Close or Pipedrive for a Data and BI Consulting Team's Pipeline

Pull your last ten deals and note where the biggest gaps sat: between first call and technical scoping, between scoping and a proof of concept, or between a successful proof of concept and a signed contract while procurement and security review run their course. A consultancy stalling mostly at the technical scoping stage has a different problem, and probably a different CRM answer, than one stalling in enterprise procurement after the technical work is already proven.

A consultancy doing active outbound to CTOs and heads of data, working a steady volume of calls and follow-ups to book discovery calls, gets real value from Close's dialer and sequencing. A consultancy relying mostly on referrals and inbound interest, where each deal has fewer, longer-touch conversations and more internal client stakeholders, is usually better served by Pipedrive's stage-based board, which makes a stalled, multi-stakeholder deal visible without needing much calling infrastructure at all.

A technical proof of concept is often the real decision point in a data consultancy's sales cycle, and it deserves a dedicated stage rather than getting folded into a generic negotiation phase. Note the scope of the proof of concept, who's evaluating it on the client side, and what success criteria were agreed upon, since a vague proof of concept with no defined success measure is one of the most common ways a promising deal quietly stalls.

Once a prospect's data will be touched by your team, even in a proof of concept, expect a security or data-access review from any enterprise buyer, and increasingly from mid-market ones too. Build a stage for this into the pipeline rather than treating it as a surprise each time, and keep a standard security questionnaire response ready so this step doesn't add weeks to every deal.

Choosing between Close and Pipedrive comes down to four moves, in this order:

1. Pull your last ten deals and note where the biggest gaps sat: before scoping, before a proof of concept, or during procurement and security review.
2. Weigh how much of your pipeline is outbound calling to CTOs and heads of data against referral and inbound deals with longer, multi-stakeholder conversations.
3. Give the proof of concept its own stage, with the scope, the client-side evaluator and the agreed success criteria recorded on the deal.
4. Add a stage for the security or data-access review and keep a standard questionnaire response ready so the step stops being a surprise.

Say a proof of concept wrapped four weeks ago with strong results, but the deal has gone quiet since. In Pipedrive, that deal sits visibly aging on the board, prompting someone to check in on what's holding up a decision, often an internal budget approval the consultancy has no visibility into unless it asks directly. In Close, the same gap is easy to miss unless someone manually set a follow-up task, since the tool's strength lies in tracking calling activity rather than surfacing deals that have simply gone silent.

New business B2B deals close in an average of 91 days, against 52 days for expansion deals with an existing customer¹. A data consultancy selling to larger enterprises with a security review and procurement layered on top should expect its own new-logo cycle to run at or beyond that average, which argues for a CRM built to track a long, multi-stage deal cleanly rather than one built purely for calling speed.

A data consultancy's relationship with a client often continues well past the first engagement, through ongoing platform support, a second phase of work, or a referral to another team inside the same company. Track that renewal and expansion pipeline as its own short process rather than letting it disappear the moment a deal counts as won, since the account team handling delivery is often not the same person who ran the original sale and needs the history to pick up the relationship cleanly.

A discovery call that gets too technical too fast can lose a prospect who isn't ready for architecture detail, while one that stays too high-level can frustrate a technical buyer who wants specifics. Many consultancies pair a business-focused salesperson with a technical lead on early calls, and whichever CRM you use, make clear in the deal record who owns the next step so a technical question from the prospect doesn't sit unanswered while two people each assume the other is handling it.