Sales & CRM

How to build a strategic account plan as Event Agency Founders

Sales & CRMFor Event Agency Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

You track event leads in a HoneyBook or Dubsado pipeline, but your 'account plan' for a corporate client is still a Google Doc you updated once in January and a Gmail thread with 47 messages. When a venue sales manager asks for your client's budget history and preferred setup styles, you're ctrl-F-ing through emails. When a hotel asks for a recap of last year's event before quoting the next one, you're rebuilding it from memory. There's no single place that holds the account: the contact history, the vendor relationships tied to it, the revenue from past events, the proposals outstanding, and the next meeting date.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Sales & CRMFor Event Agency Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A CRM where every corporate account has its own view: past events, total spend, open proposals, key contacts (venue coordinator, internal planner, procurement), and the next touchpoint — all in one place you can actually pull up on a call.

An account plan document that Starch generates from your CRM data and exports as a slide deck or shareable brief — so before every renewal conversation, you walk in with numbers, not vibes.

Automations that keep the account plan current without you doing it manually: new Gmail threads attach to the right account, invoice totals roll up from Stripe, and a weekly digest surfaces accounts you haven't touched in 30+ days.

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

CRM Presentation Agent

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule so incoming vendor and client emails attach to the right account automatically. Connect Stripe from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live to pull invoiced amounts per account into the CRM. Connect Google Calendar from Starch's synced providers to surface next meeting dates. Starch automates HoneyBook or Dubsado through your browser — no API needed — to pull proposal status into your account view if you want it there. Google Sheets (for your existing lead tracker) connects from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can query it live during the initial import.

Prompts to copy

Build me a CRM for a corporate event agency. Each account needs: company name, primary internal contact, secondary contact (usually procurement), event type preferences (conference, offsite, team dinner), average annual budget, preferred venues, last event date, next event date, open proposal value, total invoiced this year, and account status (prospect, active, renewal, dormant). Pipeline stages are: Inquiry, Proposal Sent, Contract Out, Deposit Received, Event Complete, Renewal.

Pull the account data for Meridian Financial Group from my CRM and build a 6-slide strategic account brief. Include: account summary with total spend over 2 years, events we've produced together with dates and formats, key contacts and their roles, vendor preferences we've noted, open proposal status, and recommended next steps for the Q3 renewal conversation.

Every Monday at 8am, check my CRM for corporate accounts where the last contact date is more than 30 days ago and the account status is 'active' or 'renewal.' Send me a Slack message listing those accounts with the account owner, last event date, and next event date if it's populated.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Start from the CRM starter app in Starch's App Store and immediately customize it for your agency: describe the fields that matter to you (event type, preferred venues, annual budget, renewal date) and Starch reshapes the schema. You're not forced into a generic B2B sales pipeline.

2 Import your existing contacts from your HoneyBook, Dubsado, or Google Sheets lead tracker. Starch connects to Google Sheets from its integration catalog and queries it live; paste in your Dubsado export CSV and Starch maps the fields.

3 Wire Gmail as a scheduled-sync provider. Starch syncs your message history and starts attaching incoming threads to the matching account based on sender domain and contact name — no manual logging.

4 Connect Stripe from Starch's integration catalog so the agent can query invoiced amounts per client. Tell Starch: 'Show total amount invoiced per account in the last 24 months, broken out by event.' That number lives in the account record.

5 For each strategic account, add a 'vendor notes' section to the CRM record — preferred AV company, caterer, hotel contact, dietary restrictions history. Describe this to Starch: 'Each account should have a vendor preferences section with free-text fields for AV, catering, venue, and a notes field for anything recurring.'

6 Before a renewal conversation, open the Presentation Agent and describe the brief you need: 'Pull Meridian Financial Group's account data from my CRM and build a 6-slide account brief with spend history, events produced, key contacts, vendor preferences, and a recommended next steps slide.' Starch builds the deck in minutes.

7 Set up the 30-day dormancy automation: tell Starch to check every Monday for accounts where last contact is over 30 days ago and status is active or renewal, then Slack you the list. This replaces the mental overhead of remembering who you haven't touched.

8 For accounts sourced from a venue partner or referral, add a 'referral source' field and ask Starch to surface which referral channels are producing the highest-value accounts by average annual spend. This is a question you can ask in plain language — 'which referral sources have the highest average event budget?' — and get a real answer.

9 When a new inquiry comes in and you want to check if they've worked with your agency before, ask your CRM directly: 'Has anyone from Apex Capital ever reached out to us?' Starch searches across contacts, email history, and past events.

10 Export the completed account plan as a PDF or PowerPoint from the Presentation Agent and share it with your second coordinator before a site visit or client call — so the whole small team is working from the same prep doc, not a forwarded email chain.

11 After each event wraps, update the account status to 'renewal' and log the post-event debrief notes in the account record. Starch's CRM lets you ask 'what feedback did we get from clients who ran offsites last quarter?' — surfacing patterns you'd normally lose in a shared Google Doc.

