Cosential Reviews

The support from Cosential cannot be beat. I also like the fact that we can determine if we want to turn on/off modules to custom fit our organization and where we are in the implementation. The relationship with Cosential feels like a partnership and that we are listened to and provided follow-up for our needs.

Time between request (issue or bug with system/enhancement suggestion) to the sprint where the improvement may occur. At times you are waiting for the developers or the request sits in the queue between submitting the suggestion and update for quite some time. We have learned the process of a bug or enhancement but at times we wish we could influence more of the speed to updates.

Make sure that it fits your needs from a module standpoint and the integration with your financial software.

Completely transparency of our customer opportunities and interactions between all our divisions for all customers. We have robust reporting where we can understand our pipeline, hit rate, and more data than we ever had in the past. The process is simple and we have the power as the admins to make changes/updates without having to wait for the resources at Cosential. We feel very empowered!

I really like that new features are always being developed and released. There's the Outlook add-in which is super simple to use. I also like that Knowledge Management and Publisher is available in the program as well which can lead to even greater collaboration across the business. Cosential always listens to client input and uses that input to improve the product.

The administrative functionality for the various modules could be consolidated or located a little better. Sometimes it's difficult to remember where all the administrative functions are.

Cosential has allowed us to have one system for the entire business for CRM functions. Previously, we had different parts of the business using spreadsheets or legacy systems with no visibility company-wide. This led to incomplete reporting and extra work for staff to put together comprehensive reports. We've also saved money by eliminating those other programs now that we have onboarded all of our divisions. I look forward to implementing some of the other modules as we go forward.

Fairly easy to use and setup with decent reporting and proposal building capabilities.

The email marketing module is absolutely terrible. Email templates take forever to load and preview so editing them is so time-consuming as to be useless. The fact that we were sold this capability that didn't actually work caused us to ditch Cosential altogether.

If you are considering the product for its email automation capabilities, have the sale rep perform a live test of the feature making 2 - 3 sets of email template revisions. Grab a few cups of coffee while you wait 90+ seconds each time a new view of the template loads.

We were trying to get better live reporting for our sales efforts as well as limited email marketing automation to increase requests for SOQs and proposals. After 2 months of use we were so frustrated we changed CRM and sales pipeline management to another product.

My favorite feature is the resume generation tool. The ability to produce multiple resumes tailored for specific pursuit types automatically updated each time they are created is beyond wonderful. Coupled with their availability to all team members 24/7 at the push of a button from any internet enabled device makes the resume generation tool peerless. Another great feature is the opportunity tracking – once again keeping all the pieces of a pursuit in one handy place and available 24/7 is brilliant!!!!

Although a minor issue I do wish that users other than administrators could upload templates for use in the publisher module as administrators may be busy/unavailable for periods of time making updating the templates a longer process then it should be.

Attend the webinars - get as many people trained and comfortable with the software as you can.

Consistent, accurate resumes available company wide with reduced labor hours to create them!!!!

In my hectic life at work, it has been such a pleasant change of pace to have requests I do not have to track and questions I do not have to follow up on. The team at Cosential has proactively reach out to me and responded to needs and requests so quickly! They have a great range of services to assist and guide me. The webinars are highly beneficial - I strongly recommend all of them. Attending the webinars has helped me realize Cosential has so much more to offer than what we are currently using it for. Love the personalized emails - they reassure me that I am in good hands!

I have not found anything to dislike at this point.

Ask for help from the Cosential team for any and all questions. Do not waste time struggling to figure out the setup and use on your own.

We are tracking leads and opportunities currently. We will be increasing our use of Cosential in 2018 to help us build stronger relationships with past, present and future clients. Cosential has helped our marketing/business development team stay on the same page and on task.

I like that we can customize the program to fit the data we are gathering. I also like it does store the data we are looking for and needing to store. It is nice to have the data come out in customized templates although they have their quirks.

I dislike that it is a manual entry if you don't use the CRM component of Cosential. If you don't use the CRM side of Cosential, there are fields you can't hide. I don't like you can't reorder the tabs. Also, the templates are difficult to customize and still have to be tweaked even after you export the data. We also don't have the data integrated and just use monthly uploads to Cosential because of the effort it would take to integrate with SAP since we don't use the CRM side of the program.

Understand what it currently offers and not what the salesperson says it does or will offer.

We have a place to store project and resume data including photos across multiple office locations. This means fewer phone calls and emails and more up to date data for marketing data to clients. It also means we are able to communicate updates and have the most up to date information from resumes and project data as often as the users or administrators update the data.

