A CRM for a marketing agency should hold every client company with all of its contacts, your new-business deals, each client's delivery work as projects, client requests and revisions as tickets, and renewal dates as tasks that email someone before the term ends. Make one structural decision before importing anything: keep every client in one workspace, or give sensitive clients their own. Leave invoicing, time tracking and ad reporting to the tools built for them.
Most guides to choosing a CRM for a marketing agency are lists of products with a "best for" badge on each. That helps you find names. It doesn't tell you how to set the thing up so your account managers actually use it in month three. This guide does the second part. It assumes a small agency, somewhere between two and fifteen people, running a mix of monthly retainers and one-off projects, and it uses Argento for the menu paths. The structure works in most general-purpose CRMs.
What makes a marketing agency CRM different
A product business sells once and ships. An agency sells, then does the work, then has to win the client again at renewal, and the people doing the work are usually the ones who hear first that a client is unhappy. Three consequences follow for how you set up a marketing agency CRM.
The client is a group of people, not one contact. A typical account has a marketing manager who approves work, a founder who signs the renewal, and someone in finance who asks about invoices. All three need to be on the client record. And some people work with several of your clients: a fractional CMO, a franchise group's brand manager, a web developer you share accounts with. In Argento, one contact can be linked to more than one company, so that person is one record with several company chips instead of three duplicates.
Delivery staff need logins. Designers, writers and media buyers log revisions and see what the client asked for. If they can't get into the CRM, requests live in Slack threads and personal inboxes, and nobody can see the full account when the renewal call comes. That's why pricing per seat hurts agencies more than most businesses.
Renewal is the real pipeline. A retainer that quietly lapses costs more than a lost pitch. The CRM has to put renewal dates in front of someone well before they arrive.
The first decision: one workspace or one per client?
This is the setup choice agency owners most often get wrong, and it's hard to undo after a few hundred records. In Argento a workspace is a separate set of records: data in one workspace isn't visible from another, and team chat is limited to that workspace's members. You can switch between them from the profile menu under Switch Workspace, and Manage Workspace Access controls who sees each one. Here's how the two setups compare.
| One workspace for the whole agency | A workspace per client (or per client group) | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Most agencies under about 20 clients | Clients with confidential data, white-label work, or their own sending domain |
| How you tell clients apart | Company record, plus Industry and Type fields | The workspace itself |
| Agency-wide view | Yes: one dashboard, one task list, one search | No: you switch workspaces to see each client |
| Contractor access | Sees all clients in the workspace | Can be added to only the client they work on |
| Campaign mailbox | One connected mailbox per person | Set per workspace, so each can send from that client's address |
| Plan needed in Argento | Starter ($25/mo, 1 workspace) | Growth ($50/mo, 5 workspaces) or Scale ($100/mo, 10 workspaces) |
Our view: start with one workspace unless you have a specific reason not to. You'll want the agency-wide view far more often than you'll want separation. Create a second workspace for your own new-business prospecting only if the prospect list is large enough to clutter client records, and split out individual clients when a contract, a contractor or a sending domain forces it. Two details make splitting cheaper than it sounds: a person counts as one seat however many workspaces they belong to, and contact and company limits are pooled across all your workspaces rather than counted per workspace. (We priced the six-client agency case on each plan in our post on flat-rate CRM pricing.)
Where each part of agency life goes
Once the workspace question is settled, map your vocabulary onto the records before anyone imports a spreadsheet. Agreeing on this in a 20-minute meeting saves weeks of "where did you put that?"
| Agency term | Record in Argento | Setup notes |
|---|---|---|
| Client or prospect | Company | Use Type for Retainer client, Project client, Prospect, Past client. Set Referral Source on every one. |
| Client stakeholders | Contacts linked to the company | Put their role in Position (Approver, Signer, Billing) so anyone can see who decides. |
| Pitch, proposal, upsell | Deal | Status, priority and a due date that doubles as the chase date. |
| Retainer period or project | Project linked to the company | One project per retainer period or per scoped project, with a due date. |
| Revision, request, "quick question" | Support ticket with subtasks | Status Waiting when it's on the client. |
| Renewal, QBR, check-in | Task with a reminder | The reminder emails the owner on the due date. |
| SOW, contract, brand guidelines | Documents, in a folder per client | Storage counts toward the plan: 15GB on Starter. |
| How we onboard, how we report | Knowledge Base article | Write it once; new hires read it. |
How to track retainers and renewals in a CRM
"Retainer" is the word that makes agency owners assume they need agency-specific software. For most small shops you don't. A retainer has three parts, and each maps to something simple.