12 Review your pipeline weekly with a saved view: 'Show me all accounts with open proposal value over $20,000, sorted by proposal sent date, with the next touchpoint date.' That view replaces your Friday spreadsheet audit.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Meridian Financial Group — Q3 2026 Renewal

Sample numbers from a real run

Annual Leadership Summit (2024) — invoiced	48,500
Q2 2025 Team Offsite, 40 pax — invoiced	22,750
Q4 2025 Holiday Dinner — invoiced	14,200
Q3 2026 Proposal Outstanding (Leadership Summit)	52,000
Deposit Received — Q3 2026	13,000

Meridian Financial Group has been a client since late 2023. Before Starch, the prep for their annual renewal call meant opening four browser tabs: the HoneyBook pipeline, a shared Google Doc with post-event notes, a Gmail search for 'Meridian,' and last year's invoice in QuickBooks. With the account plan built in Starch, one record holds all of it. Total invoiced across three events: $85,450. Preferred venue: hotel ballroom with breakout rooms, 80–120 pax. AV preference: in-house AV with your agency-sourced backup technician. Primary contact: Dana Cho, VP of People. Secondary: procurement via Marcus Reid (slow to approve; needs PO number on all contracts). Open proposal for Q3 2026 Leadership Summit: $52,000 — deposit of $13,000 already received. Last contact: 11 days ago (Gmail thread re: AV quote). The Presentation Agent pulled this into a 6-slide brief in about four minutes from a plain-language description. The account manager walked into the renewal call with printed copies and closed the upsell to add a pre-event dinner the same afternoon.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Open proposal value by account (total dollars in proposals sent but not yet contracted)

Revenue per account over trailing 12 months (to identify which clients are growing vs. stagnating)

Days since last contact per active account (to catch renewals before they go cold)

Proposal-to-contract conversion rate by event type (offsite vs. conference vs. dinner)

Average time from inquiry to proposal sent (a slow first response is often where the deal is lost)

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

HoneyBook or Dubsado

Great for proposal and contract workflows but not designed for account-level planning across multiple events with the same client — you end up with siloed project records and no single account view.

Cvent or Social Tables

Built for enterprise event teams with dedicated ops staff; overkill in price and complexity for an independent agency doing under $2M in events, and they won't customize to your specific fields without professional services.

HubSpot CRM (free tier)

Covers contacts and deals but requires significant manual configuration to match how an event agency actually tracks accounts, and the schema doesn't bend to fields like 'preferred AV vendor' or 'post-event debrief notes' without paid add-ons and admin time.

Google Sheets + Google Docs

Free and familiar but the account plan lives in a doc that nobody updates after the first event, and there's no way to ask it a question like 'who hasn't been contacted in 30 days' — it just sits there.

Notion CRM template

Flexible enough to build something close to what you need, but you're building it yourself from scratch with no AI authoring help, and it won't pull in Gmail threads or Stripe invoice data automatically.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, presentation agent all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

I use HoneyBook for proposals and contracts. Does Starch replace it or work alongside it?

Alongside it. HoneyBook handles your proposal and e-signature workflow well — Starch isn't trying to replace that. What Starch adds is the account-level layer that HoneyBook doesn't have: a single record per corporate client that aggregates past event history, revenue, vendor preferences, and next steps across multiple projects. Starch automates HoneyBook through your browser — no API needed — to pull proposal status into your account view if you want it, but you keep HoneyBook as the tool your clients see.

Can Starch actually pull my invoiced totals per client from Stripe or QuickBooks?

Yes, with some specifics worth knowing. Starch connects to Stripe from its integration catalog and queries invoiced amounts live when your app runs. For QuickBooks, Starch syncs your data on a schedule — invoices, bills, payments, and vendor records all come through. One current limit to be aware of: QuickBooks P&L and Transaction List report views are temporarily disabled pending a connector fix, but the underlying entity-level data (invoices, payments, journal entries) syncs normally and is enough to roll up revenue by client.

My team is two people. Is this overkill for a small operation?

The scale is actually the point. A two-person agency can't afford to have one person's head be the account plan. If you're doing 15–30 events a year for 8–12 repeat corporate clients, the cost of a bad renewal conversation or a missed follow-up is real. Starch doesn't require a CRM admin or a RevOps hire to configure — you describe what you want and it builds it. The Monday dormancy report alone is worth setting up; it takes about five minutes and replaces a mental habit that's easy to drop during busy season.

What about client confidentiality? I'm not comfortable with my client's event budgets and contact details in a cloud tool I don't control.

Fair concern to raise directly. Starch is a cloud-based product — there is no on-premise or self-hosted option today. It is not SOC 2 Type II certified at this time. If your enterprise clients require SOC 2 Type II vendor compliance before you can store their data in a third-party tool, that's a real limit you should weigh. For most independent agency use cases, where the data is the same type that already lives in your Gmail, HoneyBook, and Google Drive, the risk profile is comparable.

The account plan slide deck — does Presentation Agent produce something I'd actually send to a client?

Presentation Agent is currently in development — you can request beta access to get notified when it launches. What's available now is the CRM and the ability to export account data in structured formats. For the presentation layer today, you'd describe the account summary to Starch, get back a structured data view, and move it into your own Google Slides or a PDF template. The gap closes when Presentation Agent ships.

Can I track vendor relationships — my preferred AV company, the caterer I use at the Westin — inside the same system?

Yes. When you describe your CRM to Starch, you can tell it to include a vendor section per account: 'Each account should store preferred AV vendor, preferred caterer, preferred venue contact, and notes on what's worked before.' Starch builds that into the schema. You can also build a separate vendor contacts list and ask questions across both — 'which AV companies have we used for events over 100 pax and what was the outcome?' is the kind of question your CRM should be able to answer.