Sales & CRM

How to set up your first crm as Event Agency Founders

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

Your lead tracking lives in three places at once: a HoneyBook or Dubsado pipeline for inquiring couples and corporate clients, a Gmail thread for every vendor conversation, and a Google Sheet you built yourself to track which proposals are out, which contracts aren't signed, and which deposits are overdue. When a corporate client emails asking about a product launch event from six months ago, you're digging through Gmail search to reconstruct the thread. There's no single view of your live events, open proposals, and outstanding vendor quotes. You're the CRM.

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 built around your actual event pipeline — inquiry, site visit, proposal sent, contract signed, deposit received, day-of confirmed — with fields that matter to you (event type, headcount, venue, lead source, and total contract value)

An Email Agent that triages your Gmail inbox, attaches vendor threads to the right event record, flags unanswered proposals, and drafts your first response to new inquiries in your voice

A live dashboard that shows every open lead, every proposal past the 5-day mark with no response, every unsigned contract, and every invoice not yet paid — all in one place

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

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule, pulling messages and threads into the Email Agent and CRM automatically. Your Google Calendar is also synced on a schedule so event dates can be cross-referenced against your pipeline. HoneyBook, Dubsado, Airtable, and Google Sheets are all reachable from Starch's integration catalog and can be queried live if you want to import an existing lead list or pull historical deal data during setup. Starch automates form-submission workflows (like a Typeform inquiry form) through your browser — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me a CRM for my event agency. I need pipeline stages: New Inquiry, Proposal Sent, Contract Out, Deposit Received, Active Planning, Completed, Lost. Fields for each deal: event type (wedding, corporate, social), event date, headcount estimate, venue name, total contract value, lead source (referral, Instagram, Google, wedding wire), and whether the contract is signed. I want to be able to ask 'which proposals have been out for more than 5 days with no reply?' and get a real answer.

Set up an Email Agent connected to my Gmail. Triage incoming emails by actual priority — a new inquiry from a potential client beats a vendor newsletter. When a new inquiry arrives, draft a first response in a warm but professional tone that acknowledges their event date and asks the three qualifying questions I usually ask: venue locked or still searching, approximate headcount, and catering budget range. Attach any email thread that mentions a venue or event date to the matching deal in my CRM automatically.

Create a dashboard that shows me: all open leads by pipeline stage, any proposal sitting in 'Proposal Sent' for more than 5 days, any contract in 'Contract Out' for more than 3 days, and any active event where the deposit hasn't been logged yet.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Start with the CRM starter app from the Starch App Store and describe your event agency pipeline in plain language — stages, fields, and the questions you always want answerable at a glance.

2 Tell Starch to add event-agency-specific fields: event type, event date, headcount, venue (confirmed or TBD), total contract value, lead source, contract signed (yes/no), and deposit received (yes/no).

3 Connect Gmail as a scheduled-sync provider so Starch pulls your inbox threads automatically; the CRM will begin associating existing email conversations with deal records where the venue name or client name matches.

4 Import your current lead list — paste it from your Google Sheet or connect Google Sheets from Starch's integration catalog — and let Starch map the columns to your new CRM fields and clean up any inconsistencies.

5 Set up the Email Agent connected to your Gmail; configure it to flag new inquiries as high priority and draft first-response emails using your preferred tone and the three qualifying questions you ask every potential client.

6 Tell Starch to create an automation: when a new email thread arrives that includes words like 'inquiry,' 'availability,' or an event date, create a new CRM lead record in 'New Inquiry' stage and attach the thread.

7 Build a stale-proposal alert: ask Starch to run a daily check for any deal in 'Proposal Sent' stage where the last email contact was more than 5 days ago, then Slack you or draft a follow-up email for each one.

8 Add a contract-tracking view: a filtered pipeline view showing only deals in 'Contract Out' sorted by how many days the contract has been outstanding, so you can chase signatures without manually auditing every deal.

9 Set up a deposit-tracking automation: any deal that moves to 'Active Planning' without a deposit received flag gets added to a weekly digest you review every Monday morning.

10 Connect Google Calendar as a scheduled-sync provider so event dates on confirmed deals appear in your calendar automatically and Starch can warn you if two events land on the same weekend.

11 Ask Starch to build a vendor-thread view inside each event record: all Gmail threads where the vendor's name or the event's venue name appears, grouped by event, so you're never searching Gmail for 'Grand Hyatt florals' again.

12 Once the system is running, ask Starch: 'Which leads came in through Instagram this quarter, and what's the average contract value for those that converted?' — that's the kind of question your old spreadsheet couldn't answer.

