Lots of agencies still keep information about clients and deals in Excel or Google Sheets, or struggle with rigid, old-fashioned Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems that don’t match a relationship-focused business model.

But a CRM for agencies should be flexible enough to accommodate the way you work so you can easily scale processes, build loyal clients, and grow revenue.

A well-designed CRM is like a super smart contact manager that stores important details about clients and prospects in an online platform — and streamlines the sales and marketing process. Some CRMs even let you manage entire projects all in one place.

There comes a time when any growing agency needs to graduate from spreadsheets or one-size-fits-all CRMs to get organized and take business to the next level. Say hello to your agency CRM navigation guide.

Here we’ll help you:

CRM gives you the ability to look at a contact and get the whole context of the relationship — including how you met them, previous email communication, the last touchpoint with the client and more, making it easy to catch up where you left off and keep customers around for longer. Like creative agency and Copper customer, Corduroy, puts it:

“Copper captures the full history of our client relationships, so we don’t lose the knowledge base that we’ve built up over the years about that client.”

CRMs also make it much easier to spot upselling and cross-selling opportunities and get reminders for follow-up activities. But it’s not just about keeping current customers around. CRMs help nurture prospects and win new business by automating follow-ups and tracking leads through the pipeline so no opportunity falls through the cracks.

Agency leadership has instant insight into email communication and how their employees engage with customers. CRM keeps all customer data in one place so everyone stays on the same page, and team interactions are instantly available.

Agencies are creative at their core. CRMs automate manual data entry, reports, tasks and follow-ups and give your team more time for the creative work — aka the fun stuff.

Segment and market to leads based on specific details or insights (like where you met them or how close they are to closing). You can even use custom fields to create data points specific to your business model or niche. CRMs built with agencies in mind also make marketing and segmentation easier with integrations to your email marketing platform, like Mailchimp, for instance.

Track and follow up with referrals and referrers, show your appreciation, and stay in regular touch so your agency is top of mind next time they run into a qualified lead. CRMs with custom fields and flexible tagging options help make your referral initiatives more automated and consistent.

CRM doesn’t have to end with the deal. Take projects from inquiry to sale to onboarding and through project delivery. Some CRMs have native task and project management capabilities built into the CRM platform while others allow you to integrate directly with your current project management tools.

The ability to schedule meetings and manage tasks right from your CRM also helps keep projects running smoothly. According to marketing agency and Copper customer, Bajillion:

“We had issues where we would call a client assuming we had previously reached out to them, and it turns out they’d never been contacted. Copper eliminates that and definitely gives us a level of detail we’d never had before.”

Keep track of contractors and their work. You can create a company record for each of your contractors and set a custom field so you can sort by freelancer type or specialty (web designer vs. copywriter). You can even create a contractor-specific pipeline so that the freelance team is all working together in one place.

CRMs with straightforward reporting capabilities make it easy for agencies to track accounts and projects and estimate future revenue. With up-to-date reports, you can easily see where your pipelines are at right now and accurately forecast future sales.

Start by figuring out your company’s overarching goals — these objectives will help guide you in choosing a CRM that enables you to track progress and achieve your targets with less effort. Ideally, goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, assignable, realistic and time-related.

Here are some hypothetical examples of goals a CRM may help you with:

• Increase new client touches by XX% quarter-over-quarter Upsell X
• existing clients on larger projects by a target date Increase customer
• satisfaction by XX% by communicating more frequently Review sales
• figures weekly with the team Eliminate X hours of busy work per week

CRM prices range from $10 to hundreds of dollars per month — keep in mind there may be hidden fees. But don’t worry; It’s totally possible for small-to-medium-sized agencies to get a quality CRM for as little as $30 per user per month.

To determine your budget, you’ll need to know:

Having visibility into customer relationships across all departments is key, which means adding all team members that interact with customers (including Account Executives, Project Managers, Accounts Payable, among others). Pay attention to the fee structure since some CRMs charge a per-user-seat price, while others charge a flat fee for a base number of seats. If your agency is growing quickly, make sure the CRM plan you choose will accommodate added seats without additional fees.

Decide which features are must-haves and which are nice-to-haves. Many CRMs price their product in tiers based on features and value provided. Basic-level plans typically offer 80% of the functionality most agencies need, so that may be a good place to start; then you can upgrade when you need more features.

Deploying a CRM can be easy and straightforward, but any special customizations will take time to build out (and possibly cost extra). The more customization work a CRM requires, the more time -and resource- intensive implementation will be. A flexible CRM with an intuitive experience that makes customization simple for any user can make a huge difference

Figure out what integrations you’ll need — aka what software and apps need to work with the CRM. Here are some examples of integrations that you may want:

The companies that come up first in your Google search aren’t always the best; they may just have the biggest marketing budgets. Consider seeking advice from your peers and other agencies who’ve gone through this same process. Whether you’re part of a networking group or you field input on LinkedIn or Twitter, a personal recommendation from a trusted colleague goes a long way. You can even visit CRM-specific communities to gain extra insight (like the Copper Community here). If none of those options work, head to credible review sites, like G2 Crowd, where you can’t pay your way to the top.

The best CRMs are the ones that can be tailored to suit your needs. Before committing to a CRM, try a few different options (most offer a free trial) to see which experiences you like, what features are available and how much time it takes to set things up. Look for a CRM that you can easily customize without hiring expensive developers or consultants. (Be wary of any companies that don’t offer a free trial or require a long contract to get started.)

