B2B SaaS CRM for Consulting Firm

CASE STUDY INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Customer: 80-person consulting firm
Product: SaaS CRM
Interviewee: CEO
Results to Highlight: 30% faster sales cycle, $200K ARR increase

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SECTION 1: BACKGROUND (6 questions)
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1. Can you tell me about your consulting firm—what type of consulting do you specialize in?
2. How is your sales team structured? How many people are involved in business development and sales?
3. What does your typical sales process look like from lead to closed deal?
4. Before implementing the CRM, what tools and systems were you using to manage your sales pipeline?
   Follow-up: What did you like about them? What were the limitations?
5. How long have you been CEO, and what role do you play in the sales process?
6. What prompted you to start looking for a new CRM solution?

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SECTION 2: CHALLENGES (8 questions)
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7. Walk me through what a typical sales cycle looked like before implementing the CRM. What were the stages?
8. What were the biggest pain points your sales team faced with your previous approach?
9. Can you give me a specific example of a deal that took longer than it should have? What caused the delays?
Follow-up: How did that impact your cash flow or resource planning?
10. Where were the bottlenecks in your sales process? What was slowing things down?
11. How visible was your pipeline to leadership before the CRM?
Follow-up: How did that affect your ability to forecast revenue or make strategic decisions?
12. What was the business cost of these challenges? (Lost deals, extended sales cycles, team frustration, revenue predictability)
13. Had you tried other CRM solutions before? What didn’t work about them?
14. On a scale of 1-10, how critical was solving this problem for your firm’s growth? Why that number?

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SECTION 3: DECISION PROCESS (6 questions)
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15. How did you first hear about this CRM?
16. What other CRM platforms did you evaluate?
17. What made this CRM stand out compared to alternatives like Salesforce, HubSpot, or others?
18. What were your biggest concerns or hesitations before purchasing?
Follow-up: How did the vendor address those concerns?
19. As CEO, what did you need to see to feel confident this was the right investment?
20. What was the deciding factor that made you choose this CRM over the others?

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SECTION 4: IMPLEMENTATION (5 questions)
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21. What was the implementation and onboarding process like?
22. How long did it take to get the CRM fully rolled out across your sales team?
23. What challenges did you face during implementation?
24. How did you get buy-in from your sales team and other stakeholders?
25. Looking back, what would you have done differently during the rollout?

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SECTION 5: RESULTS (10 questions - MOST IMPORTANT)
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26. Let’s talk about results. You achieved a 30% faster sales cycle—that’s significant. How did you measure that?
27. Before the CRM: What was your average sales cycle length from first contact to closed deal?
28. After the CRM: What is your average sales cycle now?
29. Which stage of the sales process saw the biggest time savings? What changed?
Follow-up: Can you walk me through a specific example of how a recent deal moved faster?
30. You mentioned a $200K increase in ARR—how do you attribute that to the CRM?
Follow-up: Is that from closing more deals, larger deal sizes, or both?
31. Before the CRM: What was your annual recurring revenue?
32. After the CRM: Where are you now?
33. Beyond faster sales cycles and revenue growth, what other benefits have you seen?
Follow-up: Impact on sales team productivity? Customer retention? Forecasting accuracy?
34. How has the CRM changed your visibility into the business as CEO?
35. Can you share a specific deal or client story that demonstrates the CRM’s impact?
Follow-up: What would have happened with that deal under your old system?

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SECTION 6: WRAP-UP (3 questions)
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36. Would you recommend this CRM to other consulting firm CEOs? Why?
37. If a peer was considering this CRM, what would you tell them?
38. What are your plans for expanding your use of the CRM going forward?

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BONUS: QUOTABLE MOMENT PROMPTS
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• “If you had to describe the impact of this CRM in one sentence, what would you say?”
• “Complete this sentence: Before the CRM, our sales process was _____. Now, it’s _____.”
• “What’s the one thing that would make you never want to go back to your old system?”
• “If this CRM disappeared tomorrow, what would you lose?”
• “What would you tell a CEO who’s on the fence about investing in a proper CRM?”
• “What’s the ROI been from your perspective as CEO?”