- The agreement. Upload the signed SOW to the client's folder in Documents. Write the term, the monthly scope and the notice period in the company's Notes in one line, for example "12-month term from Feb 1, 4 blog posts + 2 email sends per month, 30 days' notice." Anyone opening the client sees the deal in five seconds.
- The work. Create a project under Projects → Add Project for each period, linked to the company, with priority and a due date. Monthly projects ("Harbor Dental, March retainer") give a clean history and make it obvious when a month slipped. Quarterly projects mean less admin. Pick one convention and use it for every client.
- The renewal. Add a task under Tasks → Add Task, linked to the company and the person who signs, due 60 days before the term ends, with a reminder on. Name it so it can't be misread: "Renewal conversation: Harbor Dental, term ends Jan 31." Sixty days gives you time for a results review before the client starts comparing quotes.
Add a second recurring habit: a quarterly review task for every retainer client, due the last week of each quarter. It's the meeting where you show results and hear complaints early, and it's the one that gets skipped when a team is busy. A dated task with an email reminder is a small thing that changes whether it happens.
A month at a six-person agency
Say you run a six-person marketing agency: you as owner, two account managers, a designer, a writer, and a part-time media buyer who's a contractor. You have 14 retainer clients and a few project clients at any time, all in one workspace on Starter. Here's what the CRM does during an ordinary month.
Week 1: new month, new projects
Each account manager creates that month's project for their clients. In the Projects list, sorted by due date, last month's unfinished projects stand out because they're still open. Two are: one waiting on client photos, one where the writer is behind. Both get a ticket so the reason is on the record.
Week 2: the revision pile
A client emails asking for a third round on their landing page copy. The account manager opens a ticket under Tickets → Add Ticket, links it to the company and the approving contact, and adds subtasks: "revise hero copy," "swap testimonial section for stats block," "send for approval." The writer ticks them off. When it goes back to the client, status changes to Waiting. On Friday, filtering tickets by status shows every item stuck on a client, which is the list you need before anyone says "we're behind."
Week 3: a referral and a pitch
A past client refers a regional landscaping company. The inquiry arrives through the agency's website form, which is connected to the CRM, so a contact appears in Contacts without anyone retyping it. The owner researches the business in Discover by entering its domain, imports the marketing lead as a contact, and creates a deal with a due date for the proposal. The proposal PDF goes into a new folder in Documents.
Week 4: renewals and reviews
A renewal reminder fires for a client whose term ends in 60 days. Before the call, the owner asks Claude, connected through Argento's MCP server: "Give me the full profile for Harbor Dental: contacts, open tickets, projects this year and anything overdue." The answer shows four revision tickets in two months, all on the same landing page. That's the real topic of the renewal call, and it's better to raise it than to be surprised by it.
None of this needs automation rules or a custom build. It needs agreed record types, dated tasks with reminders, and everyone, including the contractor, having a login.
Running new business without a separate sales tool
Agency new business is usually referrals plus a little outbound, run by the owner in spare hours. Keep it light:
- Five deal statuses are enough: Inquiry, Discovery call, Proposal sent, Verbal yes, Closed. If a deal has no due date, it has no next step, and it will go quiet.
- Connect your contact form. Argento's form capture works with Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms, WPForms, Elementor and plain HTML forms, which covers most agency sites. (Our guide to CRM for small service businesses walks the same capture-to-follow-up path for contractors and consultants.)
- Research before the call. Discover scans a prospect's website, Google, Google Maps and LinkedIn for people and contact details, with optional Vibe Prospecting and Hunter.io sources and Reoon email verification. You pick which leads to import.
- Mark past clients. Set their company Type to Past client and add a check-in task six months after the work ended. Former clients who left on good terms are the warmest leads an agency has.
One thing Argento won't do here: deals don't carry win probabilities or forecasts. For an agency pitching a handful of new clients a quarter, that's rarely a loss. Knowing which proposals are out and when you'll chase each one matters more than a percentage.
Client emails and the mailbox question
Argento's Campaigns send from a connected mailbox (Microsoft 365, Google, or any SMTP server) with {{first_name}} merge fields, scheduled sending and open and click tracking. For agencies, the useful detail is that the mailbox is saved per workspace. If a client has its own workspace, you can connect that client's sending address there, and mail goes out from their domain, not yours. Every member sets up their own mailbox, and nobody can send from anyone else's.