To test out usability, create a few custom fields or reports and see how long it takes you. If it takes longer than an hour or requires outside help, consider finding a system that’s more user-friendly. In general, if you have less than 10 employees, it shouldn’t take more than 5 weeks to completely deploy. If there’s any indication that it will take longer than that, the CRM may not be the right fit for your agency.

Beyond saving valuable resources, quick implementation is critical for your team’s buy-in. The key to strong internal adoption is seeing value quickly, and longer deployment times can cause team members to feel overwhelmed and abandon the tool before even giving it a chance.

Clearly outline who will lead the CRM implementation and what people will be responsible for. Depending on your agency’s size, this could involve just one person or a few people from different departments.

Here are some questions to ask to build your SWAT team:

• Who will lead this project?
• Who will own making the administrative, technical and workflow changes to our CRM account?
• Who will be responsible for importing and reviewing existing data?
• Who will be responsible for integrating the CRM with the software we’re currently using?
• Who will build our standard reports and dashboards?
• Who will be responsible for ensuring we’re meeting our CRM goals?

Next, personalize your CRM based on your existing sales process. Go back to the goals you’ve set and map out the key business processes you need in place to help you achieve those goals.

Once those are clear, here are a few things you’ll want to configure:

Pipeline stages. Track the progress of projects and deals through stages. With your process defined, now assign a stage to each step. When in doubt, keep it simple: create the minimum number of stages that will allow you to keep track of a deal’s progress. You may only have four stages: First Meeting, Proposal, Commited and Won.

Pro tip: Look for CRMs that support multiple pipelines. This way, different departments in your organization can use pipeline stages that match their workflows (i.e., sales pipeline, projects pipeline, freelancer pipeline).

Properties. CRMs usually come with a set of default properties — categories of information about a client, prospect or project your CRM will store. Common properties include Contact Name, Deal Stage or Budget. When setting up your CRM, think about what properties are critical to your sales process and what information you’ll want to analyze for reports and dashboards.

Pro tip: if you’re using spreadsheets today, you probably have 1 property per column.

Custom fields. Make sure your CRM works for you instead of the other way around. For example, if you need a specific piece of information not included in the standard fields, you can create a custom field to capture those client details, whether it’s through a dropdown or a text area.

Whether you’re moving from spreadsheets or another CRM, you’re going to have some data to transfer. Once you’ve set up your CRM, you’re ready to start importing your existing client and prospect data.

You have four things to consider at this stage:

• Make sure your data is clean and consistent. The data in your spreadsheet columns should be in the same format. For example, don’t import a spreadsheet with inconsistent date formats like 01/01/2018 and January 1, 2018.
• Ensure company, person and opportunity names are consistent. While it’s possible to map to different names, be mindful before starting the data import process.
• Make sure to map fields of the same type. For example, make sure you map date to date, or integer to integer.
• Watch the tutorial. We’ve all skipped the occasional product tutorial. But the short video tutorials that CRMs usually provide are well worth the time.

Once you’ve imported your data, you’re ready to create dashboards and reports so you can view trends that inform future business decisions.

Here are some examples of reports that agencies use to grow their business:

• Potential clients (leads) by status (new, in contact, disqualified)
• Opportunities by stage (you’ll define the stages, but for example: First meeting, proposal, committed, won)
• New clients signed by month/quarter/year
• New revenue won by month/quarter/year
• Existing clients upsold
• Existing client revenue

With all your data and dashboards set up, take some time to get your integrations in place so your new CRM works seamlessly with the other software solutions your agency uses.

This includes connecting to things like:

• Productivity suites
• Project management platforms
• Email platforms
• Social media platforms
• EPhone/VoIP systems
• And more

Most CRMs have several native integrations. If it doesn’t have one that you need, check out a solution like Zapier, a no-code way to connect applications to each other.

One major advantage of CRMs compared to spreadsheets is the ability to automate tasks and encourage better habits. Here are some examples of automation triggers you can create:

• If a contact record is inactive for more than five days, create a task for the contact owner to follow up.
• If an opportunity gets moved from the “Meeting Set” to the “Proposal” stage, generate an RFP for that account.
• If a customer has been active for one year, set a task to send them a customer appreciation gift.

From inside the CRM, invite your teammates to join. They’ll receive a standard onboarding email, but that’s not enough to get to 100% adoption. Set expectations by communicating the change in person and getting executive support if you need it.

For the best results, take time to clearly communicate what’s changing and what you expect from employees. Your SWAT team can use their knowledge and expertise to help educate the rest of the team. Consider having an all-hands-on-deck introduction meeting or doing a few smaller team meet-ups to get everyone familiar with the new software.

In The Tipping Point, author Malcolm Gladwell popularized the theory that a small percentage of people set trends that most people follow:

“The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.”

While he was writing about Hush Puppy shoes, the principle applies to product adoption of any kind.

Think about who’s most influential at your agency and get their buy-in. This process could be as simple as talking to managers or executives. Or, for smaller agencies, it might just require getting the CEO excited.

One of the oldest tricks in the book to encourage CRM usage is to tie employee compensation to the usage of the product. It may sound harsh, but the easiest way to encourage adoption is to tell people, “If it’s not in the CRM, you don’t get paid.”

For example, you may compensate salespeople based on the new clients they find. Tell them that the commission gets paid when the pipeline stage goes from “Qualified to buy” to “Closed client.” To avoid them jamming all of that information in the day before the deal closes, tell reps that the lead has to have gone through the conversion process and all the opportunity stages to be counted for commission.