The CRM for the first sales manager at a 10 to 100 person agency.
An agency manager runs a pipeline that is half same-day referrals and half 90-day RFPs, forecasts retainers and projects on different math, and tracks win rate by service line. HoneyBook will not render that dashboard. Strkr does, in one workspace.
The first sales manager at a 10 to 100 person agency inherits a mixed book. One line of business is retainer renewal and expansion against existing accounts. The other is net-new projects won off referrals or RFPs that can run 60 to 90 days. Each forecasts differently, closes differently, and reports differently. HoneyBook and Dubsado stop at the single-project view, and HubSpot ignores service-line reporting. The pains below show up on every agency manager buyer call we run.
Win-rate blindspot
Win rate per service line is impossible to pull.
The retainer motion closes at a 55 percent win rate. The one-off project motion closes at 22 percent. The paid-media retainer closes faster than the brand retainer. None of this surfaces in HoneyBook or in the Google Sheet the manager rebuilds every quarter. Strkr ships service-line and offer-type as first-class dimensions on every deal and renders win rate, cycle time, and deal size per service line without a report ticket.
Manual 1:1 prep
Prepping a 1:1 with an AE takes longer than the 1:1.
Agency AEs manage a chaotic book: three same-day referrals, two 90-day RFPs, four renewal conversations, a handful of qualified-out carryovers. Prepping the weekly 1:1 means pulling pipeline, activity, booked meetings, and stuck deals across all of them. Strkr ships a rep 1:1 workspace that auto-populates with the week's pipeline moves, activity delta, stuck deals, booked meetings, and open follow-ups. The manager walks in with the context already loaded.
Two-math forecast
Retainer math and project math live in different tabs.
The weekly forecast is retainers (MRR committed, likely renewals, expansion signed) plus projects (SOW value, close probability, start date). The manager rebuilds both halves in a spreadsheet every Friday, sums them, pastes the number into a reply to the agency owner. Strkr runs a native hierarchical forecast with per-deal category calls that handles both revenue shapes, submits with a Friday lock, and rolls up the pod number without the Sheet.
Mixed cycle length
The pipeline is half same-day referrals and half 90-day RFPs.
A referral from the owner can close in 48 hours. A government or Fortune 500 RFP can take 90 days with procurement, security review, and three rounds of SOW redlines. Pipeline hygiene thresholds that fit the referral motion are nonsense for the RFP motion, and vice versa. Strkr lets the manager set per-pipeline and per-stage thresholds so the referral pipeline flags silence after 2 days while the enterprise RFP pipeline tolerates a 10-day gap during procurement.
SOW line items are a PDF
What services actually sold is trapped in signed PDFs.
The agency sold $320k in retainers last quarter. How much of that was paid media, how much creative, how much strategy, how much custom development. Nobody can answer without opening every signed SOW. Strkr Products treats each service line as a first-class SKU, so a signed SOW is a structured line-item set and quarterly reporting on service mix runs off the Products module instead of PDF archaeology.
Post-close handoff drops
Signed deals disappear into email until the kickoff slips.
The deal closes, the AE sends a victory Slack, and the project does not land on an account manager's plate for 11 days because the handoff lives in email, Dropbox, and tribal knowledge. Strkr Projects creates the engagement automatically on closed-won, maps SOW line items to project milestones, and routes the kickoff to the right account manager by service line. Nothing waits on an email handoff.
How Strkr fits an agency manager week
The weekly primitives first-ever agency managers actually use.
Strkr for agency sales managers is the same CRM AEs use, with manager-tier views layered on top. Everything below ships on every paid tier with no premium coaching module gate. The primitives map to the four jobs a first-ever agency sales manager repeats every week: run 1:1s with each AE, run a pipeline review across retainer and project books, submit the weekly forecast with two revenue shapes, and track service-line win rate so the agency owner can price the next pitch deck right.
Dual pipeline view
Retainer and project books, side by side.
The manager pipeline view splits by pipeline (retainer renewal and expansion versus net-new project) with the two books rendered side by side. Each book carries its own stage set, its own hygiene thresholds, its own close-probability math. Filter either side by service line, deal size, or AE. The retainer book runs on monthly value, the project book runs on SOW value, and the dashboard presents both without forcing one math on the other.
1:1 prep view
Every AE 1:1, context already loaded.
Open the AE card, see the 1:1 workspace: pipeline moves this week across both pipelines, activity delta versus the four-week baseline, booked meetings, stuck deals past per-pipeline threshold, open follow-ups, retainer renewal pacing. The manager walks in with the questions already surfaced and spends the hour coaching, not clicking. Notes attach to the AE timeline and next week's 1:1 opens with last week's action items at the top of the agenda.
Hierarchical forecast
Reps submit, manager overrides, retainer plus project rolls up.
