The CRM for consulting BD, where the sellers are partners.
A BD leader at a 10 to 200 person consulting firm runs a sales motion where the sellers are partners, the pipeline is relationship-driven, and the forecast has to roll up across strategy, implementation, and managed services as three different motions. Strkr collapses that into one workspace with practice-area forecast rollup, partner-aware hygiene, and native engagement margin tracking.
Consulting firm BD leaders run a motion no SaaS playbook covers. The sellers are partners and principals with billable utilization targets, not dedicated AEs. The pipeline mixes strategy, implementation, and managed services on three different margin profiles with three different cycle lengths. Relationships close deals, not sequences. Most CRMs ship assuming a dedicated sales team and a single sales motion, and most pipeline tools score a deal by stage percentage math built for product sales. The pains below show up on every consulting BD buyer call we run with firms between 10 and 200 people, and each one is a direct consequence of the unusual team structure consulting firms carry on the sell side.
Partners sell, not AEs
The sellers are partners with 60 to 80 percent utilization targets.
A consulting firm BD leader manages a pipeline where the sellers are partners and principals, each carrying a billable utilization target that competes directly with BD time every week of the quarter. A standard CRM assumes a dedicated AE spending 100 percent of their week on pipeline, and the activity dashboards punish partners for behavior that is actually a billable hour booked for a client. Weekly cadence tools built for an SDR team demand touchpoint volumes a partner cannot sustain at target utilization. Strkr ships a partner-aware tier that tracks BD time against utilization, surfaces pipeline moves without demanding activity rituals, and lets the BD leader run a weekly review that respects the dual role instead of forcing the partner to pick a side.
Three motions, one forecast
Strategy, implementation, and managed services roll into one number.
Strategy engagements close in six weeks at high margin on partner-led selling with a short scoping phase and a lean pursuit team. Implementation projects close in four months with a scoping phase that reshapes value twice before signature and requires a staffing model attached to the proposal. Managed services carry a monthly recurring shape with renewal risk no project deal has and a churn signal that only shows up in client satisfaction scores quarters later. Rolling all three into one forecast number inside a generic CRM means a Google Sheet with three tabs and a Friday night reconciliation call that nobody owns. Strkr runs native practice-area forecasts that roll up to a firm number with the three motions treated distinctly in the math and the renewal column captured as a first-class line.
Pipeline scored by vibe
Relationship-driven pipeline is hard to score with stage math.
A consulting deal advances because the senior partner had lunch with the CFO and the CFO introduced the COO, who then looped in the head of operations. Stage-based pipeline math built for product sales says the deal is at 20 percent because it has not left Qualified. The BD leader knows the deal is a 70 percent close inside sixty days and cannot defend that read in a CRM report, which forces every forecast conversation into a side-channel email. Strkr runs a relationship-weighted hygiene score that reads signal from meeting cadence, stakeholder count, partner engagement, and referral chain depth, so the BD leader forecasts the way the firm actually sells.
Margin tracked offline
Engagement margin lives in a scoping spreadsheet, not the deal.
Every consulting deal carries a scoping phase that estimates hours per role per week per partner, loads a blended bill rate against a cost rate, and lands on a target margin that justifies pursuit. Today that math lives in a Google Sheet on the scoping lead's desktop and never makes it back to the CRM, so pipeline reports show revenue only and margin becomes a quarterly reconciliation surprise. The BD leader cannot sort pursuits by margin band or flag the pursuit priced too thin before the proposal lands. Strkr lets the deal record carry a margin estimate alongside the booking number, so the BD leader sorts pipeline by margin as readily as by close date and approves the margin before the deal moves to proposal.
Cross-practice chaos
A strategy deal that pulls in implementation never gets logged.
The strategy partner closes an advisory engagement at a bank. Three weeks in, the client asks whether the firm can also run the data platform implementation that follows. The hand-off happens in a hallway, no record attaches the second engagement to the first, and the referral chain evaporates before QBR. Strkr runs a native cross-practice referral primitive on the account record so the BD leader sees every multi-practice path, credits the originating partner on every downstream engagement, and reports referral revenue as a first-class number at QBR time.
