The CRM for Consultants Who Win Work Through Relationships

For an independent consultant or a small consulting firm, a CRM is worth having when it tells you every Monday which clients and open proposals need you this week. Customermates is an open-source, AI-native CRM built in Germany that keeps client companies, the people in them, every proposal and, from the Pro plan, the email, LinkedIn and WhatsApp conversations around them in one place. It covers winning the work. Time tracking, billing, proposal documents and project delivery stay in other tools, and the limits section below names tools built for them.

What consultants need from a CRM

Many tools sold as consultant CRMs bundle the pipeline with projects, timesheets and billing. Separate the two jobs before you compare them. Winning work depends on relationships and timing; delivering it depends on hours, budgets and documents. A CRM for consultants has to do the first job well, and on that side consulting has its own shape:

• A client is a company with several people. The sponsor who hired you, your day-to-day contact and procurement at renewal time all belong to one organization.
• Proposals wait for weeks. The risky part is the silence after you send one, so you need a list sorted by when an answer is due.
• Conversations are spread out. The referral comes in on LinkedIn, scoping runs by email and the managing director prefers WhatsApp. A contact list sees none of it.
• Past clients go quiet while you deliver. They are the cheapest source of the next engagement and the first thing to slip in a busy project.
• Client mail is confidential. Once you work with associates, it matters who can read which conversation.

A consultant setup in Customermates

Customermates starts with five lists, and you can add your own. Here is one way to map the five to consulting work; every field name is an example.

In Configure you can also rename any list under General, for example Deals to Opportunities, Services to Offerings and Tasks to Follow-ups.

Stages and weighted values

The deal stage is a single choice field you define, and each option gets a win probability in Configure. A starting point for consulting: Conversation 10%, Scoping 25%, Proposal sent 50%, Negotiation 75%, Won 100%, Lost 0%.

A deal's value is the sum of its line items, each an offering times quantity. Say the offering "Advisory day" carries your day rate of €1,200 and a proposal includes 12 of them: the deal is worth €14,400, and in Proposal sent its weighted value is €7,200. That is arithmetic from your own probabilities, not a forecast. On the pipeline board each deal is a card you drag between stages.

Four saved views for Monday morning

1. Proposals waiting: deals in Proposal sent, sorted by Decision expected.
2. Stalled: deals in Scoping or Proposal sent whose last update is older than 14 days, oldest first.
3. Retainers by renewal: deals with Engagement model Retainer, sorted by Renewal date.
4. Quiet past clients: organizations with Relationship Past client, sorted by last update, oldest first. "Last update" refers to the organization record itself, so this view works if you update its notes after each contact.

Saved views are personal, so each colleague sets the same filters and saves their own view.

Client conversations in one inbox (Pro and above)

In Customermates Cloud on Pro, Business and Enterprise, the unified inbox brings email from Gmail, Outlook or IMAP together with LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Instagram and Telegram. You reply on the original channel. Link a participant to a contact once, and every conversation with that address appears on the contact's timeline.

Two details change the plan you need. Pro includes 1 connected account per user, so a consultant who wants a mailbox and LinkedIn in the inbox needs Business, which includes 3. And conversations from your own accounts stay private: colleagues, admins included, see a thread only after you share it, or after you share the whole account on Business and above.

Meeting prep and a weekly client review with Mate (Customermates Cloud)

Mate is the assistant inside Customermates Cloud. It runs on hosted AI credits that every cloud plan includes per active user; reading inbox conversations needs Pro or higher. Before a call, ask in the chat:

For the weekly review, set up a routine, a saved instruction that Mate runs on a schedule or when a record changes. Choose Every week under Repeats, Monday at 08:00, and give it instructions like these:

Find deals in the stages Proposal sent and Negotiation that have not been
updated for 10 days. For each one, read the latest inbox conversation with
its contacts. If the last message was sent by me and has no answer, save a
short, friendly follow-up as a draft reply in that conversation. Do not send
anything. End with a list: client, deal, stage, days since the last update,
draft saved yes or no.

A second routine can react to events instead: when a deal's Stage changes to Won, create a task "Kickoff call" linked to that deal and assigned to the same person. Starter includes 1 routine per user and Pro includes 5.

Prefer your own AI client? Connect Claude, ChatGPT or another client through MCP. It works on every plan and on self-hosted installations, with model use billed by your AI provider. The messaging tools need Pro or higher in the cloud.

What Customermates does not do for consultants

• No time tracking, no billing, no proposal or contract documents, no project delivery and no client portal.
• Tasks have no due dates, reminders or notifications. Add a date field and a saved view, or let a routine do the checking.
• No email sequences or bulk outreach. Follow-ups are written one conversation at a time.
• No file storage on records. Keep the proposal in your file storage and its link on the deal; files in messages stay in the inbox thread.
• No mobile app and no calendar booking.

If one of these is why you are shopping, look at a tool built for it. Customermates publishes this page; vendor details were checked on 8 October 2026 on each vendor's own website.

A workable split is two systems: Customermates for relationships and pipeline, and a tool such as MOCO or BigTime for hours and billing. A webhook fires when a deal changes, so an n8n workflow you run separately can pass a won deal to the other tool, provided that tool has an API.

What it costs

Prices are per active user per month, billed monthly. Every plan includes REST, webhooks and MCP.

Each plan adds monthly hosted AI credits per active user for Mate; the amounts are on the pricing page. Running the open-source core on your own server costs no licence fee, but a self-hosted installation has no inbox, no Mate and no routines.

Moving in from a spreadsheet or another CRM

1. Save your list as Excel

   The import reads Excel workbooks (.xlsx) of up to 5,000 rows. CSV files are not accepted, so save them as .xlsx first.

2. Import organizations first

   On the Organizations list, open More actions, choose Add from file and map your columns, custom fields included.

3. Import contacts

   Add a column with each person's company name; the import links them to the organization of that name.

4. Import open proposals as deals

   Include the stage and your date fields, then add line items with offerings and quantities so each deal gets its value.

5. Connect the inbox

   On Pro or higher, connect your mailbox under Settings › Channels and link the people you write with to their contacts.

6. Save the views and the routine

   Save the four views above, then set up the weekly review.

Client data and confidentiality

• In Customermates Cloud, the primary production database is configured in the AWS Frankfurt region. That is a product setting rather than a contractual residency promise. Hosting and the other subprocessors, US providers among them, are on the subprocessors page, and a data processing agreement is available.
• A custom role with Assigned read access limits an associate or subcontractor to the records assigned to them.
• The audit log records who changed which record, on every plan.
• Customermates holds no certification such as ISO 27001 or SOC 2. If a client contract requires one, check that before you move their data.

Frequently asked questions