Sales & CRM

How to set up your first crm as Professional Services Founders

Sales & CRMFor Professional Services Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Your pipeline lives in HubSpot — or a Google Sheet, depending on who set it up last. Either way, the deal data is stale, the contact notes are wherever the last person put them, and the email thread proving a client said yes to scope expansion is buried in someone's Gmail. You're a 12-person consultancy; you don't have a CRM admin. You have a partner who configured HubSpot two years ago and a senior who updates it when she remembers. Retainer renewals sneak up because nobody set the reminder. Proposals start from three old decks stitched together in a Google Drive folder nobody can find. You know you need a real CRM. You don't need Salesforce.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Sales & CRMFor Professional Services Founders2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A CRM with pipeline stages, deal fields, and contact tracking that matches how a professional services firm actually sells — by relationship, proposal status, and contract value — not how a SaaS company tracks MRR

Automatic email thread history pulled from Gmail so every client record shows the last time you talked, what was agreed, and what's still open — without anyone manually logging calls

Alerts and follow-up prompts for retainer renewals, unanswered proposals, and contacts you haven't touched in 30+ days — so the revenue doesn't leak quietly while you're delivering work

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, so deal-linked email threads appear automatically on each contact and company record inside your CRM. Connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live to import your existing contacts, companies, and deals so you're not starting from scratch. LinkedIn enrichment runs through browser automation — no LinkedIn API needed — to keep contact profiles current as people change firms.

Prompts to copy

Build me a CRM for a 12-person management consultancy. Pipeline stages are: Warm Lead, Proposal Sent, Scope Under Review, Contract Out, Active Client, Renewal Due, Closed Lost. Key fields per deal: client company, primary contact, engagement type (advisory retainer / project / staff aug), estimated contract value, proposal sent date, contract start date, renewal date, and which partner owns the relationship. Pull in email history from Gmail so I can see the last thread on each deal without leaving the CRM.

Set up an email triage workflow that flags any client email I haven't replied to in more than 48 hours, any email that mentions contract, proposal, or invoice, and any thread where someone asked me a direct question. Draft a reply for each flagged email and show me a one-sentence summary of the thread before I read it.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Gmail as a scheduled-sync provider. Starch will pull your message history on a schedule so every client conversation is searchable inside your CRM from day one.

2 Connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog. The agent queries it live to pull your existing contacts, companies, and deal records — saving you from re-entering three years of relationships.

3 Open the CRM starter app from the Starch App Store. It ships with contacts, companies, deals, and email thread sync already wired; you're customizing from a working base, not building from zero.

4 Describe your pipeline to Starch in plain language. Name your exact deal stages (Warm Lead → Proposal Sent → Scope Under Review → Contract Out → Renewal Due), the fields that matter to your firm (engagement type, partner owner, renewal date, contract value), and Starch reconfigures the schema to match.

5 Tell Starch to flag stale deals: 'Show me every deal where the last activity was more than 21 days ago and the stage is Proposal Sent or Scope Under Review.' You'll get a live view — not a scheduled report — of proposals that have gone quiet.

6 Set up the Email Agent. Describe what matters to you: unanswered client emails over 48 hours, threads containing the word 'invoice' or 'contract', messages where someone asked you a direct question. The agent triages and drafts; you approve and send.

7 Ask Starch to build a renewal tracker: 'Create a view that shows every Active Client with a contract end date in the next 90 days, sorted by contract value, with a column showing the last email date.' This replaces the spreadsheet your ops person updates manually each month.

8 Add LinkedIn enrichment. Starch automates LinkedIn through your browser — no API needed — to pull current titles, companies, and connection data into each contact record so you know when a champion changes firms before you send the wrong proposal.

9 Set up a weekly digest automation: 'Every Monday at 8am, send me a Slack message listing deals that moved stages last week, contacts I haven't emailed in 30 days, and any retainer renewals due in the next 60 days.' This is the partner briefing that currently doesn't exist.

10 Test the CRM by asking it a plain-English question: 'Who are my five largest clients by contract value and when did I last email each of them?' If the answer takes more than five seconds or requires you to open another tab, adjust the data wiring.

11 Share the CRM with your team. Each partner and senior gets their own view — their deals, their contacts, their open follow-ups — without everyone seeing each other's private BD conversations unless you want that.

12 Review and refine after two weeks. Starch lets you add fields, change stages, and build new views by describing what you want. When the engagement mix shifts (you land a new service line, you start doing staff aug), the CRM changes with you.

