Sales & CRM

How to run a weekly sales pipeline review as Event Agency Founders

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

Your pipeline lives in three places at once: HoneyBook or Dubsado for proposals and contracts, a Google Sheet you update on Sunday nights, and your memory for anything that fell through the cracks. Every Monday you're manually cross-referencing which leads got a proposal, which corporate clients are waiting on a venue quote, which contracts were sent but never signed, and which deposits are now two weeks overdue. You can't see at a glance whether Q3 is solid or empty. By the time you realize a warm lead went cold, it's been 19 days since you replied.

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 live event agency CRM that tracks every lead, proposal, and signed contract in one view — with pipeline stages built around how your agency actually sells (inquiry → site visit → proposal sent → contract signed → deposit received)

A weekly automated pipeline review that surfaces every open deal, flags stalled proposals older than 7 days, and shows outstanding invoices by event date — delivered to your inbox or a Slack channel before you start your week

Gmail thread history attached automatically to the right deal so vendor emails, client back-and-forth, and proposal conversations are searchable from the same place you track the deal status

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 Sales Agent CRM

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule so email threads and contact history flow into the CRM automatically. Connect HoneyBook or Dubsado from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries them live when your pipeline view needs proposal status or contract data. If your inquiry form lives on a site without a direct API (Squarespace form, Typeform, a custom contact page), Starch automates capturing those submissions through your browser — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me an event agency CRM with pipeline stages: New Inquiry, Proposal Sent, Contract Out, Deposit Received, Event Confirmed, and Closed Lost. Each deal should track: client name, company (for corporate events), event date, event type (wedding / corporate / social), estimated value, venue shortlist, catering vendor, proposal sent date, contract signed date, and deposit due date. Flag any deal where the proposal has been out for more than 7 days with no reply.

Every Monday at 7am, pull all open deals from my CRM and send me a pipeline summary: deals by stage, total pipeline value, which proposals have been sitting longer than 7 days, which contracts haven't been signed yet, and which deposits are overdue relative to the event date. Send it to my Gmail.

Connect my Gmail so that when I get an email from a contact already in my CRM, the thread automatically attaches to their deal. If the sender isn't in the CRM yet, flag it for me to add.

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

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Gmail — Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule, so client emails, vendor threads, and proposal replies all become searchable from your CRM without manual copy-paste.

2 Tell Starch your pipeline stages in plain language. Start with the CRM app from the App Store and describe your actual event sales process — 'New Inquiry, Proposal Sent, Contract Out, Deposit Received, Event Confirmed, Closed Lost' — and Starch rebuilds the schema around those stages.

3 Add the fields that matter to your business: event type, event date, venue shortlist, catering vendor, estimated event value, deposit due date. These aren't available in a generic CRM out of the box — you describe them and Starch adds them.

4 Import your existing leads from your Google Sheet or HoneyBook export. Tell Starch: 'Import this CSV, map the contact name to client name, the event date field to event date, and flag any row missing a proposal sent date as Proposal Pending.' Starch cleans and loads it.

5 Set up the 7-day stall alert: 'Flag any deal in Proposal Sent stage where more than 7 days have passed since the proposal sent date and no reply email from that contact has come in.' This runs automatically against your synced Gmail data.

6 Build the Monday morning pipeline review automation. Describe it: 'Every Monday at 7am, summarize my open deals by stage, calculate total pipeline value, list every proposal older than 7 days, every unsigned contract, and every deposit that's due within 14 days of the event date. Email me the summary.' Starch sets up the schedule and runs it.

7 Add your corporate inquiry sources. If your RFP submissions come from Cvent or a venue marketplace with a web portal, Starch automates pulling those through your browser — no API needed — and creates a new deal in your CRM.

8 Wire up the Gmail thread-to-deal matching. Tell Starch: 'When I get an email from a contact already in my CRM, attach the thread to their deal. If the sender is new, create a New Inquiry card and ask me to confirm the event details.'

9 Ask your CRM a natural-language question mid-week: 'Which clients haven't heard from me in more than 10 days?' or 'How many confirmed events do I have in September and what's the total contracted value?' Get a real answer, not a canned report.

10 At the end of each month, run a close rate review: 'Show me how many inquiries came in this month, how many got proposals, how many converted to signed contracts, and the average days from inquiry to contract signed.' Use this to spot where leads are falling out.

11 Share a deal-specific timeline with a client directly from Starch — describe the view you want and Starch builds a shareable page pulling from the same data you planned from, so there's no second spreadsheet to maintain.

12 Adjust pipeline stages or add new fields at any time by describing the change. No admin portal, no support ticket — tell Starch 'add a field called AV vendor to every deal' and it updates the schema.