Utilization vs BD balance
The partners who close most are the ones most behind on billable.
A partner closing six deals a quarter is a partner spending time on BD that is not showing up on a utilization report. The BD leader rewards the number, the practice lead punishes the hours gap, and the partner carries the whiplash. Strkr ships a utilization-vs-pipeline tile that pairs billable hours and BD hours per partner against a target split, so the BD leader can defend a partner's pipeline contribution with grounded hours instead of a feel-based argument during the quarterly review.
How Strkr fits a consulting BD week
The primitives a consulting firm sales manager actually uses.
Strkr for consulting BD leaders is the same CRM the practice partners use, with a BD-tier overlay for forecast rollup, pipeline hygiene, margin tracking, and cross-practice referral attribution. Everything below ships on every paid tier with no premium professional-services module gate. The primitives below map to the four jobs a consulting firm BD leader repeats every week: run partner pipeline reviews, roll a practice-area forecast, coach specific pursuits, and track margin on open engagements. When those four jobs happen inside one workspace with partner-aware context, the BD leader stops reconciling spreadsheets and starts coaching deals.
Practice-area forecast
Three motions, one rollup.
Strategy, implementation, and managed services each roll up through their own forecast with motion-appropriate category math. Strategy uses commit, best case, and pipeline on six-week cycles. Implementation uses the same categories on four-month cycles with a scoping checkpoint. Managed services carries a renewal column with churn risk. The three streams combine into a firm number without a Google Sheet, and the BD leader sees per-practice contribution at a glance.
Partner pipeline view
Every partner pipeline on one scrollable screen.
The BD leader opens the partner rollup and sees every partner pipeline grouped by partner, sorted by stage and close date. Filter by practice area, deal size, margin band, or hygiene score to find the fifteen pursuits that matter this week. Collapse per partner when running firm-wide reviews and expand per partner when running a 1:1 on a specific pursuit, so the review flows from zoomed-out to zoomed-in without opening a second tool.
Relationship hygiene score
A score that reflects how consulting actually closes.
Every open pursuit carries a hygiene score built from inputs that match the motion: meeting cadence with the economic buyer, stakeholder count across the account, partner engagement in the last two weeks, referral chain density, next-step date, and scoping completeness. Sort the partner pipeline by hygiene and the five pursuits that need a partner nudge this week surface above the fold.
Engagement margin on the deal
Margin estimate lives beside the booking number.
Each pursuit carries a scoping block with hours per role per week per partner, a blended bill rate, a cost rate, and a target margin. The number lands on the deal record, surfaces in every pipeline report, and lets the BD leader sort pursuits by margin band. The scoping lead edits the block inline without opening a second spreadsheet, and the BD leader approves the margin before the deal moves to proposal.
Strkr AI deal risk
The pursuit the partner is overcommitted on, flagged early.
Strkr AI reads pursuit activity, email thread tone, meeting cadence, stakeholder movement, and scoping completeness, then flags pursuits where the partner commit looks optimistic versus the signal. The flag opens into a specific reason (no economic buyer meeting in 30 days, scoping phase slipping twice, procurement never engaged) so the coaching conversation is grounded in a case, not a hunch, and the partner respects the surface.
Cross-practice referral chain
Every multi-practice path attributed to the originating partner.
An account carrying a strategy engagement that spawns an implementation project and a managed services renewal is one account with three engagements and one referring partner. Strkr renders the full chain on the account record with originating partner attributed, so firm-level reporting captures referral revenue as a first-class line at QBR time without a manual roll-up ritual every quarter.
Utilization-vs-BD tile
Billable hours and BD hours on one chart.
For each partner the BD leader sees billable hours and BD hours per week against a target split (for example 60 percent billable, 20 percent BD, 20 percent practice development). The tile flags partners drifting past the split in either direction, so a top-closing partner behind on billable surfaces before the practice lead raises it.
Dashboards by practice
Partner, practice area, and firm, one page.