AEs submit weekly category calls per deal (commit, best case, pipeline, omit) through a Friday workflow with a submit-lock. Retainer deals submit MRR committed, project deals submit SOW value. The manager overrides where the manager read differs and submits the pod number upstream. The agency owner sees the rolled-up number by service line, not a Sheet. No copy-paste moment where retainer math and project math drift between tools.
Service-line reporting
Win rate, cycle time, deal size, broken out by service.
Every deal carries service-line tags (paid media, creative, strategy, custom dev, brand, retainer tier). The manager dashboard renders win rate, average deal size, cycle time, and lost-reason mix per service line. The agency owner uses the dashboard to decide which service lines to lean into next quarter and which to deprioritize. No BI engineer, no Sheet rebuild, no monthly roll-up ritual.
Strkr AI deal risk
The RFP that is quietly dying, flagged early.
Strkr AI reads deal activity, email thread tone, meeting cadence, stage movement, and SOW drafting progress, then flags deals where the AE category call looks optimistic versus the signal. The flag opens into a specific reason (no procurement response in 14 days, SOW redline round three with no counter, decision-maker rotated off the thread). The manager coaches on a case, not a hunch.
Products as SOW builder
Service SKUs that reporting can read.
The Products module treats each service as a first-class SKU with price, unit, bundle rules, and service-line tag. AEs build an SOW by picking SKUs instead of free-typing a scope. The signed SOW carries structured line items that reporting rolls up into quarterly service mix, utilization math, and gross-margin forecasting without opening a single PDF.
Projects post-close
Signed deals become engagements automatically.
When the deal moves to closed-won, Strkr Projects creates the engagement with SOW line items mapped to milestones, routes the kickoff to the right account manager by service line, and attaches every call, email, and shared file from the sales cycle to the engagement timeline. The AM walks into the kickoff with the full context the AE built, not a 15-minute Slack brief.
Retainer renewal pacing
Which retainers are up, with which signals.
Every active retainer carries a renewal pacing tile that surfaces 90, 60, 30 day windows with the latest engagement health signal (last QBR, scope creep, utilization, NPS). The manager spots the retainer that is 45 days from renewal with no QBR booked and routes it to the AE before the client raises a concern of their own.
What Strkr automates for an agency manager
The repeatable moves the CRM should do before Monday.
The first sales manager at an agency is almost always a working manager: still carrying a book, still writing proposals, still joining pitch calls. The hours that go to admin come straight out of selling hours. Strkr Flows handle the dozen automations every agency manager should run, each one ships as a native trigger with no webhook plumbing. The pattern below is what shows up in week two of every agency deployment.
Forecast submit-lock
Friday 5 PM, submissions lock.
A weekly flow opens the forecast on Monday, nudges AEs on Thursday if they have not submitted, locks submissions on Friday 5 PM agency-local, and rolls the pod number to the owner queue. AEs who miss the lock escalate to the manager automatically. The number that lands with the agency owner is the number the sales team actually agreed on, not a late Sunday-night Sheet edit.
Referral speed-to-first-touch
Owner-sourced referrals route in 10 minutes.
A referral logged by the agency owner or a partner routes to an AE based on service-line fit, triggers a first-touch task with a 10 minute SLA during business hours, and surfaces to the manager if the SLA breaches. Same-day referrals close same-day only when the first touch happens same-hour, and the automation enforces the discipline without the owner chasing anyone.
RFP stage gate
Enterprise deals move only with the right fields filled.
An RFP stage transition from Discovery to SOW Draft requires decision-maker contact, procurement contact, published budget range, and competitive context captured. The AE sees required fields inline, the deal is blocked without them, and the agency stops drafting SOWs for RFPs the owner has not actually qualified. Rules are tunable per service line so a creative RFP and a paid-media RFP can carry different gates.
Closed-won to Projects
A signed SOW spawns the engagement in minutes.
Deal moves to closed-won, Strkr Projects creates the engagement, maps SOW line items to milestones, assigns an AM by service-line routing rule, blocks a kickoff on the AM calendar within 72 hours, and attaches the full sales timeline to the engagement. The handoff that used to burn 11 days now happens before the AE finishes writing the victory Slack.
Renewal 90-day trigger
Retainer renewal workflows fire on calendar math.
At 90 days to renewal, a workflow drafts a QBR invite, generates a renewal pricing brief based on utilization and service-line expansion signals, and books an internal AE-plus-AM prep. At 60 days the proposal draft lands in the AE queue. At 30 days the manager sees the deal on a renewal risk tile. Nothing waits on the AE remembering.
Scope-creep sentinel
Projects running hot alert the AE and the AM together.
When a Projects engagement burns through more than the budgeted hours per milestone, a flow pings the AE and the AM in a shared thread with the overage number and the suggested change-order path. Scope creep stops being a quarterly margin surprise and starts being a Tuesday conversation grounded in a specific number.
