Every consultancy tries a generic CRM and every consultancy ends up in the same place: Salesforce or HubSpot bought at some scale, customised at some cost, quietly abandoned by the partners who still run their real book of business out of Outlook. The pattern is so consistent it's worth asking why — and what a CRM for consultancies actually needs to do instead.
Why the generic ones fail here
1. The buying committee is the deal, not a tab on the deal
Transactional sales tools treat contacts as attachments to an opportunity. In consultative revenue, the buying committee is the opportunity — economic buyer, technical buyer, champion, coach, delivery partner, sometimes an outside advisor. A tool that can't render the committee, its coverage and its relationship health on one page isn't fit for purpose.
2. Deals aren't linear
The seven-stage pipeline works when every deal really does go Discovery → Qualification → Proposal → Negotiation → Won. Consultancy deals go Discovery → sixteen months of conversation → suddenly RFP → three weeks. The stage model creates false discipline that partners quietly ignore, then everyone pretends the forecast is a real number.
3. The same client is worth ten times more in year three
Generic CRMs are optimised for the initial sale. Consultancies live on land-and-expand. The year-three ARR of a strategic client dwarfs the initial engagement, sometimes by an order of magnitude. The tool has to make growing an account as first-class as closing a new one.
4. Partners don't do data entry
Ask a senior partner to log a call and they will not. Ask them to log twenty and the entire CRM programme is dead. Any tool that requires manual activity capture from the firm's most valuable people is broken before it ships.
5. Institutional memory is the actual asset
When a partner leaves a consultancy, they leave with the relationships. Every firm has a story about the loss — and every firm remembers exactly which client it was. A working CRM has to be the institutional memory: the answer to "what happened at this client between 2022 and now" without anyone typing a summary.
6. Delivery is part of the sale
In services, the delivery team is on the account every day and knows the truth before the account partner does. A CRM that hides tickets, project health, invoices and satisfaction scores from the sales view is missing the leading indicators for the next deal.
What a CRM for consultancies actually needs
- Automatic activity capture from Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace — zero manual logging.
- Buying-committee views at the account and opportunity level, with per-role coverage and relationship strength.
- Meeting-note ingestion from Teams, Zoom, Meet and Granola, with action-item extraction that lands on the person, not the deal.
- Client health scoring that includes delivery, commercial and strategic signals — not just sales activity.
- Institutional memory — an evolving per-client timeline that survives departures.
- Partner ecosystem tracking for technology alliances, referral partners and subcontractors — because that's how consultancies actually grow.
The honest recommendation
If the firm already runs on Salesforce or HubSpot and delivery is broadly happy, layer a relationship intelligence platform over the top instead of migrating. If the CRM programme has already failed once — the software is bought, no-one uses it — replace it. The category of tool built for this problem is small, but it exists.
Kith is one of them. We built it from the ground up for consultancies, systems integrators, managed service providers and technology partners, because everything above is what the firms we started with told us they needed.