Sales & CRM

How to clean up stale deals in your pipeline as Event Agency Founders

Sales & CRMFor Event Agency Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Your pipeline lives in a spreadsheet, a HoneyBook dashboard, and a Gmail folder you've been meaning to sort since February. A corporate holiday party inquiry from October is sitting in 'Proposal Sent' even though the client ghosted after the venue walkthrough. Three wedding leads from a bridal show are marked 'Warm' but haven't had a touchpoint in six weeks. You only notice the rot when a prospect you'd written off calls back and you can't find the original quote. There's no alert, no flag, no one telling you that eight deals in your pipeline haven't moved in 30 days — you just hope you remember to check.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Sales & CRMFor Event Agency Founders3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live CRM built around how your agency actually tracks events — by event date, proposal status, venue, and client budget — with every stale deal surfaced automatically so nothing ghosts you silently

An Email Agent that flags unanswered threads from leads, drafts follow-up notes in your voice, and reminds you which inquiries have gone cold before they fall off your calendar entirely

A weekly automation that scans every open deal, identifies which ones haven't had activity in your defined window, and Slacks or emails you a triage list every Monday morning

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 Email Agent Task Manager

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule so email threads attach to the right deal automatically. Connect HubSpot or Capsule CRM from Starch's integration catalog if you're migrating existing contacts — the agent queries them live during the import. Google Calendar is synced on a schedule so event dates in your CRM stay current. For HoneyBook or Dubsado, Starch automates them through your browser — no API needed — to pull in lead and proposal status.

Prompts to copy

Build me a CRM for my event agency. Deals should have fields for: event type (wedding, corporate, social), event date, venue name, estimated budget, proposal sent date, contract signed status, and deposit received. Pipeline stages are: Inquiry, Proposal Sent, Venue Confirmed, Contract Out, Booked, and Lost. Flag any deal that hasn't moved stages in 21 days.

Show me every deal in 'Proposal Sent' or 'Contract Out' where the last activity was more than 14 days ago. For each one, draft a short follow-up email in my voice that references the event type and date.

Every Monday at 8am, give me a list of all open deals with no activity in the last 21 days, grouped by stage. Include the client name, event date, and last touchpoint. Send it to my Gmail.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Start from the CRM starter app in the Starch App Store, then describe your agency's actual pipeline stages — Inquiry, Proposal Sent, Venue Confirmed, Contract Out, Booked, Lost — and add the fields that matter to you: event type, event date, venue, estimated budget, deposit status.

2 Connect Gmail through Starch's scheduled sync so every thread with a lead or vendor automatically attaches to the matching deal by email address and event keyword.

3 If you're running existing contacts in HubSpot or Capsule CRM, connect either from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries them live and maps your old fields into the new schema.

4 For HoneyBook or Dubsado leads you want to pull across, Starch automates those platforms through your browser — log in once, describe what you want imported, and the agent handles the rest without needing their API.

5 Set your staleness threshold: tell Starch that any deal sitting in the same stage for more than 21 days (or 14 days for Proposal Sent — where time kills) should be flagged in a dedicated 'Needs Attention' view.

6 Install the Email Agent and point it at the same Gmail sync. Tell it: 'Any email thread tagged to an open deal where I haven't replied in 5 business days should surface a draft follow-up and create a task.'

7 Build the Monday morning automation: 'Every Monday at 8am, pull all deals with no stage movement in 21 days, group by pipeline stage, include client name, event date, estimated budget, and last touchpoint, and send me the list via Gmail.'

8 Use the Task Manager to capture any manual follow-up actions the CRM flags — reply to Meridian Events about the venue deposit, resend contract to the Chen wedding — with P1/P2 priority and due dates so nothing gets buried in a to-do app you don't open.

9 Ask the CRM a natural-language question once a week: 'Which deals have an event date in the next 60 days but no signed contract?' — this catches the ones that are technically 'active' but operationally at risk.

10 For deals you're officially closing out as lost, tell Starch to move them to Lost, log the reason (ghosted, budget, competitor, date conflict), and archive the email thread — so your active pipeline only shows real opportunities.

11 Once the pipeline is clean, build a simple dashboard view: count of active deals by stage, total estimated revenue in pipeline, and number of deals past their follow-up date — so you can see the health of your book of business at a glance before any client call.

See this running on Starch

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

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Worked example

April 2026 pipeline audit — Harvest Events Co.