I love being able to see the history of our opportunities and have an at-a-glance understanding of where we are on certain pursuits. It's empowering to have that kind of information just before walking in to a client meeting. Additionally, the publisher module has made a world of difference in increasing the quantity of our marketing qualifications output. Having a simple way to wrangle our data, tailor it to client needs, and then publish directly to our branded format has saved us hundreds of hours in production time. We have also really enjoyed working with Oscar and Amy-- they have been been wonderfully friendly, patient and positive with us as we clear the initial Cosential learning curve!

Tailoring our reports and finding the right field locations for tracking financial projections has been more challenging than expected.

Using the Opportunities and Workflows in Cosential, we have been able to automate our project job number request system with accounting. Accounting now has the information they need in one succinct email and can proceed with opening project numbers for our engineering staff right away without a lot of time-consuming research and follow up.

1 year after purchase: This has easily been one of the wisest investments our firm has made. The ability to track customer information (CRM), their experience, past performance data, and leads/opportunities all from one simple application and dashboard makes my 1-man marketing team feel like 3. The capability to routinely pull data from our accounting software reduces duplication in both content and time. I no longer spend hours "looking for *stuff*" (put politely) during proposal preparation due to the full featured project and ‘knowledge’ database paired up with the advanced reporting functionality. I still have only scrapped the tip of the metaphorical iceberg of features that are included with the package including the ability to automatically survey clients, a built in email marketing tool, card scanner, countless plug-ins, a customizable RESTful API, Outlook and Exchange server plugins, and soon a full blown Zapier integration. Additionally, the support both during install and throughout my journey have been absolutely wonderful. They have made the ins and outs of using the software a simple, and surprisingly enjoyable, experience!

Improvements could be made to the 'knowledge base' section. The mobile app has been troublesome on my Android phone and tablets.

Spend time at early implementation to verify your data is correct and clean before beginning your import.

As mentioned in my previous description: I no longer spend hours "looking for *stuff*" (put politely) during proposal preparation due to the full featured project and ‘knowledge’ database paired up with the advanced reporting functionality. Tracking opportunities and my pipeline from a single page is a huge time saver.

Cosential keeps all of the information we need to market our clients in one place, from clients and contacts, marketing opportunities, personnel and project information, and so much more. The customer service that we receive and the attention to our issues, particularly from Dianna and Christina, is unmatched by other software vendors. The company is committed to continuing to evolve the software to stay on point with industry trends.

Because it is web-based, it is sometimes slow, however the fact that it is web-based allows users to access it anywhere at anytime, not just on our network.

Take the time needed to get your data cleaned up during implementation. Use the financial data connector to connect to your financial system so that project information is accurate and loaded into the system automatically.

With multiple offices, knowledge sharing is a huge issue. Cosential provides one home for knowledge on our clients, projects, staff, etc.

Cosential is an all in one platform that has addressed our business development and marketing challenges. We like having everything in one system. The implementation and training support has been outstanding. Lisa Pitts was amazing to work with during the process. She helped make the transition from our old CRM to Cosential virtually seamless.

We are struggling with the Card Reader Application, but the team is addressing the issues. Overall, we have found Cosential to be an outstanding tool. The support team has been able to address any challenges we have experienced.

Continue to focus on developing the marketing automation tools.

Having all of our account, contact, and opportunity information and history in one place has been valuable for our sales team. We are just starting to utilize the Proposal and Marketing tools. We are impressed with the ease of use and power of the system. This is an AEC CRM built by people who understand the AEC business.

I love how easy it is to access and analyze our information. Cosential has a home for every data point you can imagine -- and the flexibility add new ones as needed -- so you can store and recall information about all of your pursuits and projects.

Load time has been a factor, but it has improved significantly over the past 6 months and I know their developers are actively pursuing even greater speed.

Be sure to work VERY closely with your implementation specialist. Launching well is essential for others to buy in.

Our biggest problem is that knowledge about our projects, clients, past pursuits, etc. lived primarily in the heads of our people. That's fine as long as no one leaves and no one forgets...but that clearly isn't reality. Cosential is a robust, interconnected database that allows us to have literally everything in one place, and we can view that information from multiple perspectives.

I have used Cosential now for over 10 years, and I can't imagine doing my job without it! Not only does the program provide complete CRM tools, it is a powerful relational database specifically structured for the AEC world. I use it to consolidate all the information I need for responding to RFQ's and RFP's: information on our personnel, consultants, and projects. It's fast, intuitive, and has a powerful report writer that allows me to pull out necessary information in seconds. Better yet, the company continually improves the software and adds in new features at no additional cost to its clients. The system has saved me hours previously spent searching for information, and data is accessible more quickly than it can be found on our servers. Keep up the good work!

Anything I have disliked or found missing has been addressed through customer support.

Benefits include having one single source to find out any type of company information on contacts, projects, employees.