The BD leader dashboard renders deal velocity by stage per practice, average deal size per practice, win rate per partner, cycle time per lead source, booked margin per practice, and referral revenue by originating partner. Each tile filters by practice area, partner, segment, and timeframe. The weekly firm pipeline review runs off the dashboard in 20 minutes instead of a Monday ticket to a shared services analyst.
What Strkr automates for a consulting BD leader
The repeatable work the CRM should do before Monday.
The best consulting BD leaders are the ones who automate the repeatable moves and spend the week on partner coaching and account strategy. Strkr Flows handle the dozen automations every BD leader should run, and each one ships as a native trigger with no webhook plumbing. The pattern below is what shows up in week two of every mid-sized consulting firm deployment, and each flow respects that the sellers are partners with billable targets, not dedicated reps.
Forecast submit cadence
Monday open, Thursday nudge, Friday lock.
A weekly flow opens the forecast on Monday, nudges partners on Thursday if the forecast submission is still open, locks submissions Friday 5 PM firm-local, and rolls each practice number to the BD leader queue. Partners who miss the lock surface on a BD leader list without a chase email going out, and the practice number that rolls up is the number the practice agreed on.
Stale pursuit nudge
Pursuits past the per-stage threshold surface weekly.
Monday 7 AM, Strkr identifies every open pursuit past the per-stage age threshold with no partner activity in the window. Drops a nudge on the owning partner's dashboard and attaches the batch to the BD leader partner review. The weekly review opens with the stale list already surfaced instead of the BD leader building the list live during the meeting.
Scoping handoff flow
Deal moves to proposal, scoping lead gets the brief.
A stage transition from Discovery to Proposal triggers a scoping handoff flow: the brief lands with the designated scoping lead, the margin block opens for edit, the BD leader is notified of the handoff, and the deal is tagged with the scoping lead for accountability. Nobody drops a handoff in the hallway, and the margin estimate reaches the deal record before proposal land day.
Cross-practice trigger
A new engagement on an account with another open engagement flags.
When a second engagement opens on an account that already carries one, the flow tags it as a cross-practice referral, credits the originating partner, and surfaces it on the referral dashboard. The firm captures referral revenue as a first-class number without a quarterly reconciliation call, and originating partners see their referred-revenue line next to their direct-closed line.
Risk-flag digest
Monday email, five pursuits, two paragraphs each.
Monday 7 AM email to the BD leader: the top five Strkr AI risk-flagged pursuits across the firm with the specific reason per pursuit and a suggested partner conversation. The BD leader walks into the Monday partner review with the risk list in hand. The digest frames the week's coaching around five specific pursuits instead of a vague "we need to tighten up the pipeline" statement across a 40-pursuit book.
Utilization-BD rebalance
Partners drifting past the split get a weekly flag.
Monday 7 AM, each partner sees billable hours, BD hours, and the gap versus target split for last week. Partners drifting past the band in either direction surface on a BD leader list for a soft conversation. The weekly rebalance arrives before the quarterly practice-lead confrontation, which keeps the dual-role tension inside a weekly rhythm instead of a quarterly surprise.
Managed services renewal
Renewal pursuits surface 90 days out.
Managed services engagements open a renewal pursuit automatically 90 days before contract end, assigned to the practice lead with current engagement data pre-attached. The renewal flows through the same forecast primitives as a new engagement so the firm number captures renewal risk the same way it captures net-new pipeline.
What a BD leader sees that partners do not
The BD tier that respects the partner workspace.
A BD tier that creates a parallel UI is a tier partners resent, and in a consulting firm resentment at the top of the sellers list kills adoption firm-wide. Strkr keeps the partner workspace identical for partner and BD leader, then adds a BD-only overlay for practice rollups, private partner notes, risk flags, and margin visibility that partners do not see on each other. The result is a shared source of truth where partners trust that what they see is what the BD leader sees for their own book, with no shadow view running on top.
Firm rollup
Every practice pipeline on one scrollable view.
The BD leader firm rollup shows every practice pipeline on a single screen, grouped by practice area and then by partner, sorted by stage and close date. Filter by segment, lead source, deal size, margin band, or hygiene score. Collapse per practice for firm-wide reviews, expand for a practice-specific session.