Sample numbers from a real run

Chen Wedding (Proposal Sent, 47 days stale)	18,500
Meridian Corp Holiday Party (Contract Out, 22 days stale)	34,000
Park & Bloom Rehearsal Dinner (Inquiry, 31 days stale)	6,200
Alvarez Quinceañera (Proposal Sent, 15 days stale)	9,800
TechCo Summit Q3 (Venue Confirmed, 19 days stale)	52,000

Before setting up Starch, founder Tara at Harvest Events Co. had all five of these deals marked as 'active' in a shared Google Sheet — $120,500 in theoretical pipeline. The Monday morning automation flagged that the Chen wedding hadn't moved from Proposal Sent in 47 days. Email Agent found the last thread: Tara had sent a revised menu pricing PDF and never heard back. Starch drafted a three-line follow-up in Tara's voice referencing the June 14th date and the florist's availability window. Tara sent it in one click; the client replied within two hours — they'd been waiting on a venue confirmation and assumed Tara was handling it. Meridian Corp's $34,000 holiday party contract had been sitting unsigned for 22 days; the automation caught it, created a P1 task in Task Manager to call the procurement contact, and the contract came back signed that week. The TechCo Summit, at $52,000, had gone quiet because the internal event coordinator had changed — the CRM flag prompted a quick LinkedIn check (automated through the browser) that surfaced the new contact name. Total revenue rescued from stale-deal limbo in one week: three confirmed, one restarted, one officially closed as lost and removed from the pipeline so the numbers meant something again.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Number of open deals with no activity in the past 21 days (staleness count by stage)

Proposal-to-contract conversion rate, tracked by event type (wedding vs. corporate vs. social)

Average days from Proposal Sent to contract signed

Total estimated pipeline value vs. total value of deals active in the last 14 days (the real pipeline)

Follow-up response rate — how many stale-deal outreach attempts result in a reply within 5 business days

Comparison

What this replaces

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

HoneyBook or Dubsado

Both are purpose-built for event and creative service businesses with strong client-facing workflows, but neither lets you ask natural-language questions about your pipeline or build custom automations without manual rules configuration — and neither flags stale deals without you setting up every trigger yourself.

HubSpot CRM (free tier)

Free HubSpot gives you a real pipeline with email integration, but the schema is rigid, the deal fields don't map cleanly to event-specific data like event date or venue, and you'll spend more time configuring it than actually running your pipeline.

Google Sheets + manual review

Zero cost and total flexibility, but it only tells you what's stale when you remember to check — there's no automated flag, no email drafting, and no activity tracking unless you build all of that yourself.

Airtable with automations

Airtable's views and automations can approximate a CRM, but you're building every trigger, every view, and every formula yourself, and connecting email threads to the right record still requires manual effort or a paid integration.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, email agent, task manager 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 client management. Can Starch pull my existing leads and proposals in?

Yes. HoneyBook doesn't have a public API that Starch connects to natively, but Starch automates HoneyBook through your browser — no API needed. You log in once, describe what you want imported (lead names, event dates, proposal status, budget), and the agent navigates and extracts it. It's not instant, but it works.

Will the CRM understand event-specific fields like event date, venue, and event type — or do I have to force it into generic deal fields?

The whole point of Starch's CRM is that you describe your schema and it builds around you. Tell it 'I need fields for event type, event date, venue name, estimated guest count, proposal sent date, and deposit received' and that's exactly what you get. You're not adapting to someone else's pipeline model.

What counts as 'activity' on a deal? If I open the record but don't do anything, does that reset the staleness clock?

You define it when you build the automation. Common definitions: a stage change, an outbound email sent from the Gmail sync, a note logged, or a task completed against that deal. Opening a record doesn't count unless you tell Starch it should. Be specific in your prompt and the automation reflects that.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I sometimes have event budgets and client contact info in here.

Not yet — Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified as of today. If your clients have strict data handling requirements (enterprise corporate clients, for example), that's worth knowing upfront. Most independent agency founders find it fine for their stack, but it's an honest limit worth naming.

I have 80 leads from a bridal show in a spreadsheet. Can I bulk import them?

Yes. Connect Google Sheets from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live — and describe the field mapping: 'Import all rows from Sheet 1, map column B to client name, column D to event date, column F to estimated budget, and mark all as Inquiry stage.' Starch's import worker handles the pagination and field mapping.

Can the Email Agent draft follow-ups in my voice, or will they sound like a chatbot?

It learns from your existing sent emails in Gmail (synced on a schedule). The more you've written, the closer it gets to your tone. You always see the draft before it sends — there's no auto-send without your review unless you explicitly set that up. For a first-touch follow-up after a bridal show, you'd probably edit one or two lines. For a routine 'just checking in on the venue deposit' message, most founders send it as-is.

What happens to deals I mark as Lost? Do they disappear or can I look back at them?

Starch archives them — they're out of your active pipeline view but not deleted. You can ask 'show me all deals I lost in Q1 2026 and why' and get a real answer if you logged a loss reason. It's useful at the end of a quarter when you want to see whether you're losing more to budget objections or to competitors.