Risk-flag digest
Monday email, five deals, two paragraphs each.
Monday 7 AM email to the manager: the top five Strkr AI risk-flagged deals in the pod with the specific reason per deal and a suggested coaching question. The manager walks into the Monday pipeline review with the risk list in hand and runs five grounded coaching conversations instead of a generic "we need to tighten up the pipeline" talk.
Call summary coaching
Pitch call recordings tagged for coaching moments.
Every recorded pitch, discovery, and SOW-walkthrough call runs through Strkr AI tagging: discovery questions asked, objections raised, next steps set, pricing moments, competitor mentions. The manager jumps to the two timestamps worth reviewing and leaves an inline comment the AE sees on Monday with the clip queued, instead of watching every call back at 1.5x.
What an agency manager sees that AEs do not
The manager tier that stays out of the AE workspace.
A manager tier that creates a parallel UI is a tier AEs resent. Strkr keeps the AE workspace identical for AE and manager, then adds a manager-only overlay for pod rollups, private 1:1 notes, risk flags, service-line reporting, and quota setting that AEs do not see. The result is a shared source of truth where AEs trust that what they see is what the manager sees. The surfaces below are what gets added at the manager tier, not what gets taken away from the AE.
Pod rollup
Every AE pipeline across both books in one view.
The manager pod rollup shows every AE pipeline (retainer and project) on a single screen, grouped by AE, sorted by stage and close date. Filter by service line, deal size, pipeline, or hygiene score to find the fifteen deals that matter this week across the sales team. Collapse per AE for pod-wide reviews and expand per AE when running a 1:1.
Private 1:1 notes
Manager notes that AEs do not see.
Notes captured during an AE 1:1 can be marked private to the manager or shared with the AE. Private notes feed into the quarterly review view and the ramp dashboard, so the manager has running context on each AE across the year. Shared notes become visible to the AE on Monday with the related action items queued. Both live on the same AE timeline.
Submit-lock override
The manager read beats the AE read when it has to.
AEs submit weekly category calls through the Friday workflow. The manager overrides the AE call per deal where the manager read differs, and the override carries a one-line reason the AE sees on Monday. The pod number that rolls up to the owner is the manager-adjusted number, with the AE submission preserved as an audit trail for the quarterly review.
Service-line benchmarks
AE against pod, service line against company.
Every AE metric (activity, pipeline, win rate, deal size, cycle time) renders against the pod average and the company average on the same tile, with a service-line filter. The manager spots the AE a quarter outside the pod on paid-media cycle time and runs a specific coaching session instead of a vague "we need to close faster" talk. The service-line view lets the owner pitch new hires or new offers with grounded numbers.
Risk-flag inbox
The deals Strkr AI flagged, in one triage queue.
Every Strkr AI deal risk flag in the pod lands in a manager-only risk inbox. The manager triages each flag in two clicks: dismiss (false positive, carries a reason), schedule coaching (creates a task tied to the deal), or escalate (routes to the owner with the flag history attached). The inbox clears to zero on a disciplined week, and dismissals train the model.
Quota setting
Per-AE quota, per period, with ramp curves and split credit.
The manager sets quota per AE per period with a ramp curve for new hires and split-credit rules for team-sold deals (common at agencies where senior partners pull junior AEs into pitches). The quota rolls into pacing dashboards for the AE and the manager without a quarterly sync meeting. Change a quota mid-period and the ramp recalculates automatically.
Agency owner view
A read-only view the owner opens on a Friday.
The agency owner gets a dedicated view: pod forecast rolled up by service line, top ten active deals by value, retainer renewal risk tile, service-line win rate trend, and the manager's Friday commentary. The owner stops asking the manager for a Monday export because the view is already there, and the Friday review runs off a shared screen instead of a status email.
Head-to-head
Strkr vs HubSpot plus HoneyBook plus spreadsheets.
Most first-ever agency sales managers inherit a stack where HubSpot (or Pipedrive) runs records, HoneyBook or Dubsado runs the single-project booking flow, a Google Sheet runs retainer tracking, a second Sheet runs the weekly forecast, and signed SOWs live in Dropbox as PDFs. The stack is five surfaces, five bills, five logins, and five places where service-line reporting is impossible. Strkr collapses that into one workspace with Products as the SOW builder, Projects as the post-close handoff, and the manager tier shipped by default on every paid plan.