Makes assembling proposals and answering odd questions much easier.

Will be expanding our use of the very detailed CRM features this next year.

Being industry specific has been helpful in many ways. Having Jan and Lisa, my support contacts, has been a critical piece to implementing a CRM into a company of 250 people and 7 offices across the country where no CRM existed before. I've been a user for less than a year and even in that short period of time I've seen a continuous effort on their part to improve the platform and the user experience. My confidence is there that things will continue to improve and develop over time.

There are many pieces to the system, not all of which are well developed. There is also a small consistency issue from screen to screen and module to module. You can tell the system has been in development over a long period of time because you have newer interfaces and older ones depending on where you are. I wish the live chat worked in the support center. That would help for those quick things that I need.

Disparate systems for tracking company contacts and sales opportunities is the big one. The marketing component will be a part of our 2017 plans. Now that all of our data is in a single place we are starting to see benefit we didn't imagine. It's an exciting time for the company as we look to grow in size as per our 2020 plan.

In the ten + years I’ve used Cosential, I’ve been a reference often and I always remind clients and potential clients that Cosential isn't perfect, they have their flaws, they are human and can drop the ball but overall I have found them to be the BEST option for a marketing database for AEC firms.

I used Cosential for the first five years of my career as a marketing coordinator at a construction firm, then I transitioned into a CRM Manager role. This company used CMiC for accounting and I was involved with the FDC which connected data from accounting to Cosential.

I left and did CRM for a national engineering firm with 16 offices that used BST for their accounting system and was responsible for their FDC. After two years, I went back to construction and was the CRM Manager and implemented the FDC for them and they were on ViewPoint.

I started my own consulting business in May and use Cosential for my business development / marketing needs as well as workload management.

The best thing about Cosential, in my opinion, is it's diversity. I like that some use it extensively for the CRM component, others for the proposal automation and some for the opportunity/profit projection. To those clients that is what Cosential does well which to me says they do it all well.

Cosential is self explanatory and is an 'out-of-the-box' solution. However, if all modules are left turned on I do think it can be overwhelming. It has so many options and modules but you can narrow users focus to just what the user needs which makes it easier to navigate.

Implementing a new CRM is not easy. Cosential has tweaked the implementation process, and streamlined things well so the process and steps to follow are clear. However, know that your implementation specialist is busy, so as a client you need to own your part to drive things forward. It’s like working with a trainer - you have to do your part, the trainer can only instruct. Once you get going you’ll see results but you have to stay focused; if you fall behind or get off task it’s understandable, but know that you have to hold yourself accountable to get back on schedule.

Finally, in year's past I use to say that Customer Service was an issue but in the last year things have really turned around with the hiring of new staff. This has resulted in quicker ticket resolution and increased communication.

Know what you want out of Cosential so you can successfully setup your account. Stay on track with the outlined implementation process and ask questions often if you don't understand - as with anything don't assume.

I use Cosential for business development efforts, opportunity tracking, hit rate and win rate calculations, project data and reporting.

Because Cosential was designed by marketers in our industry, they know what information is important to collect, track, and analyze. The organization of the information and ease of use of the system is unparalleled to other CRMs/databases. Cosential is constantly updating and enhancing the system, so there are new, and improved, features being released to its users constantly, and I always hear what's going on - I know it's the top of the line database for information junkies like me. The reporting and template publishing tools are also incredibly helpful.

I wish the reporting module was a little more user friendly - it can be daunting to new and novice users causing it to go unused and frequently used incorrectly causing frustrations. I am now in the Commercial Real Estate industry (more so than what would be termed AEC), I would love love to have more information/modules relating to development of projects, property and asset management - understanding the high-level of property and information turnover for these types of services.

It's the best in the industry, but implementation (as with any software), can be very time consuming and overwhelming. Depending on your level of implementation, I would highly recommend a dedicated employee to this endeavor, and then can become the go-to Cosential person/administrator for the system ongoing. Even after implementation, you need to understand any database is only as good as the information that goes into it - so constant maintenance is imperative to keep the system updated and accurate.

Tracking our proposals and showing our win/loss ratios to senior leadership has been crucial. Also, the ability to store less-than-popular data for possible future use is highly beneficial.

The program is easy to use and great customer service. I was able to book an appointment with someone right away to teach me how to integrate indesign into cosential.

The one thing I would like to see changed is the dollar figure automatically rounds to the millions.

I have used Deltek Vision before and this system is much easier to use and better customer service.

How to keep all of our project information into one system and use this to create project sheets and resumes.

Cosential team has gone above and beyond again and again to help us accomplish a successful launch. They have helped me develop a good understanding of the product and I feel ready to support my team and office users.