Sending is capped at 50 emails per person per day, and larger lists continue automatically over the following days. That makes Campaigns a good fit for your own agency newsletter, renewal check-ins or a small client's customer emails. It isn't a replacement for a dedicated email marketing platform on a client with a 40,000-person list, and we'd tell you to keep that client in their ESP. Whatever you send, follow Google's email sender guidelines on authentication and unsubscribes, and the FTC's CAN-SPAM compliance guide, which says that both you and the client can be held responsible when you send on a client's behalf.
Where a general CRM stops for agencies
Be honest about this before you buy. A general-purpose CRM like Argento isn't the right tool for:
- Time tracking and billable hours. Keep your time tracker. Note the retainer scope in the CRM so you can compare.
- Invoicing and retainer billing. Accounting software handles this.
- Ad and analytics reporting. Client reports come from the ad platforms and analytics tools. Store the finished report PDF in Documents so it's on the client record.
- Visual boards. Argento shows projects, tickets and tasks as list views with status columns you can sort and filter, not as drag-and-drop boards. Creative teams that live in boards sometimes keep a separate project tool for production and use the CRM as the client record.
- Client portals. Argento is built for your team's internal record, not as a portal where clients log in to approve work. Share deliverables the way you do today.
If production management is your main pain, read our guide to all-in-one CRM and project management to judge whether projects inside the CRM are enough for your team, or whether you need both tools.
What a CRM for a marketing agency costs when the whole studio needs a login
Count everyone who should see client history, not just whoever sells. For the six-person agency above, that's six logins including the contractor. Argento's price is per plan, not per person: Starter is $25 a month for up to 10 users and one workspace, Growth is $50 for up to 50 users and five workspaces, and Scale is $100 for up to 100 users and ten workspaces. Deals, tickets, tasks and projects are unlimited on every plan, which matters when you're opening a project per client per month. Full details are on the pricing page. There's a 14-day free trial, and if you cancel, the workspace stays read-only and exportable for 30 days.
A good trial: put in three real clients (one retainer, one project client, one prospect) and see whether your account managers open the CRM before client calls by week two. If you use Claude, the Help Center covers connecting the MCP server in a few minutes, and the workspaces section covers creating and sharing workspaces if you decide to split clients out.
Frequently asked questions
What should a marketing agency CRM track?
Five things: client companies and every contact at them, new-business deals, the delivery work for each client as projects, client requests and revisions as tickets, and renewal and review dates as tasks with reminders. If those five are current, the agency always knows what it owes each client and what's coming up for renewal.
Should an agency use one CRM workspace or one per client?
Most small agencies should start with one workspace and tell clients apart by company. Use separate workspaces when a client's data must be kept apart, when a client sends campaigns from its own domain, or when contractors should only see one account. Argento's Starter plan has one workspace, Growth has five and Scale has ten.
How do I track retainers in a CRM?
Keep the signed agreement in Documents, run each retainer period as a project linked to the client, and add a renewal task with a reminder 60 days before the term ends. Invoicing stays in your accounting software; the CRM records what was promised and when it comes up again.
Do agencies need a CRM if they already use a project management tool?
Usually, yes. A project tool tracks this month's deliverables. A CRM tracks the client relationship over years: who the contacts are, what was pitched, when the retainer renews and which past clients might come back. Some agencies keep both; others run light projects inside the CRM to avoid two logins.
Can I send client newsletters from an agency CRM?
You can send campaigns from Argento through a connected mailbox, and the mailbox is set per workspace, so a client workspace can send from the client's own address. Sending is capped at 50 emails per person per day, so it suits relationship emails and small lists rather than large newsletter programs.
How much does a CRM for a marketing agency cost?
It depends on whether you pay per seat. Agencies add designers, writers and contractors who need logins but don't sell, so per-seat plans grow fast. Argento is a flat price per plan: $25 a month for up to 10 users, $50 for up to 50 and $100 for up to 100, with a 14-day free trial.
Run clients, retainers and requests in one place
Companies and contacts, deals, projects, tickets, tasks with reminders, documents and team chat, with logins for your whole studio. Flat pricing from $25/month for up to 10 users. 14-day free trial.
Start your free trial