5 Stress-Relieving Benefits of Automation for Consulting Companies

The major consulting sectors such as operations, management, technology, strategy, human resources, and financial advisory are overlapping more ever than before. The digital revolution has changed the scope of consultants across the world, and the pandemic made this change even more apparent and necessary. 

If you’re in the growth consulting business or have a consulting company of your own, the benefits of automation for your business are many. Let’s look at some of the advantages of automation for consulting companies that can help relieve business owners of a lot of stress and pave the way for a more efficient way of working. 

1. Streamline admin work 

Many businesses, including consulting businesses, often struggle with streamlining the several moving pieces of managing clients as well as running a business. This involves lead capturing and nurturing, onboarding associates, sending contracts and invoices, and collecting payments, among other things. A lot of these processes take up a large chunk of time for a consulting business and can be a nightmare to manage without plentiful resources. 

Having a consulting software or platform that has automation abilities built into it can help streamline a lot of work for a business owner. 

2. Save time & cost 

Automation can be a major boon for your consulting business by helping you save precious time and money.  Consulting software digitizes all client and business management processes that are a heavy investment of time and resources. This helps consulting companies focus on their core work and leave the orchestration of the rest of the tasks to technology. 

Think about it: hiring a virtual assistant would probably cost you $15-20 an hour, on average. The same tasks if automated by an efficient consulting software that fulfils all your criteria can cost as low as $9 per month (if you’re just starting out). Even the cost of an upgraded plan on such a platform will be a lot less than what a virtual assistant would cost. A technology platform will be able to automate and streamline a major part of running a consulting company, making it a more optimal and efficient option in the long run. 

Also, what would take up a major part of the working day for an assistant to do, a consulting software will easily automate. In the long run, digitizing also saves countless hours by avoiding long meetings, stakeholder interviews, and eliciting requirements into spreadsheets. 

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3. Enhanced client experience 

One of the most important factors in every consulting service is the client experience. How smooth is the collaboration between the consultant and the associate? How much time gets wasted in tasks and conversations that could be spent more productively? Because of its importance, it also causes the most pressure within the company – especially in multi-consultant companies. 

A consulting software automates most of the consultant’s day-to-day tasks, so that they can focus on providing solutions to their clients. 

The onboarding process, for instance, is one of the most vital steps in the client journey. If a platform can provide the client exactly what they need to know at the right time and if the process is smooth and friction-free, it also sets the tone for the rest of the engagement. 

As a next step, a good software can automatically track action points, send reminder nudges, and meeting invites along with links, and so much more! 

4. Gather data and reports 

How do you prove the impact of your consulting services to clients? Without technology, proving progress and impact can be difficult or at the least, very time consuming. With the help of the right technology, tracking growth and progress in a quantitative and objective manner can be made simple. Reports on progress, impact, and ROI can be created automatically and shared directly from a consulting platform that has automation at its core. 

5. Scale & grow 

One of the biggest concerns of any consulting company wanting to go digital is – how do we preserve our proprietary methodologies in a digital landscape? How do we take everything we do offline, online?  

A consulting software can take away that stress by helping you digitize and productize your proprietary methodologies so you can reduce operational work, increase productivity and scale your business while still offering consistently great, on-brand experiences to clients. A consulting software can enable the following benefits for you: 

• Save time with pre-programmed frameworks based on your unique methodology 

• Run cohesive team-level engagements and hybrid engagements 
• Maintain business-level tool repositories for company-wide use 
• Set roles and access rights to easily maintain confidentiality 
• Create subscription & session packages for additional revenue streams 

Sources: Olive, Relevant

FAQs 

1. How do you automate a consulting business?  

A consulting business can be automated with the use of a consulting software which can automate a large part of the business functions such as onboarding associates, sending session invites, invoices & contracts, collecting payments, and more. 

About the author

Ipsita Nayak

Content Marketing Manager @ Simply.Coach

Ipsita Nayak is a full-time writer-editor-content strategist and a part-time NLP coach and yoga teacher. She believes conventions are overrated, has a disproportionate need for solo time over social time, and loves a good mix of sci-fi and trashy TV in her free time!