Consulting pain points

What people report in Consulting

Software bills and unbilled hours drain this kind of work from both ends. Bloated Overpriced CRMs is the heaviest pain point listed: 647 people, 363 who say it costs them, and 156 who say they pay or would pay, far above anything else on the page. Small sales and business teams describe expensive systems packed with features nobody uses, hard to customize, with several versions of the master file circulating and supplier updates that break things.

Billing is the other drain. Billable Time Tracking Loss hits Freelancers, lawyers, agencies: 303 people, 241 who say it costs them, 67% weekly. Tracking is clumsy when clients and tasks overlap, entries get forgotten in busy stretches, and the system lets managers bend the record rather than raise overruns. Late B2B Invoice Payments (268 people, 218 say it costs them) is the cash side, but only 26% hit it weekly. People report filing liens and still being dodged, and no tool compels an unwilling buyer to pay.

AI at work is a recurring theme. Uncontrolled AI Token Spend, for Engineering, FinOps, and AI teams, draws 597 people and the highest cost count, 442, though only 41% hit it weekly: tools report tokens only after a request is sent, never the price beforehand. AI Context and Memory Loss reaches 87% weekly (336 people), with a model that forgets rejected options and proposes them again. AI Tool Adoption Friction (349 people, 78%) is the effort of setting tools up with context and catching polished output that hides errors. AI Slide Deck Rework (254 people, 58%) means decks that are not client-ready and break slide masters, and Manual Meeting Minutes (235 people, 85%) means summaries that miss chunks and mix up buyers and sellers.

Manual Power BI Development (261 people, 60% weekly) is a narrower niche: report changes have no dependable backup and no way to undo them, deployment is not automatic, and AI breaks reports. Shifting Client Expectations (285 people, 58%) shows a weak payment signal, with 8 who would pay, the same as AI Slide Deck Rework. Claude, Excel, Power BI, HubSpot, Notion, Claude Code, Salesforce and PowerPoint are the tools named most.

Of the pain points listed, Bloated Overpriced CRMs is the strongest on reach, cost and willingness to pay, with 68% hitting it at least weekly. Billable Time Tracking Loss is the better-defined runner-up: 39 who would pay and a problem measured directly in lost revenue.