How to protect margins: The 3-step guide for consultancy firms

How to protect margins:
The 3-step guide for consultancy firms

A step-by-step overview on why we take this approach, what it involves and how it can benefit you.Contents

What next?

CONSULTANCIES DON’T LOSE MARGIN ON DELIVERY ALONE.

THEY LOSE IT WHEN:

Sales and delivery are disconnected
Scope isn’t tracked
Insights don’t feed back into future deals

This three-step cycle shows how you can protect margins and continuously improve the way you scope, prioritize and deliver projects for clients.

Lock down scope before
it goes to the delivery team

Many sales team members make the mistake of keeping scope details high-level. But this can push the problem further down the line and pass it to the delivery team.

To avoid margin loss before delivery begins, you can:

Store exactly what the client needs in one system
Standardize scoping templates
Capture dependencies around implementation

1.

Create a clean, automated sales to delivery handover

Your sales team has won the work. Now all of the information about that project needs to be passed to the delivery team.

For many consultancies, valuable data gets lost at this stage because there isn’t a single place to store it or a consistent format. This is where margins quietly disappear.

Using CRM with integrated project management allows you to:

Automatically create a project when an opportunity closes, including pricing, scope, and timelines
View full client history in one place, including agreed scope
Trigger compliance checks, contract generation, and project kick-off for a consistent onboarding process

2.

Set up a single dashboard
to track project revenue

Without a single place to review all of your projects and their associated costs, it’s hard to track revenue.

With better insights you’ll get stronger margins.

The way to succeed is to use software that lets you manage customer data and projects, all-in-one.

Link projects to missed and actual revenue recognition
View billable vs. non-billable time spent on projects
Identify overrun projects and view non-chargeable time
Visualize in-progress work not yet billed
Easily move time between tasks
Approve recognized revenue, invoice amounts and timesheets

This means you can compare your estimates with outputs, identify high and low margin projects, and feed real delivery data back into future pricing and scoping.

3. The 3-step cycle, explained

Consultancies don’t lose margin on delivery alone.

They lose it through:

Poor visibility
Weak control
Disconnected systems

By storing all your client information in one place, it’s much easier to track client data, manage margins, and automate parts of the process to save time.

With better insights into project revenue, you can continue to refine your scoping process and help your sales team understand exactly what needs to be passed over to delivery.

With better insights into project revenue, you can continue to refine your scoping process and help your sales team…