Contacts are leads who have been qualified and confirmed as definite business prospects. Once they have been converted, contacts need even more attention from your agency. It is essential to keep them organised. A deal may encompass many individuals, especially when your clients are businesses, each important for helping your agency execute your work.

With Pipedrive's holistic approach to contact management, you can create contact records for individuals linked with the company the person works for and the deals they are involved in. You can take organisation further and add tags to help you recall critical information or search efficiently. For example, attaching the tag “videographers” to any contacts with that profession will help you quickly identify any existing connections in that field. Contacts are also searchable by location. Say you’re working on collateral for a trade show in London.

Through Pipedrive CRM, you can pull up all of your contacts in that postcode and use the work to check in, let them know about the event, and inquire about future possibilities. Pipedrive contact records are designed to be intelligent and super easy to use.

Contact organisation isn’t just crucial for contract execution. Each contact represents future business opportunities at the organisations they move to. With the average professional making fewer than seven career transitions, you must maintain relationships as people switch jobs. That’s the beauty of social integration. Connecting contact cards to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (X) profiles lets you stay in touch with contacts even when their business emails, titles, and cities change.

Contractors are clients too

Most creative companies work with a small army of subcontractors who bring their expertise to your business when needed. Use your CRM software to keep track of them and your clients. There is no reason you should limit your contacts exclusively to the people who pay to work with you. Instead, keep all of your contacts in one central location. Not only does it make it easy to pull up contact information when you are looking for help, but it also allows you to link those contacts with the deals you’ve hired to help you within your database.

Staying on top of your contacts is the first step to building solid relationships. Pipedrive CRM makes the data entry straightforward and lets you and your co-workers focus on the people and the deals at hand.

Managing and improving Proposals

As a creative agency, you receive many incoming enquiries for work and send out an equal number of proposals. Without a CRM solution, you’re likely relying on a combination of assorted templates, chaotic email threads, and crossed fingers.

If you don’t integrate a tool for organising and tracking proposals into your processes, you'll be left waiting for potential clients to respond.

Pipeline management puts you back in control.

With Pipedrive CRM, you can create a fully customised sales pipeline. No matter how your agency moves through the client process, Pipedrive CRM can adapt to fit your preferred workflow. Enter the names of the different pipeline stages and order them in the best way for your business.

Let's look at a simple example of a sales pipeline. A new lead will usually be placed into the first stage of the sales funnel, "Incoming." You evaluate this lead, and if it is qualified, you forward it to the next stage in the sales process, the "Qualified" stage. Once you’ve gone through discovery with the customer and are ready to give a quote, you can move the deal forward to the "Quote" stage. Once you prepare the price quote and send it to the prospect, you can move the lead to the last active stage, "Closure". This is where the final details will be sorted out, and the negotiation will usually occur. After the Closure stage, you will either win or lose the deal. You can then convert the opportunity into a project. 

In Pipedrive CRM, all the stages are fully customisable to your business to reflect your unique sales process.

Document management

Using pipeline management, you can keep all documents and contacts associated with a deal in one central location. There is no need to dig for that email attachment; you can find everything you need in your CRM. You can review all relevant documentation whether you are on the phone with a client or putting together a new proposal for upcoming work.

Automated tasks

 A robust CRM like Pipedrive CRM also helps you remember to follow outstanding bids with the Tasks feature. Select Tasks from the menu of the tool, create the to-do item, assign it to a staff member, and set a due date. The person responsible for the proposal will get a reminder in their dashboard (and their email) to contact prospects when the time is right, improving client follow-up and helping you land more gigs.

All tasks are easily accessible to team members so that they know what’s coming up and when.

Performance reports

Pipedrive CRM comprehensive reports can also improve your proposal process over time. For instance, with the Deal Lost Reasons report, you can track why your proposal was declined in the past and work to improve the areas of your workflow that are preventing success. Pipedrive CRM reporting can offer invaluable insights into how your agency’s team members perform, giving you a clearer direction for making improvements and securing more projects.

Use the Deals Lost Reasons report to know why you’re not converting prospects into customers and work to improve in the future.