Why You Need a Resource Allocation Tool That’s Integrated with Your HubSpot CRM

For consulting companies and professional services teams, efficient resource planning can make or break your business. Yet, many firms face significant challenges because their tools are disconnected. Companies with hunderds of consultants are steered using a collection of excel spreadsheets "that one employee put together 7 years back." At the heart of resource allocation is the link between sales and delivery, and tooling-wise, the link between CRM and resource allocation tools. While HubSpot CRM excels at managing sales pipelines and client relationships, it often struggles to align sales efforts with operational capacity. It also fails in forecasting the business that comes from existing clients, as CRMs are often new business-focused.

By integrating a resource allocation tool with your HubSpot CRM, you can simplify your team’s processes. Smarter planning, better forecasting, and more seamless collaboration between sales & delivery teams are just some of the benefits. Let’s explore the common pain points consulting firms face, the advantages of integration, and how one of our customers, Supreme Optimization transformed their operations with this approach.

The Biggest Resource Management Issues Without HubSpot CRM Integration

1. CRMs Are Poor at Managing The Full Sales Cycle for Consulting Firms

CRMs like HubSpot are designed to optimize lead generation and new client acquisition. However, consulting companies often rely heavily on revenue from existing clients through project extensions and continuations. This creates a disconnect:

• Sales processes for repeat clients don’t align well with the traditional CRM pipeline structure.
• It's hard to forecast the business as the new business data from CRM is not connected with the project continuations in the resource allocation tool
• Sales team doesn't have visibility to available consultants

If you'd like to learn more on what sales is like in consulting, read our previous blog posts like setting up a sales process in a consulting firm, and how to turn your consultants into trusted advisors.

2. Difficulty in Revenue Prediction & Capacity Forecasting

Repeat business can be hard to forecast because CRMs focus on new deal pipelines. Consulting companies need tools that factor in project extensions, but traditional CRMs don’t model resource needs or revenue impacts effectively. This creates the need for elaborate custom reporting, connecting data from multiple sources, which is mostly busywork for many companies.

3. Misaligned Sales and Delivery Teams

Sales teams often close deals without insight into available resources, leading to overbooking or underutilization. This misalignment can cause bottlenecks, delivery delays, and strained client relationships. On top of that, sales teams might reach out to the same people, not knowing that there's a specific skill set available elsewhere in the company. The link helps in making skills-based matches of consultants to the right projects.

4. Managing Complex Client Relationships & Project Continuations.

Consulting firms often juggle multiple projects for the same client. Consolidating related data in one place can be challenging. CRMs alone don’t provide a comprehensive picture of the different project streams for existing clients making it hard to forecast the business, and plan ahead. The management is often left with poor data to base their decisions on.

The Benefits of Integrating HubSpot CRM With a Resource Planning Tool

1. Seamless Data Flow

Integrating a resource allocation tool with HubSpot CRM allows consulting firms to:

• Sync deal stages with resource planning workflows in real time: staffing teams know which projects to prioritize

• Eliminate manual data transfers, reducing errors and saving time: client names, project names, and project owners are transferred automatically between the systems

2. Improved Forecasting

Combining CRM and resource data helps firms:

• Predict resource requirements accurately based on deal progression.
• Create more reliable revenue forecasts tied to ongoing and new projects: it's possible to predict which teams and competencies will be overbooked and underutilized

3. Enhanced Collaboration

An integrated tool aligns sales and delivery teams by:

• Providing a unified view of deals and available resources.
• Ensuring closed deals match actual capacity, preventing operational inefficiencies.
• showing who's soft booked to which projects minimizing communication breakdowns

4. Optimized Client Management

Integrated systems consolidate all project data, enabling teams to:

• Track resource allocation across multiple projects for the same client.
• Identify opportunities for upselling or cross-selling based on available capacity.

Case Study: How Supreme Optimization 9x'd their resource allocation efficiency

Supreme Optimization, a leading consulting firm, faced challenges that many firms can relate to:

• Misaligned sales and resource allocation workflows.
• Difficulty forecasting consultants' future capacity.
• Operational inefficiencies affecting project delivery.

The Solution

By integrating Operating's resource planning tool with their HubSpot CRM, Supreme Optimization achieved:

• Real-Time Resource Syncing: Automatically matched deal stages with resource availability for smoother transitions from sales to delivery.
• Data-Driven Forecasting: Combined data from HubSpot and Operating to model capacity accurately.
• Enhanced Continuation Tracking: Visualized ongoing client projects, making resource allocation for project extensions effortless.

The Results

• 9x More Efficient Resource Allocation: Streamlined workflows reduced delays and optimized team capacity.
• Spotting project overages and unused budgets By utilizing the planned and actual hours reporting in Operating

Why Operating Is a great Choice for HubSpot Users

Operating integrates natively with HubSpot CRM, eliminating the need for third-party connectors or big integration projects. This seamless integration makes it ideal for consulting firms, IT services companies, and professional services teams alike. On top of the CRM integration, Operating connects with best of breed time tracking tools like Harvest, making it the perfect choice for consulting firms to streamline their whole operations.

Features Tailored to Consulting Firms and IT Services

• Skill management and CRM connection to match the right consultants to the right projects
• Extensive resource allocation timeline to manage tentative and confirmed workloads in projects
• Revenue forecasting and predictive project budget monitoring to help companies focus to the future instead of looking into the rearview mirror
• Consulting-specific reporting for project portfolio metrics, utilization, planned vs. actual hours spent, and more.

For more details, visit www.operating.app/integrations/hubspot