Private partner notes
BD leader notes that partners do not see.
Notes captured during a partner 1:1 can be marked private to the BD leader or shared with the partner. Private notes feed the annual review view and the partner development dashboard. Shared notes become visible to the partner with the related action items queued, both living on the same partner timeline.
Submit-lock override
The BD leader read beats the partner read when it has to.
Partners submit their weekly category calls through the Friday workflow. The BD leader overrides the partner call per pursuit where the BD read differs, and the override carries a one-line reason the partner sees on Monday. The practice number that rolls up is the BD-adjusted number, with the partner submission preserved as an audit trail for the annual review, so the firm forecast respects the BD judgment without erasing partner input.
Risk-flag inbox
The pursuits Strkr AI flagged, in one list.
Every Strkr AI pursuit risk flag across the firm lands in a BD-leader-only risk inbox. The BD leader triages each flag in two clicks: dismiss (false positive, carries a reason), schedule coaching (creates a task tied to the pursuit), or escalate (routes to the practice lead with the flag history attached). The inbox clears to zero on a disciplined week, and dismissals train the model to the firm's selling style.
Margin visibility
Every pursuit margin visible to the BD leader.
Partners see the margin estimate for their own pursuits, the practice lead sees margin across the practice, and the BD leader sees margin across the firm. The BD leader runs a margin review to spot pursuits priced too thin for the hours scoped, approves the margin before proposal, and defends firm pricing discipline with grounded numbers instead of a quarterly margin reconciliation surprise.
Partner benchmarks
Partner against practice, practice against firm.
Every partner metric (BD hours, pursuits opened, win rate, deal size, cycle time, referral revenue) renders against the practice average and the firm average on the same tile. The BD leader spots the partner a quarter outside the practice on cycle time and runs a specific coaching session instead of a generic conversation grounded in no numbers.
Pursuit timeline
Every meeting, email, and partner note in order.
The pursuit timeline captures every meeting, email, partner note, risk flag, and category call across the pursuit lifetime. The BD leader walking into a difficult pursuit review scrolls the timeline in two minutes and arrives with context instead of an interrogation. The review stays grounded in events, not opinions.
Head-to-head
Strkr vs Salesforce plus LinkedIn plus spreadsheets.
Most 10 to 200 person consulting firms run Salesforce for records (often an inherited instance from a prior CIO), LinkedIn Sales Navigator for relationship surfacing, a Google Sheet for the practice-area forecast rollup, a scoping spreadsheet on the engagement lead's desktop for margin, a shared drive folder for proposals, and email threads for cross-practice coordination. The stack is five surfaces, five logins, and five places where the firm number drifts between tools. Strkr collapses that into one workspace with one bill, with the BD leader tier shipped by default on every paid plan.
What matters
Strkr
Salesforce + LinkedIn + spreadsheets
Number of surfaces the BD leader opens for a weekly review
1 (Strkr)
5 (Salesforce, LinkedIn, Sheet, scoping, email)
Practice-area forecast rollup
Native rollup across strategy, implementation, managed services
Google Sheet with three tabs reconciled Friday night
Partner pipeline view
Native partner-grouped rollup with utilization context
Salesforce pipeline report filtered by owner
Relationship-weighted hygiene score
Native score built for consulting motion
Stage percentage math built for product sales
Deal risk flags
Native Strkr AI flags with specific reasons
BD leader eyeballs the pipeline Monday morning
Engagement margin on the deal
Margin block beside the booking number
Scoping spreadsheet on the engagement lead desktop
Cross-practice referral attribution
Native referral chain on the account record
Quarterly reconciliation call across practices
Utilization-vs-BD tile
Native tile pairing billable and BD hours
Two reports from two systems, reconciled by hand
Managed services renewal pursuit
Auto-opens 90 days before contract end
Calendar reminder on the practice lead inbox
Monthly cost per partner (BD stack)
One per-seat line, see pricing page
Four to five per-seat lines stacked
See the CRM built for the BD leader at a consulting firm.