What matters
Strkr
HubSpot + HoneyBook + spreadsheets
Number of surfaces the manager opens for a 1:1
1 (Strkr)
4 to 5 (HubSpot, HoneyBook, Sheets, Dropbox, docs)
Retainer plus project forecast
Native hierarchical rollup with both revenue shapes
Two Google Sheets reconciled by hand
Win rate by service line
Native dashboard tile, filterable
Quarterly Sheet rebuild by the manager
SOW line-item reporting
Products module as structured SKUs
PDF archaeology across Dropbox
Deal risk flags
Native Strkr AI with specific reasons
Manager gut-feel on Monday morning
Same-day referral speed-to-first-touch
Native SLA flow with manager escalation
Slack ping to whoever is online
Closed-won to project handoff
Native Projects engagement in minutes
Email thread, 11-day average lag
Retainer renewal pacing
Native 90/60/30 tiles with health signals
A calendar reminder on the AE phone
1:1 prep
Context pre-loaded into the AE card
Manager builds a Google Doc Sunday night
Monthly cost per seat (manager stack)
One per-seat line, see pricing page
Four to five per-seat lines stacked
See the CRM built for the first sales manager at a 10 to 100 person agency.
Start a trial with the full agency manager stack enabled: dual retainer and project pipelines, hierarchical forecast with submit-lock, service-line win rate reporting, Products as SOW builder, Projects post-close handoff, Strkr AI deal risk, 1:1 prep view. Migrate from the HubSpot plus HoneyBook plus Sheets stack in an afternoon and keep every deal, retainer, and signed SOW intact on the way in.
Can Strkr replace the HubSpot plus HoneyBook plus Google Sheet stack most agencies run?
For most 10 to 100 person agencies, yes. Strkr ships both the CRM half (contacts, accounts, deals, pipelines, activity timeline, email sync) and the agency-specific half (retainer tracking, Products as SOW builder, Projects as post-close engagement, service-line reporting, renewal pacing). The HubSpot license comes off the next renewal, HoneyBook or Dubsado retires once the Projects module takes over post-close, and the forecast Sheet retires in week two. For agencies that need deep client-portal invoicing beyond what Projects covers, Strkr integrates with QuickBooks or Xero rather than replacing the ledger.
How does Strkr handle the retainer plus project revenue blend most agencies run?
Strkr treats retainer and project as two distinct pipelines inside one workspace. The retainer pipeline tracks MRR committed per account with renewal pacing at 90, 60, and 30 days plus an expansion lane for existing clients. The project pipeline tracks SOW value, close probability, and start date for net-new engagements. Both pipelines carry service-line tags so dashboards render win rate, cycle time, and deal size per service across both books. The forecast rolls both halves up in one hierarchical submission, so the agency owner sees a single quarterly number with the retainer plus project split preserved underneath.
What does Strkr AI do for an agency sales manager specifically?
Strkr AI runs three jobs for the agency manager tier. First, deal risk flagging across both pipelines: a daily pass that flags retainer renewals with no QBR booked and RFPs where procurement has gone silent for more than the per-stage threshold. Second, call summary coaching: a structured summary per pitch, discovery, and SOW-walkthrough call that extracts discovery questions, objections raised, pricing moments, and competitor mentions, with jump-links to the exact timestamps worth reviewing. Third, scope-creep sentinel on Projects engagements: when a milestone burns through budgeted hours, the AE and AM get pinged with the overage number and the change-order path. All three ship on every paid tier without a premium AI add-on.
How does the Products module work as an SOW builder for an agency?
Products in Strkr treats each service as a first-class SKU with price, unit (hour, month, project), bundle rules, service-line tag, and gross-margin band. AEs build an SOW by picking SKUs from the catalog instead of free-typing scope language, which locks pricing to a shared source of truth and makes service-mix reporting trivial. The signed SOW carries structured line items that map one-to-one to Projects milestones on closed-won, so the AM walks into the kickoff knowing exactly what sold at what price. The quarterly service mix question (how much paid media, how much creative, how much strategy) runs off the Products module instead of opening every PDF.
Can a first-ever agency sales manager customize the pipeline without a RevOps hire?
Yes, for the manager-tier levers. The manager can tune per-pipeline and per-stage hygiene thresholds, pod quota per AE per period with ramp and split-credit rules, forecast category labels, 1:1 note templates, risk-digest cadence, service-line tags, and RFP stage-gate rules without a RevOps ticket. Deeper schema changes (new custom objects, API-level integrations with the ledger, flow logic that writes to external systems) still route through an admin by design, so pod configuration stays local but shared architecture stays coherent. Most agencies run Strkr without a dedicated RevOps hire until headcount passes 50 reps.
How does the closed-won to Projects handoff work day-to-day?
The deal moves to closed-won. Strkr Projects creates the engagement automatically, maps SOW line items to milestones with the dates and hours the AE agreed to, assigns an account manager by service-line routing rule, and blocks a kickoff on the AM calendar within 72 hours. Every call recording, email thread, shared file, and signed SOW from the sales cycle attaches to the engagement timeline, so the AM opens the first-day view with the full history the AE built. The handoff that used to burn 11 days of email tag now happens before the AE finishes writing the victory Slack, and scope-creep sentinel starts watching the engagement from day one.
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