CRM for professional services firms
- Proposal total, dollars
- 21,450
- Professional fee, dollars
- 18,000
- Contingency line, dollars
- 1,950
Every figure on this page is computed from the inputs you enter, by the method stated below it. Sowbird supplies no constant of its own: the letter's length and the proposal's total are arithmetic on the engagement facts you type. The defaults are a worked example to replace with your own.
A CRM for professional services firms has one job before any other: hold the client and the engagement so that the next document, the proposal that opens the work and the reference that closes it, is written from the record rather than from memory. That means the client with its people and its history, the engagement with its statement of work, its fee and whether it was signed, the proposals sent and the letters given, and a reminder to the client who owes a signature. Timesheets, resourcing and the billing run are other products' jobs; the CRM's job is that every proposal leaves the firm scoped on the same method and every reference names what the engagement actually delivered. The two documents on this site are written from exactly that record, free, and Sowbird Pro is the record itself.
Open the Professional services proposal template Free to use. No account, no card, no trial clock.
Keep the engagement, not just the contact
A professional-services client is a series of engagements, each with a statement of work, a fee, a start, an end and an outcome, and the numbers that matter are the hours scoped against the hours delivered and the fee proposed against the fee billed. Software that holds the engagement as its own record, with the proposal and the reference attached to it, is the difference between a client history and an address book; the proposal on this site takes the hours, the rate and the phases as inputs so the firm sees what each does to the total.
Write every proposal on one method
Hours at the rate, the phases the work is delivered in, expenses billed at cost, a contingency the firm can defend and a deposit due on signature: a proposal built on those lines every time is one a client can compare with the last one and the firm can reconcile at the end. The free proposal on this site prints the statement of work's fee, the contingency line, the deposit and the balance across the phases from the firm's own scoping; Pro keeps each one against the client and the engagement and records whether it was signed.
Close the engagement with the reference it earned
An engagement that ends without a record of what it delivered leaves the firm writing its references from memory a year later, when the checker calls. The reference letter on this site is sized and structured from the engagement's facts, the months, the pieces of work, the strengths with an example each and the results with a number; Pro keeps those facts on the engagement as it runs, so the letter is written from the record and kept with who it went to.
CRM for professional services firms: common questions
Is there a free CRM for professional services firms? The two documents on this site, the proposal and the reference letter, are free and need no account, and they are the documents a CRM exists to write. Sowbird Pro is the record behind them: the clients, the engagements, the proposals sent, the signatures recorded and the letters given, for one flat price for the whole firm.
What should a professional services CRM hold that a general CRM does not? The engagement as its own record: the statement of work, the hours and the fee proposed, the phases, whether it was signed, what it delivered and the reference written when it ended. A general CRM holds the contact and the deal value; it does not know what the work was, which is what the next proposal and the next reference need.
Does a one-partner consultancy need a CRM? The free documents carry a sole practitioner for a long time. Pro is worth it the first time a client asks for the proposal from two years ago, or a checker calls about someone whose engagement you have to reconstruct from email; both are one search in the record and an afternoon without it.
Sowbird Pro
Keeping what you write
The documents and the answers are free forever. Pro turns them into your client record: every proposal kept against the client and the engagement, the statement of work and the fee behind each one, whether it was signed, the reference letters written and to whom, reminders to the client who owes a signature, and a clean export when the accountant asks what the engagements billed against what they were proposed at.
- Download the document as PDF
- No Sowbird watermark
- Save and reopen later
- Your firm's name and registration on it
- Bulk export proposals and letters
- Signature and follow-up reminders emailed under your firm's name
- Connect your own Stripe account and take deposits online
- Connect your QuickBooks Online or Xero
$79per month, whole firm
Start Sowbird Pro PricingRenews monthly at the price above until you cancel. We email you before any price change.
Will it do what you need for CRM for professional services firms?
Tell us what your firm needs and we will tell you straight whether Sowbird Pro does it today, whether it is coming, or whether you are better off with something else. A person reads these and replies.