Start a trial with the full BD leader stack enabled: practice-area forecast rollup, partner pipeline view, relationship-weighted hygiene score, Strkr AI deal risk, engagement margin on the deal, cross-practice referral attribution, utilization-vs-BD tile, managed services renewal flow. One bill, one workspace, one source of truth for the firm. Migrate from the Salesforce plus LinkedIn plus Sheet stack in an afternoon and keep every account, pursuit, and open scoping block intact. The pricing page lays out the per-seat line in full.
Can Strkr handle a forecast that mixes strategy, implementation, and managed services?
Yes, and it is the primary reason consulting firm BD leaders adopt the product. Strkr runs native practice-area forecasts that treat each motion with its own category math: strategy uses commit, best case, and pipeline on six-week cycles; implementation uses the same categories on four-month cycles with a scoping checkpoint; managed services carries a renewal column with churn risk per engagement. The three streams combine into one firm number without a Google Sheet, and the BD leader sees per-practice contribution against target at a glance. For firms running additional practice variants, the forecast primitive scales with per-practice weight configuration.
How does Strkr handle the fact that our sellers are partners with billable targets?
Strkr ships a partner-aware tier that respects the dual role. Every partner carries a utilization-vs-BD tile that pairs billable hours and BD hours per week against a target split (for example 60 percent billable, 20 percent BD, 20 percent practice development). The BD leader runs weekly reviews that respect the split and defends a partner's pipeline contribution with grounded hours instead of a feel-based argument. Activity dashboards do not punish partners for billable hours booked, and the forecast primitives do not demand a dedicated-rep activity cadence no partner can sustain at utilization target.
How does the relationship-weighted hygiene score work?
Every open pursuit carries a hygiene score built from six consulting-motion inputs: meeting cadence with the economic buyer, stakeholder count across the account, partner engagement in the last two weeks, referral chain density, next-step date present and in the future, and scoping completeness. Each input carries a tunable weight so a strategy pursuit with a six-week cycle and an implementation pursuit with a four-month cycle both run the same column with motion-appropriate math. Sort the partner pipeline by hygiene and the five pursuits that need a partner nudge this week surface above the fold. The BD leader coaches on specifics instead of a vague "we need to tighten the pipeline" statement across the firm.
Can we track engagement margin on the deal record?
Yes. Each pursuit carries a scoping block with hours per role per week per partner, a blended bill rate, a cost rate, and a target margin. The number lands on the deal record, surfaces in every pipeline report, and lets the BD leader sort pursuits by margin band. The scoping lead edits the block inline, and the BD leader approves the margin before the deal moves to proposal. Firms running tiered pricing can configure target margin bands per practice and per segment so the sort flags pursuits priced too thin before the proposal lands.
How does Strkr handle cross-practice referrals between strategy, implementation, and managed services?
Strkr ships a native cross-practice referral primitive on the account record. When a second engagement opens on an account that already carries one, the flow tags it as a cross-practice referral, credits the originating partner, and surfaces it on the referral dashboard. The firm captures referral revenue as a first-class number without a quarterly reconciliation call, originating partners see their referred-revenue line next to their direct-closed line, and the BD leader reports cross-practice contribution at QBR time with grounded numbers. For firms running a formal referral comp plan, the attribution math exports to the comp spreadsheet without a manual pull.
Can a BD leader at a 50 person consulting firm configure Strkr without a Salesforce admin?
Yes, for the BD-tier levers. The BD leader can tune per-stage hygiene thresholds, practice-area forecast categories, utilization-vs-BD target splits per partner, margin bands per practice, risk-digest cadence, and scoping handoff rules without an admin ticket. Deeper schema changes (new custom objects, API-level integrations with the firm's PSA or financial system) still route through an operations admin by design. For firms migrating from an inherited Salesforce instance, Strkr ships a migration path that preserves accounts, pursuits, forecast submissions, and open action items on the way in.
No sales call, no migration consultant, no four-month implementation. Enter your card, get 14 days of the full Pro tier, cancel any time before day 14 with zero charge. Spin up a workspace, import your CSV, and have something useful before lunch.
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