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

Consultancy BD Cleanup — April 2026

Sample numbers from a real run

Meridian Logistics — Strategy Retainer (renewal due June 1)	144,000
Forrest & Hale — Operational Review (proposal out, no reply in 18 days)	62,000
Copeland Group — Staff Aug extension (verbal yes, contract not sent)	38,000
Wingate Partners — Warm Lead, intro call done	25,000

It's the first Monday of April. You open Starch and ask: 'Show me every open deal and flag anything that needs action this week.' Starch surfaces four items immediately. Meridian Logistics — your $144,000 retainer — renews June 1 and nobody has started the renewal conversation; last Gmail thread was 27 days ago. You ask Starch to draft a renewal check-in email from the thread context; it reads the last three messages, notes you wrapped a deliverable in March, and writes a one-paragraph note. You send it in 90 seconds. Forrest & Hale sent a $62,000 proposal 18 days ago with no reply; Starch flagged it in the Email Agent triage as an unanswered thread and drafted a follow-up. Copeland Group gave a verbal yes on a $38,000 staff aug extension but the contract never went out — Starch caught it because the deal stage was still 'Scope Under Review' with no contract date set. You update the stage to 'Contract Out,' note to send the MSA today. Wingate Partners is a warm lead you met at a conference; Starch pulled their LinkedIn profile via browser automation and updated the contact record to show the primary contact changed roles last month — information that would have made your next email awkward.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Weighted pipeline value by stage (Proposal Sent, Contract Out, Renewal Due) — updated without manual logging

Days since last client contact, per active account — the number that tells you which retainer is quietly at risk

Proposal-to-close rate and average days from proposal sent to signed contract — tracked per engagement type (retainer vs project vs staff aug)

Retainer renewal rate and average days of advance notice before renewal conversation starts

Partner-level pipeline coverage: each partner's open deals vs their revenue target for the quarter

Comparison

What this replaces

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

HubSpot (Sales Hub)

HubSpot has the deepest feature set, but configuring it for a services firm takes weeks, the schema fights you when you don't sell SaaS, and you'll pay for seats your team won't use consistently; Starch builds the schema around how you actually sell and doesn't require an admin to maintain it.

Google Sheets pipeline tracker

Free and flexible, but it doesn't read your Gmail, can't tell you who you haven't contacted in 30 days, and the manual update discipline breaks down the moment a senior goes heads-down on a client deliverable.

Notion CRM template

Good for small teams who live in Notion, but it won't pull email threads, won't alert you on stale proposals, and falls apart when you want to query across contacts and deals in plain English.

Kantata / Projector / Deltek

Purpose-built for professional services with resource planning and utilization tracking, but priced for 50+ person firms, takes a quarter to implement, and is overkill if you primarily need pipeline visibility and client relationship tracking.

Salesforce (Essentials or Sales Cloud)

Enterprise-grade and highly customizable, but the customization cost is real — you'll spend more time configuring it than closing deals unless you hire a Salesforce admin or a consultant, which defeats the point at 12 people.

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

We already use HubSpot. Do we have to rip it out?

No. Connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live — your contacts, companies, and deals pull into Starch without you abandoning HubSpot. You can keep updating HubSpot if some of your team prefers it; Starch reads the current state whenever it needs it. Think of Starch as the layer where you actually ask questions and get answers, not a HubSpot replacement.

Will Starch read all my Gmail, including personal threads?

Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule and makes it queryable inside your CRM. You control which labels and threads are surfaced in context. The Gmail OAuth consent screen currently shows the underlying connector's name rather than Starch's — that's on the roadmap to fix. It's worth knowing upfront: if your team has concerns about mail access, you can connect a dedicated work account rather than a personal Gmail.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We have clients who ask about data security.

Not yet — Starch is not currently SOC 2 Type II certified. That's the honest answer. If a client procurement process requires a SOC 2 report today, Starch isn't the right fit for storing that client's data in a Starch-synced integration. For most 12-person consultancies running BD data and internal pipeline tracking, this isn't a blocker, but it's worth knowing.

Our pipeline fields are unusual — we track things like whether the client has budget approval, who the internal champion is, and what the competing firm is. Can Starch handle that?

Yes — that's exactly what Starch is for. Tell Starch what fields you track ('I need a field for internal champion, budget approval status, and which competitor we're up against on each deal') and it adds them to your CRM schema. You're not constrained to a fixed object model the way you are in most CRMs. Describe what your deals actually look like and the CRM reflects that.

Can Starch automate my proposal process — pulling data from old proposals and assembling a draft?

Starch can pull contact and deal data into a proposal structure and work with Google Drive documents from the integration catalog, queried live when an app or automation runs. A fully automated proposal assembly workflow — selecting the right case studies, drafting the scope section, formatting the document — is buildable by describing it to Starch, but you'll want to test it against your actual proposal format first. Start with the CRM and email triage, get the pipeline data clean, and then layer in the proposal automation once you trust the underlying data.

What happens when a contact changes firms? Will the CRM update automatically?

Starch automates LinkedIn through your browser — no LinkedIn API needed — to pull current titles, companies, and profile data into your contact records. You can set this to run on a schedule so stale contact data gets flagged or updated without manual checking. If someone leaves a client company, you'll see it before it embarrasses you on an outreach email.