Consulting Firms Are Sitting on a Goldmine of Data But Missing the Business Value

Consulting firms collect enormous amounts of data. CVs and skills, certifications, client meetings, requests, pipeline opportunities, utilization rates, and margins. Most of it is recorded—and then left untouched. The data is there, but for many consulting firms, it remains an underutilized asset.

The Data Was Already There, It Just Needed to Be Activated

Cinode serves as Castra’s operational hub. It houses CVs and skills data, resource matching, CRM and client information, as well as partner networks, subcontractors, and Cinode Market. This makes it the natural home for some of the company’s most important business data.

The data was already there and ready to be used. The next step was to bring it together into a unified view and enrich it with information from other sources.

– We had a tremendous amount of data in the system that we wanted to consolidate and use to make better decisions. That’s where the idea started. How could we use our data to make better decisions? says Elin Toft.

Power BI became the tool for surfacing and visualizing the data, while also combining it with information from other business systems. The operational and business-critical data comes from Cinode, while financial data is sourced from the company’s accounting system, Kleer.

– If I can bring all my dashboards together, then I’ve achieved my goal, she says.

This combination is where the real value is created. Planning and forecasting data reside in Cinode, while actual financial outcomes are captured in the accounting system. When the two are viewed side by side, deviations become immediately visible—providing a clearer understanding of performance and enabling more informed business decisions.

Skills, Sales, and Financial Performance in One View

The first area of focus is skills. What expertise do we have, and does it align with what clients are actually looking for?

– We primarily look at skills. Do we have the right number of consultants across our different business areas? We also use it as a CRM. How many meetings are we having with specific clients? What do those meetings look like, and what outcomes do they generate? That’s incredibly important to analyze, says Elin.

The most significant impact has been on the sales side of the business, where the growing volume of client data has enabled a level of analysis that was previously impossible.

– A lot of it comes down to sales strategy. Are we engaging with clients in the right way? Are we meeting the right stakeholders? What outcomes do those meetings lead to? The insights are far more concrete than what we could access before, says Elin.

Because Castra captures client requests and opportunities in Cinode, the company has a continuous pulse on market demand. This provides early visibility into emerging trends—such as the growing demand for AI expertise—and enables the organization to align recruitment, skills development, and business planning with where the market is heading.

What the Data can Actually Reveal

Once the data is unified in a single view, it opens up a broad set of analytical opportunities. The combination of Cinode and Power BI enables consulting firms to track and understand their business in entirely new ways.

Sales and Pipelines

• Pipeline by expected close date and sales stage.
• Conversion rates from open deals to won business, and where deals tend to stall in the process.
• Sales cycle velocity, including average days in each stage per team and per salesperson.
• Scheduled and completed meetings can now be directly linked to outcomes.

Revenue and forecasting

• Revenue by currency, client, and skill set.
• Forecasts broken down by probability of deal closure and level of certainty.
• Revenue distribution across own employees, partners, and subcontractors.

Skills and Staffing

• Supply versus demand, skill by skill.
• Where demand is highest compared to available capacity (“bench”).
• Utilization over time and by competence area.
• Certifications and the share of utilization that is billable.

Profitability and Business Steering

• Margin per team and per skill set.
• Hourly rates and billable utilization rates.
• Average salary and salary dispersion by competence area.
• A foundation for understanding where the business is profitable—and where it is not.

Salary data by competence is becoming increasingly important in light of the EU Pay Transparency Directive, which places new demands on organisations to explain and justify pay structures. With Cinode, this data is already available and structured for that purpose.

Still early, but already becoming clear

Castra began rolling out the setup in January. Elin is clear that it is still early days, but the trends are already becoming visible.

– Overall, it’s a support system—a piece of the puzzle that helps us forecast and understand what we should be doing. Are we doing the right things? she says.

Advice to industry peers: just get started

Elin’s clearest message is about starting to use the data you already have.

– If you’re not using the data you have in Cinode, you should start. There is a lot of interesting data to uncover. Data we previously thought we didn’t need to look at revealed important patterns once we started analysing it, she says.

And in closing, she sums up why Castra chose to take the step:

– Any data you can get access to is an eye-opener. You think things are a certain way, and then the data shows something different. ‘Just do it’ is what I usually say. Just go for it.