A CRM for agencies, from brief to retainer

A marketing, communications or digital agency has three kinds of work in its pipeline. New clients who arrive through the network, the website or a pitch invitation. Existing clients who want a new project. And retainers that get renegotiated every year. Most revenue usually comes from the second and third group. Most attention goes to the first.

The sales cycle is short when a client already knows you, and long when you pitch against three other agencies. There is an intro call, a brief you need to sharpen, sometimes a paid pitch, a proposal with scope and hours, and a negotiation where the scope moves twice more. After the signature a project manager takes over, while the account director keeps talking about the next project.

You will know this one. A client emails the account director about a new campaign. She is in a pitch for another client that week and answers four days later. In the meantime the client's marketing manager has called someone on the strategy team about an extra channel. Nobody puts the two conversations side by side. Three weeks later it turns out the client asked another agency to handle that channel.

The issue is not that people are careless. The issue is that what the agency knows about a client lives in inboxes, loose documents and the heads of a few senior people. An agency of twenty or fifty people can absorb that for a while. But every time someone leaves, a piece of client history leaves with them.

Lumo puts that history on the organization. Mail with known contacts lands on the timeline. The pipeline shows which pitch and which proposal are open. The proposal itself goes out as a quote with e-signature. And requests after kick-off arrive in the helpdesk instead of in someone's personal inbox.

With automations you capture the fixed steps. A rule starts on a new deal, a stage change, a won or lost deal, a new lead or organization, a completed activity, or a deal that has been stale for a number of days. It creates an activity or note, updates a field, assigns an owner or adds a label. It does not send email. You test it with a dry run first.

Rules agencies often switch on first:

• Deal enters the Brief stage: create a task Work out the brief for the strategist.
• Deal stale for ten days in Proposal: create a call for the owner.
• Deal won: create a Kick-off task for the project manager and add the Client label to the organization.
• Deal lost with reason Other agency: create a note with the reason and a task to try again in six months.

In reports you build the numbers that matter in an agency. The share of pitches won, broken down by origin. Won deal value per account director against a goal line. Lost reasons per quarter. And weighted pipeline per engagement type, so you see whether the coming months rest on small projects or on retainers. Every chart drills down to the deals behind it, and a dashboard can be shared with the team or kept private.

Say a digital agency in Manchester with 35 people. For this example we call it Northline Studio. It has a new business manager, three account directors and four project managers. It works for about forty clients, a third of them on a retainer.

Northline creates two pipelines. New clients with the stages from the example above. And Existing clients with the stages Signal, Proposal and Agreed. So leadership sees in one report how much revenue comes from new clients and how much from growth.

A holding company with four brands is set up as a parent organization with four organizations underneath. The holding's account director is stored in the user field. A request from one of the brands arrives as a ticket in the shared mailbox, and a project manager picks it up.

For a new project the account director puts two product lines on the deal: a one-time line for the design work and a monthly line for the retainer, with twelve cycles. The deal value adds them up. The proposal goes out as a quote through Gmail and the client signs the same day with the code they receive by email.

The new business manager starts each morning on the Today screen: leads to follow up, stalled deals and the tasks for the day. A strategist who prefers Outlook puts the personal BCC address in Bcc, and his mail lands on the right organization and deal. Nobody has to switch mail clients to keep the client picture complete.