What is an Agency?

Agency refers to a small group of people or a business which provides certain services to another set of people or another business. Some of the examples of an agency may include Digital Marketing agencies, Advertising agencies, Media & PR agencies, etc.

What are the key challenges of an Agency?

The biggest challenge an agency faces is customer attrition. A low customer retention results in continuous loss of clients overtime. This means they will have to spend a significant amount of their creative time for new customer acquisition activities which is usually 10 times more challenging than retaining an existing client.

The root cause of these challenges lies in the lesser than adequate customer relationship management setup at the agency.

Here are some of the instances:

1. Information about the customer is not organized, there is no single place to find certain information about any customer
2. Agencies struggle with resource capacity management due to an unsteady flow of deals in their pipeline. This results in ad hoc work pressure imbalances. In the long term it may cause friction within your delivery team and may impact the quality of deliverables.
3. There is no coordination between their marketing team and sales team. Silos efforts lead to results which do not help each other and lead to a lot of potential leakages of your overall marketing budget.
4. Lack of a proper process in place kills productivity of team members which can be more utilized in creative activities of the agencies.

Why would an Agency need a CRM?

Creative agencies have to interact a lot with their clients. While it all depends on the quality of work your creative team delivers, an ever lasting customer relationship management system in place can do wonders for your agency business by putting you on a growth track.

Agencies would need a CRM for a number of uses:

1. Lead Generation
2. Engaging with Leads
3. Sales Prospecting
4. Managing and Tracking active Deals
5. Organizing customer contacts
6. Building relationship for future opportunities

How does a CRM benefit an Agency?

1. Better Lead Capture and Nurturing:
   With the help of a CRM, Agencies can capture their leads quickly without the need for juggling through multiple excel sheets from different sources. They can qualify leads, nurture them and warm them up effortlessly using a single platform.


2. Better Prospecting:
   Once you start recording your leads data in CRM, overtime it will help you identify an ideal customer persona for your agency. This helps you improve your sales prospecting productivity to identify which prospect has better chances of conversion.


3. Automation saves time:
   CRM automates a lot of your manual tasks of data entry, data analysis and data reporting. Sales force automation can help you offload those repetitive tasks so that you can focus more on the various other initiatives of your agency.


4. Build long term relationship:
   CRM gives you a 360 degree view of your customer even after the first deal gets closed. This helps you build a long term relationship with the customer for future business opportunities.


5. Customer Information repository:
   A good CRM provides you the option to note down your meeting minutes and attach your requirement documents so that it serves as a complete repository of your customer profile. This saves your team a significant time who will otherwise struggle scrambling multiple emails and notes lying at different places when there is a need for the data.


6. Better Collaboration:
   When your team works in silos, it creates a knowledge gap. Certain team members would be having a required amount of information while the other would be having less adequate information to deliver effectively. A good CRM helps your team work in a more collaborative way on a single platform so that everyone is on the same page with a common data repository.


7. Measure Performance:
   CRM equips you with sales reporting and analytics solutions which offload your burden of manually preparing period sales reports and trying to measure and analyze various performance bottlenecks.