Sectors
Sectors
Someone looking for a CRM for their recruitment agency wants a page about recruitment agencies, not a general page they have to translate. So we write one sector at a time, properly, starting with the ones our early customers come from.
There are seventeen of them. Each is built around the one structural problem that actually costs that trade money, rather than around a list of features with the industry's vocabulary substituted in.
Every one of them says plainly what Consonas is not before it says what it is, and several recommend a different category of product. That costs us enquiries, overwhelmingly the ones that would have become a refund or a customer who left in month two.
All of them
Seventeen trades, written properly
Professional services
Client work, repeat engagements, and knowing who said what to whom.
About professional servicesConsultancy
A small pipeline where each opportunity is large, slow and personal.
About consultancyRecruitment
Two relationships at once, clients and candidates, in one system.
About recruitmentMaintenance and facilities
Sites, contracts and jobs that come round again.
About maintenance and facilitiesEducation and training
Seasonal enquiries, cohorts, and a payer who is not the learner.
About education and trainingProperty and accommodation
Where the central record is a building instead of a person.
About property and accommodationCharities
Donors, beneficiaries and volunteers, kept properly apart.
About charitiesTravel
Parties rather than customers, and long enquiries that go quiet.
About travelLegal
Referrers, counterparties and the part before the file is opened.
About legalHealthcare administration
Referrers, recalls and a front desk that books without reading.
About healthcare administrationConstruction
The tender pipeline, the professional team, and documents that expire.
About constructionFinancial services
Introducers, review dates, and the part before somebody is a client.
About financial servicesMarketing agencies
Pitches, retainer renewals, and the client contact who moves.
About marketing agenciesMembership organisations
Memberships as periods, and history that survives a lapse.
About membership organisationsTechnology
Accounts with several people, and renewals as their own pipeline.
About technologyRetail services
Account customers, reorders, and noticing the ones who stop.
About retail servicesLocal service businesses
Quotes that get chased and recurring work that gets remembered.
About local service businessesWhat repeats
Six shapes that turn up across the whole list
Most trades are a combination of four or five of these. If yours is not written yet, find the shapes that match and read the pages that share them.
- The record that lasts is not a person
- Property, accommodation, maintenance and construction all share this. The durable thing is a building or a site, and the people around it change. Model the site as the record and connect people to it with periods, or the history disappears every time a tenant moves.
- Two populations who must not mix
- Recruitment holds clients and candidates. Charities hold donors and beneficiaries. Healthcare holds referrers and patients. In each case one system has to hold both without the wrong person reading the wrong half.
- The payer is not the person
- Education, travel, healthcare administration and property all separate who benefits from who is invoiced. A parent, an employer, a lead traveller, a landlord. One contact per record forces a choice that loses one of them.
- Long silence is normal
- Consultancy, construction, legal and travel all have enquiries that go quiet for months and are not dead. Instinct stops working, because dead and waiting feel identical, and the stage history replaces it.
- The work comes round again
- Maintenance, membership organisations, financial services and healthcare all have recurring commitments: a service, a renewal, a review, a recall. Almost all of it lives on a wall planner, and a predictable proportion is missed every year.
- The relationship belongs to a person who will move
- Consultancy, marketing agencies, technology and professional services all sell to an individual who changes employer. When they do, the account is at risk and a new opportunity has appeared, and most businesses act on neither.
How to use them
Reading one of these usefully
Start at the section that says what this is not
Every page has one, usually about a third of the way down, and on several of them it will tell you to buy something else. If the limitation named there is central to your business, stop. You have saved an afternoon and we have saved a trial that would have ended badly.
Then read the modelling section
Each page sets out how to represent that trade's records: which relationship types to create, what the durable record is, which connections need dates on them, and which custom fields are worth having. That is the part that determines whether the system is still useful in a year.
If you are two of these at once, and nearly everybody is
A training company also consults. A maintenance firm also builds. The system can only be set up around one durable record, and the test is not which half earns more but which half you would still want the history of in three years. Read the page for that half first, all of it. Then read the second one for its other parties and its calendar, and skip its modelling section.
Not on the list
The kinds of page this list will never have
The gaps in a list like this are usually just work not done yet. Three of them are refusals instead, and a reader deciding whether to trust the site is entitled to know which is which.
No pages for job titles
There will not be a page for sales directors, or office managers, or founders. A job title does not determine what your records look like: an operations manager in a lettings business and one in a recruitment agency have nothing in common but the phrase on their door. What a role does change is who can see what, and that is answered once, on the security page.
No pages for a size of company
Consonas is built for organisations of two to two hundred people and says so. Size affects how many people you invite, not what a contract is. Where it matters it matters absolutely: below two people this is more system than the problem deserves, and above two hundred there are products built for a scale of administration we have deliberately not built for.
No pages named after other people's products
The genre where a page is titled as an alternative to a named competitor is effective and we are not going to write in it. Most of such a page has to describe software we do not run and cannot keep accurate, and it is wrong the moment someone else ships a release. What replaces it is the section on every sector page naming who should buy something else: our own limits, which we can keep accurate.
And the sectors that will not get one
This last is a genuine absence instead of a format we dislike. Some trades have no page because the honest one would be a paragraph telling the reader to buy a regulated system of record instead: dispensing, clinical notes, patient care records. The healthcare administration page exists because the front desk work suits a CRM. The clinical half does not, and the page says so.
Asked about the list
Questions about these seventeen pages
Does the product change depending on which sector page I came from?
No. Nothing is configured differently and there are no sector editions. The pages differ because the trades differ, not because the software does. What changes is which parts you use first and how you model your records, and that is what each page is actually about.
How were these written?
Each began with someone describing a problem in a shape we had not modelled. None was written backwards from a search phrase, which is why there are seventeen rather than seventy. An earlier version of this page listed trades we intended to write about and had not, which wasted the time of anyone who read their own name and found nothing behind it. A trade appears here when there is something to read and not before.
What if the page for my sector says Consonas is the wrong tool?
Then believe it. Several of these pages send people elsewhere: the healthcare page says clinical records belong in a clinical system, the maintenance page says a field service product is the right purchase if scheduling vans is your core problem, and the consultancy page says a spreadsheet may genuinely be enough for two people who have not forgotten anything this year.
The page for my trade describes it badly. Is that worth telling you?
It is the most useful message we get. Two of the early pages were written from a guess and both had to be rewritten after someone in the trade explained what was actually difficult. Say which sentence is wrong, and the page changes.
If yours is not here
The useful thing to do
There are seventeen pages above and considerably more than seventeen kinds of organisation. If none of them describes what you do, the useful thing is not to read the nearest one and translate it. It is to tell us what you do and what is stopping you using Consonas, in your own words.
That is how every page above got written, and a message describing a problem is worth more to us than one naming a feature. Custom record types on the Enterprise plan exist because four separate trades needed the durable record to be something other than a person.
Or skip the reading
A free organisation takes a couple of short forms and a confirmation email, and will tell you more about the fit than any page here.
Three people, a thousand relationships, no card and no time limit.