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 — Week of August 25

Sample numbers from a real run

Hartley Corporate Retreat (Contract Out)	28,500
Rivera Wedding (Deposit Received)	19,800
Okafor & Associates Holiday Party (Proposal Sent — 11 days)	14,200
Chen Family Gala (New Inquiry)	9,500
Landmark Realty Q4 Summit (Proposal Sent — 3 days)	22,000

On Monday at 7am your pipeline summary lands in Gmail. Total open pipeline: $94,000 across 5 active deals. Starch flags two issues immediately: the Okafor & Associates proposal has been out for 11 days with no reply email detected in your Gmail sync — that's past your 7-day threshold and needs a follow-up today. The Hartley Corporate Retreat contract was sent 6 days ago and still hasn't come back signed; the event is September 18, which means you're 4 days away from your internal 10-day contract buffer before venue deposits are due. Starch surfaces both of these in the summary so you're not digging through HoneyBook tabs to find them. The Rivera wedding is clean — deposit received, event confirmed for October 4. You ask the CRM: 'What's my confirmed revenue for Q4?' It answers: $19,800 confirmed, $64,700 still in proposal or contract stages. You know exactly where to push this week.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Proposal conversion rate: inquiries that become signed contracts, tracked monthly

Average days from inquiry to signed contract, by event type (wedding vs. corporate)

Total pipeline value by stage at the start of each week

Number of proposals stalled more than 7 days with no client reply

Outstanding deposit value relative to upcoming event dates in the next 60 days

Comparison

What this replaces

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

HoneyBook or Dubsado

Strong for proposals, contracts, and client portals — but pipeline visibility is limited, the reporting doesn't flex around your actual stages, and you still end up with a separate spreadsheet for weekly deal reviews.

Google Sheets pipeline tracker

Free and fully flexible, but it doesn't pull in Gmail thread history, doesn't send you automated Monday summaries, and goes stale the moment you forget to update a row on Friday.

HubSpot Sales Hub

Powerful CRM with solid pipeline views, but it's priced for sales teams, takes real configuration time to reflect how an event agency actually sells, and won't connect to your HoneyBook proposals without custom integration work.

Cvent or Social Tables

Built for enterprise event teams with procurement budgets — not a realistic fit for an independent or small agency, and neither gives you a founder-level pipeline view across all your active leads.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, sales agent crm 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 run my proposals and contracts through HoneyBook — can Starch connect to it?

Yes. Connect HoneyBook from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries it live when your pipeline view or weekly summary needs proposal or contract status data. If you also want to pull data from HoneyBook's web portal directly, Starch can automate that through your browser — no API needed.

Can Starch build a CRM that matches how my agency tracks events, not just generic B2B sales stages?

That's the point. The CRM app from the App Store is a starting point — you describe your actual stages (inquiry, site visit, proposal, contract, deposit, confirmed), the fields that matter to you (event date, event type, venue, catering vendor, deposit due), and Starch rebuilds the schema around your workflow. You're not mapping your process onto someone else's template.

Will Starch pick up vendor emails and client replies automatically, or do I have to log them manually?

Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule. Once Gmail is connected, the agent matches incoming and outgoing threads to the right deal by contact. You don't log anything manually — the conversation history is there when you open the deal.

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

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today — worth knowing if you're handling sensitive corporate client data or have contractual compliance requirements. There's also no on-premises or self-hosted option. If SOC 2 is a hard requirement for a specific enterprise client, that's worth flagging upfront.

I get RFP leads through venue marketplaces that don't have an API. Can Starch still capture those?

Yes. If the marketplace has a web portal you can log into, Starch can automate pulling those submissions through your browser and creating new inquiry cards in your CRM — no API required. This is how Starch handles tools that exist on the web but don't publish an integration.

What if I want to track which leads came from referrals vs. Instagram vs. my website inquiry form?

Add a lead source field when you describe your CRM to Starch — 'add a lead source field with options: referral, Instagram, website, venue marketplace, repeat client.' It's one sentence to add the field. Then your weekly pipeline summary can break down pipeline value by source so you know where your best leads actually come from.

Can Starch replace HoneyBook entirely for proposals and contracts?

Not today. Starch builds the pipeline visibility and weekly review layer on top of your existing tools — it doesn't generate proposal PDFs or collect e-signatures. The Contract Lifecycle Management app that would handle that workflow is coming soon. For now, Starch works alongside HoneyBook: HoneyBook handles the client-facing documents, Starch handles the pipeline view and the weekly summary that keeps you from missing follow-ups.