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

September 2026 pipeline review — Meridian Events Co.

Sample numbers from a real run

Corporate product launch — Hartwell Group (Proposal Sent, Day 7)	28,000
Wedding — Reyes-Nakamura (Contract Out, Day 4)	19,500
Social gala — Eastbrook Foundation (Deposit Received, Active Planning)	14,200
New inquiry — Chen Tech offsite (New Inquiry, Day 1)	0
Lost — Budget conflict (Thornbury Corp)	0

It's a Tuesday morning in September. You open Starch's dashboard and see immediately that the Hartwell Group proposal — a $28,000 corporate product launch — has been sitting in 'Proposal Sent' for seven days without a reply. Starch already drafted a follow-up email last night; you review it, make one edit to reference the venue they mentioned (The Foundry), and send it in 30 seconds. The Reyes-Nakamura wedding contract has been out for four days — Starch flagged it in your Monday digest, so you already nudged them. The Eastbrook Foundation gala is in active planning and the $14,200 deposit is logged. A new inquiry came in overnight from Chen Tech for a 90-person offsite — the Email Agent read it, created a lead record, and drafted a first response asking about their venue preference, headcount, and catering budget. You approve and send it without writing a word. The whole review takes twelve minutes instead of the forty it used to take when you were cross-referencing Gmail, HoneyBook, and a spreadsheet.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Proposal-to-contract conversion rate by lead source (referral vs. Instagram vs. Google)

Average days from proposal sent to contract signed

Number of open proposals past the 5-day follow-up mark at any given time

Average contract value by event type (wedding vs. corporate vs. social)

Outstanding unsigned contracts and unpaid deposits at week's end

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 wedding pros and handle contracts and payments natively — Starch doesn't replace that invoicing layer, but it gives you a smarter pipeline and email intelligence those tools lack.

HubSpot (free or starter)

HubSpot has a more mature contact database and marketing features, but you'll spend real time configuring it for event-agency stages and it won't draft first-response emails in your voice or auto-attach vendor threads to deals.

Airtable + Gmail + manual process

Flexible and cheap, but it's still you doing the work — Starch replaces the manual copy-pasting between your sheet and your inbox with surfaces that talk to each other automatically.

Cvent or Social Tables

Enterprise-scale tools built for large hotel and venue teams — expensive, complex, and designed for buyers managing dozens of properties, not a 2-5 person agency.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, email 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 already use HoneyBook for contracts and invoicing. Do I have to give that up?

No. Starch doesn't replace your contract or payment workflow — it sits alongside HoneyBook and gives you a smarter pipeline view and email intelligence. You can connect HoneyBook from Starch's integration catalog and pull your existing client list in during setup. Think of Starch as the layer that handles lead tracking, email triage, and follow-up intelligence — HoneyBook still handles the money.

Can Starch automatically create a CRM record when a new inquiry form comes in?

Yes. If your inquiry form is a Typeform, a Google Form, or lives on a page you can navigate to, Starch can automate the browser interaction and create the lead record. If your form tool (like HoneyBook's built-in form) has a connection available in Starch's integration catalog, the agent queries it live. Describe what your intake form looks like and Starch will figure out the right approach.

Will Starch actually read my Gmail threads and connect them to the right event?

Yes. Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule. You tell it the matching rules — event name, client name, venue name — and it attaches threads to the right deal record. It's not perfect on ambiguous threads (a client who also becomes a vendor referral, for example), but for the standard case of 'all emails mentioning Grand Hyatt florals belong to the Chen Tech offsite record,' it handles that automatically.

Is my client data secure? Are you SOC 2 certified?

Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. That's the honest answer. If a corporate client requires SOC 2 certification from your software vendors as part of their own compliance, that's worth factoring in. For most independent event agencies and small corporate shops, this isn't a blocker — but we'd rather tell you upfront than have you find out later.

Can I ask the CRM questions in plain English, like 'who haven't I followed up with this month?'

That's exactly how it's designed to work. The CRM isn't a fixed set of reports — you ask it questions and it queries your data. 'Which proposals have been out for more than a week?' 'What's my average contract value for corporate events this year?' 'Which leads came from Instagram and what did they convert at?' Type it in like you'd ask a colleague.

What if I want to track something specific to how my agency works — like whether the venue has a preferred vendor list that affects my florals margin?

That's the whole point of building your own CRM instead of using a template. When you describe your pipeline to Starch, include that field. 'Add a field called preferred vendor list — yes, no, or unknown — and a notes field for which vendors the venue mandates.' Starch adds it. You're not stuck with whatever columns HubSpot decided matter.