tips on how to set up your CRM and use it successfully.

They are based on our vast experience supporting consultancies and independent consultants with their relationship management and sales processes.

1. Build a repeatable sales process that is simple enough to follow

If you’re juggling a series of different leads through relatively long sales cycles, it’s important to always clearly keep in mind the next step for every one of those leads.

That way you can easily guide them all from having a business problem to hiring you as a consultant to solve it.

Commonly, such a sales process consists of the following stages:

1. Lead: Someone you want to reach out to.
2. Contacted: You’ve contacted this lead about your services.
3. Qualified: You’ve established that you’re able to sell the lead your services (they have a need, a budget, a timeline and you’re talking to the right person at the company).
4. Proposal made: You’ve made a proposal for them.
5. Won: They’ve accepted your proposal.
6. Lost: They weren’t qualified or they didn’t accept your proposal.
7. Fridge (optional): They were qualified, except for the timeline bit. It was a “yes, totally, but not now” kind of case. Keep nurturing these!

It’s best to take a moment to sit down and consider what it looks like for you. Write down the names of the stages and a short description of each stage in a document that you can keep as a reference for yourself and for your team. The more customized the better, but keep it simple.

2. Agree as a team how you’ll use the CRM

While an action driven approach has clear merits, most companies who implement a CRM don’t reserve that short, but essential moment to sit together with their teams. And it doesn’t have to be complicated.

Here’s how you can go about this:

1. Fire up a shared document

Just start a new shared document in Google Docs or Microsoft Office 365. It’s important that the full (sales) team has access to it.

You can use the following section titles (and discussion points between brackets):

1. How do we track our sales process? (sales pipeline stages (cf. above), use tasks or not, when to set up automated reminders, filtered views, …)
2. How do we pick up and follow up leads? (responsibilities, timelines, automation, …)
3. What is the core data we keep track of? (most important fields and custom fields → what is essential and what does it mean)
4. Who can access and do what? (permission roles, core data and pipeline access, email templates, saved filters, …)
5. What metrics do we track? (dashboards and reports)
6. What is our CRM integrated with? (simple integrations)
7. Who to contact with issues or questions? (point(s) of contact)

2. Discuss each section as a team

Have a short discussion to share ideas and align on a way of working. Write down your decisions briefly but clearly.

This discussion does not have to take longer than a few hours, but it will make your chance of success many orders higher.

After all, if everyone in the team uses the CRM a little differently, it can’t really be used as a collaboration tool, a source of insights, a single point of truth, or anything else you were expecting it to help you with.

3. Use it as a reference and update it when needed

From now on, this document is not just a shared reference for how you’ll work together in the CRM. It can also be a handy onboarding document for future hires.

3. Commit to never dropping a good lead

It may seem like a moot point, but committing to never dropping a good lead can make a huge difference in your sales results.

One of our consulting customers (a team of 3) reported an extra one million dollars in sales simply by switching from an Excel sheet to Salesflare and following up their leads better.

To state the obvious once more: it’s much easier to generate extra revenue by managing your current leads better than by generating more leads.

Two stumbling blocks we often identify:

1. A company doesn’t actively decide to focus on good follow up (busy busy!)
2. They didn’t manage to get it done with their previous CRM (too much work)

In case you decide to use Salesflare, our CRM will keep track of your leads and customers for you and even remind you to follow up when you forget about it.

In general, it’s good to stand still for a moment and ask yourself the question: how will I know which deals are slipping? Is it through tasks, automated reminders (based on inactivity), filtered views (by last email date, last meeting date, last interaction date, last stage change date), …?

4. Send personalized emails at scale to keep relationships alive (webinars, case studies, …)

If you’re already taking the three above tips to heart, then this one is the cherry on the cake.

Even if you’re following up perfectly with the leads in your pipeline, many of them will not make it to the “Won” stage: they don’t need your services right now, they don’t have time, they don’t have budget yet, they have other priorities first, …

If your initial targeting was good, many of those will make good leads in the future though, so it would be a waste to just let them go.

Instead, it’s good to invest a little bit of time each month or quarter into building a stronger relationship with them.

Adding them on LinkedIn and posting some relevant content is a good starting point there, but to really build relationships, you’ll need to stay closer by.

The best way to do that is to deliver value straight in their email inbox. This can be a personal invite to a webinar, some insightful research about a topic they work on, a guide, a practical case study of a customer you helped, …

5 of the 7 CRMs above allow you to send personalized emails or email sequences to your leads, so make good use of it!

Frequently asked questions

What is a CRM in consulting?

The acronym "CRM" is an abbreviation of customer relationship management. It is a strategy that consulting and other companies use to manage interactions with customers and potential customers, but it also very often refers to the software systems that make implementing the strategy possible.

What CRM does McKinsey use?

As McKinsey is an enterprise consultancy that works with other large enterprises, it uses an enterprise CRM called Salesforce. It has an explicit alliance with Salesforce as well to bring the CRM services of the market leader to its own customers.

Do consulting firms use CRM?

While many consulting firms still use a spreadsheet, most successful consultancies do use a CRM. As consulting is a relationship business, it is essential to manage those relationships with dedicated, professional software. While spreadsheets are a good start, they miss much of the powerful functionality included in a modern consulting CRM.

What is the best CRM for a consulting business?

Some of the top CRMs for a small or medium-sized consulting business include Salesflare, HubSpot CRM + Sales Hub, Pipeliner CRM, Freshworks CRM, Zoho CRM, Salesforce, and Pipedrive. Which one of these is best for you depends on the exact functionality you need for your consultancy.

What is the best free CRM for consulting firms?

Some of the best free CRMs for consulting firms include Salesflare, HubSpot CRM + Sales Hub, Pipeliner CRM, Freshworks CRM, Zoho CRM, Salesforce, and Pipedrive. All offer a free trial or free introductory plan. For full functionality in the longer term, a paid plan is required (otherwise these businesses don’t make money).

Want more guidance? Let us know!

Our team is here to help. Even if you don’t end up picking Salesflare.

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