The Benefits of In-Person Consulting

Hey-ya! My name is Cris, and I am one of the Marketing & CRM Consultants at HubGem, which means I am part of the team that works directly with clients, from delivering onboarding sessions and providing technical support to conducting in-person consulting visits and planning and implementing processes’ upgrades.

You may have heard about consulting in general, and are considering the benefits of in-person consulting for CRM systems and processes, or perhaps both are brand new concepts and you would like to learn a little information about them. Perhaps you are wondering “What is consulting? Why would we need consulting for our HubSpot CRM? Can’t we just use internal teams to conduct consulting for our organisation?”. These are all brilliant questions! So,  I will be providing some insight into these topics with today’s blog post.

Let’s start off with a brief definition of ‘consulting’. Consulting is a practice which involves offering expertise for various sectors, topics or matters to a third party, and it can include advisory services or implementation services. Consultants must take an independent and unbiased stance on presented issues, offering effective advice and implementation recommendations according to each organisation’s unique situation and structure.

Now that we’ve explained what consulting is, you may be wondering why use an external third party instead of internal teams or employees, great question!

Within an organisation, teams and employees get trained on the current systems, they learn the company’s processes and how to complete tasks and projects efficiently given the current structure, tools and goals. However, it is very common for companies and teams to not be able to easily identify areas of friction, or possible upgrades to existing systems and processes, as the more one functions within an environment the more accustomed to said environment one gets.

Thus, a consultant is brought in to help analyse, develop and improve existing processes, helping the organisation visualise their current situation, with existing friction points and improvement opportunities, and providing advice and guidance on how processes can be improved. As a person external to the company and not accustomed to the current systems, a consultant brings a fresh perspective and objective advice depending on each client’s situation and needs.

My recent in-person consulting trip

I’ve recently had the pleasure of conducting my very first in-person consulting visit with one of our fantastic clients. The experience was incredible, and it highlighted how valuable consulting can be, as during the two days working with the client we were able to uncover major friction points, plan vital upgrades to existing processes and create new reporting elements and criteria.

The drive to Edinburgh was very scenic and calming, however, I highly recommend that anyone who needs to use M8 leave at least 50% extra time, so if a journey takes 2 hours, leave 3 hours early, as you will spend at least 2.5 hours trying to get through the motorway.

I digress...The consulting was conducted for the service team, so we focused heavily on the processes and activities developed, conducted and KPIs monitored by the service team and for the service team.

During the first day of consulting, we sat down and analysed the existing processes, how every task was completed, the communication channels and what were the daily responsibilities of service team members. The service team communicated with their clients on a daily basis, from receiving and solving support requests, to updating service packages, discussing clients’ requirements, contacting current clients for various reasons or handling service-based requests.

After analysing all of this information, we discovered that the current processes were good, but not the most efficient, a lot of time was lost trying to get back to clients, going through the shared email box to see and manage requests or communication and there were no feedback channels nor KPIs or reports to analyse the service channels and client management.

Afterwards, we spent the second half of the day planning various upgrades for the existing systems, how to improve communication management for the service team, implementing a new process to separate support requests from other communication. We also discussed ways to segment and assign communication more easily, so that members know exactly which communications to manage, developed a brand new element to record and process support requests and created several feedback forms for each communication channel that the team used.

During the second day of consulting, we focused on the other critical areas identified, which were developing concrete KPIs for the service team and finding the best way to record revenue for each deal, as the pupil admissions are highly customizable and each application can bring in various amount of revenue. For the service KPIs, we’ve mapped and built some brand-new elements that could help track some of the most common service-based metrics, analysing various aspects of the communication conducted, the communication channels and enquiry resolutions. All of these elements were then used to map out several reports and compile them all on a dashboard for easy access and clear monitoring, helping the management to understand capacity, enquiry types, communication time and what would bring the most crunch to the team.

We then analysed all of the applications that can come through, how value is associated to them and how each school fee is calculated. Thus, I helped map out a system that would take each application, analyse the services requested and automatically calculate the estimated revenue brought in by each deal. 

The consulting days were brilliant, and the team members were absolutely lovely, amazing people and I was very happy to meet them personally. After the consulting project wrapped-up, I was able to build the last remaining processes as the organisation also had a technical support plan in place.  I managed to map and build the revenue attribution process for deals, which was very lengthy and complex, but it was successfully developed and would bring in additional highly valuable information for each application.

Each consulting project is different, from the way it starts to the areas we focus on and all of the recommendations given, thus, every single project is exciting, familiar yet new, so I cannot wait to see what my next consulting session will bring.

For more information on the consulting we offer at HubGem click here.

If you would like to book a call to discuss the possibility of some in-person consulting for your organisation click the button below!