We have not run into any problems to date.

We envision Cosential helping take our Business Development to the next level. Currently we have nowhere to store all of our pursuit data. The data we are storing isn't easily manipulated by our BD and marketing teams. Having the data more accessible is going to make a huge difference.

I really appreciate how well Cosential's structure and terminology relate to the construction industry. This is a huge plus for me since I implemented while being over sales and marketing for our electrical contracting firm.

There are what I would call basic actions in the workflow module that are missing. For example I would like a workflow to trigger a calendar invite for management to review bids prior to submission. The mobile app needs work. When using mobile version I will login through safari's browser and the user experience is much better.

Make sure to review internally your business development process flow. While mapping this out you will figure out who all needs to be involved internally and this will give them chance for buy in. I think this is crucial for quick adoption by coworkers and it will help you articulate what you need to your implementation specialist.

As manager of business development I am able to keep our operations management informed on our rumor mill and the availability of opportunities in a specific market.

Our operations managers are able to understand the effectiveness of our bidding strategy by reviewing win/loss opportunity reports. Once the operations managers see how easy the opportunity grid is to navigate they can quickly create their own views of data and export out to excel for further manipulation.

Our estimators involvement as CRM users allow us to assign opportunity IDs and keep all the data organized and available company wide. This allows multiple people to follow up on opportunities that otherwise would be won by our competition.

The industry specific knowledge of Lisa Pitts, our implementation specialist. Her background on construction business development and marketing made her extremely intuitive about our needs. It would have taken months or years to understand the nuances of simple administrative setup decisions. Hands down, Cosential's customer support is the absolute best in the industry.

There is nothing at this point that I dislike..

We are able to have clear insight into our pipeline, wins, losses, and make connections that were not available to us before adopting Cosential.

Cosential is like collective “Mind Sharing”, in that it allows all of our users to share the most important data needed for our roles as if we were one mind in sync together. The aim of mind share is to establish a being of one with the best information provided. Nabholz has offices in five states so being able to remain on the same page together is vital. This all relates generally to the development of awareness, and is one of the main objectives of advertising and promotion. When people think of examples of a category, they usually think of a limited number of data inputs.

Internet response time to Save or Retrieve

One place to locate information shared amongst many.

Reporting function and publisher module for creating resumes and project data sheets; ability to connect to other databases for data; customer service provided by Christina Leahy and Dianna Lovelace (superb!)

Sometimes the responsiveness of Cosential with our FDC is not ideal; we are working to make the reporting query fields more customized for how we use them. Cosential can have a lot of fields to sort through but can be scaled back by administrator; must be careful when switching between projects when more than one project is opened in different tabs so you don’t and end up editing the wrong project.

It is a great tool that will make your team more efficient, as well provide accurate data for quality documents. The easy of creating reports, exporting resumes and exporting project data sheets that contain real-time, accurate information is invaluable.

Efficiency; accuracy of data; data collection process for new projects, completed projects and new hires; quickly generate project sheets and resumes with dependable/reliable info; quick and easy reports to assist in go-no-go decisions as well as team selection for pursuits.

I have worked with other enterprise database systems and been "left in the cold" throughout the process. Cosential collaborates all the way thru. Our Implementation Specialist, Lisa Pitts, is knowledgeable about the system and our industry practices. We speak the same language! which makes everything even easier. Top notch!!

As we are still in implementation currently, nothing. Very happy to date.

still in implementation. this will help our CRM and Marketing professionals become more effective.

Built by and for the AEC industry. The workflows are a huge time-saver and allow us to capture the data we need to make our systems function.

Nothing major - I love their reports, but they can take some getting used to.

You will need a Cosential Champion and they will need support from the top!

We used to have to pull and drag project information out of our Project Managers after their projects were completed, while they were already working on a few others.... Now with the workflow and Financial Data Connector, we are able to sync our financial projects directly into Cosential project records and pull relevant data real-time.

I think the web interface and the ease of use. It is accessible from anywhere and saves our firm a ton of time.

There isn't really anything that I dislike about Cosential. Most of our issues have to do with users actually doing what they are asked to do.

Truly is amazing for the AEC industry.

Reporting, opportunity tracking, employee information, general marketing information, and CRM.

The information that marketing is responsible for maintaining is always up-to-date because of Cosential. Regardless of what firm a person is in, they have access to all of the information that they need to find.

The amount of items that are in the program

For a small firm there is too much information and too many work arounds that are not yet developed

I would really compare the needs of the organization in comparison to the items available in Cosential. While Cosential has a lot to offer, for some it may be overwhelming. I would suggest a firm have a dedicated database administrator to main this product.

Organization of project management; not many benefits. Seem cumbersome