In 2021, the ITAM survey, run by Flexera, found this to be the case mostly in big companies—which is understandable given the number of software tools they procure for myriad reasons.
But if you were to factor that number into your agency business, it would be devastating. The cost of unused software for agencies usually means that you are underachieving your revenue numbers, your procurement is out of whack, and it’s going to go further downhill if you don’t rein in the wastage.
It’s tempting for agencies to buy every other software that promises to solve their pain points. But it isn’t until much later that they realize that there are too many moving parts in their techstack and they need to consolidate their software purchase and administration.
On the contrary, agencies that opt for fewer software that come with all-in-one capabilities have lesser problems related to pricing, scale, and maintenance. If you have burned your fingers buying or managing too many software to manage your agency operations, you will definitely relate to this blog.
In this post, we are going to recommend you nine must-have tools (or the type of tools) that will help you manage every aspect of your agency business.
Must-have tools in your agency techstack
As with any business, most agencies need to have a good grip on four core areas to grow sustainably:
- New client acquisition
- Client retention (contract renewals)
- Design
- Productivity
- Accounting
- Hiring
If your agency is going through a growth curve, sales and marketing (i.e. acquisition) always take more precedence than other functions because they help you pay the bill. This blog is structured in a way that reflects the priorities of a fast-growing agency. We have frontloaded software recommendations that can accelerate your agency’s sales and marketing followed by best-in-class tools that help you with hiring and accounting.
As such, here are the nine non-negotiable tools that you must have in your agency techstack to simplify your everyday processes.
1. HubSpot CRM
HubSpot is an all-in-one solution that helps your go-to-market (GTM) teams like sales, marketing, and customer support automate their workflows and collaborate seamlessly with each other.
You can use HubSpot CRM to unlock a world of possibilities for sales and marketing to accelerate your GTM activities. It’s a bit on the higher side (starting price: $50/user/month), but it has everything that a growing agency needs to amplify its sales and marketing efforts.
Here is a quick run-through of some of HubSpot’s most popular features:
For marketing
Forms: Create standalone, pop-up, embedded, and collected forms to gather the contact details that your business needs.
Email marketing: Send bulk emails that are tested and optimized for different devices and inboxes. Create better emails with a drag-and-drop editor and personalization tokens.
Ad management: Connect accounts from supported ad networks to your HubSpot account. Create audiences from your HubSpot contacts database, and see which ads generate customers.
Ad retargeting: Show ads to users who have visited your website. Retarget ads on Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn.
Landing pages: Create responsive landing pages built to convert using our drag-and-drop editor.
List segmentation: Create static or dynamically updating contact lists based on various criteria using properties in your HubSpot database. Use them to power more personalized content in email, on the web, and more.
Reporting dashboard: Get in-depth, customizable data on your marketing performance to know how you're doing and where to improve.
For sales
Canned snippets: Create a bank of reusable answers for prospects' most frequently asked questions that you can quickly add to live chats or emails to save time and help prospects faster.
Documents: Build a library of sales documents that you can easily share with prospects. Get insight into when and where prospects are most engaged.
Meeting scheduling: Share a link with customers that lets them see when you're free and book meetings with you, cutting out those tedious 'what time works best for you' emails.
Email templates: Save and reuse your best-performing emails, and share them with your team for a faster and more consistent way to communicate with prospects.
Sales automation: Automate your sales process and cut time-consuming operational tasks.
HubSpot also offers a host of other features as part of its Service Hub to help customer support effectively manage customer communications and relationships. The Service Hub features are included in the same price range as Marketing Hub and Sales Hub for each tier.
2. Hunter.io
If your agency has an outbound sales team that works hard to generate a steady pipeline for you every month, give them the gift of Hunter.io.
You must be wondering: how is Hunter any different from other people-finder tools like Apollo.io, ZoomInfo, or Lusha? To be fair, they all offer similar benefits and you might want to explore other tools that fall in the same price range.
But Hunter is easy to use, has a free plan, and is more reasonably priced than most people-finder tools—which is why we think it’s a better fit for a growing agency’s use cases.
Hunter also has a slightly different edge from the rest—it helps you find a prospect's contact information and email addresses based on the domain address. For instance, let's say you want to reach out to Richard Roe, an CMO at Big IT Solutions. With Hunter.io, you can type the company's domain, e.g., "bigIT.com," in Hunter's search box, and it would give you a list of all potential prospects working in that company.
Hunter also has a Google Chrome browser extension that lets you find email addresses in a single click. With Hunter.io, you can schedule, track, and templatize cold email campaigns and automate follow-ups with a good blend of personalization and automation. Hunter’s paid plans start at $49/month, but it also offers a free forever plan with limited offerings.
3. Avoma
This is going to look like a bit of a shameless plug—but for a good reason. A conversation intelligence tool like Avoma gives your agency actionable insights about your client conversations.
The insights allow your teams to adjust your interactions with customers in order to win more deals, build a smooth account handoff process, identify potential churn signals, and improve client retention.
At the core level, Avoma transcribes, summarizes, and analyzes audio and video meetings. It uses a combination of artificial intelligence (AI), speech science, and natural language processing (NLP) technology to parse and understand the meaning behind verbal conversations. Avoma also helps you organize this information in an easy-to-access manner for agency leaders to make data-driven business decisions.
At an advanced level, Avoma helps you coach new account managers to become better at their jobs, review their calls to improve performance, and saves you time by reducing manual note-taking and CRM data entry.
Like HubSpot, Avoma’s all-in-one offerings make it a worthy investment for agencies that can’t afford to let their SaaS spending go unaccounted for. With the wide range of solutions it offers under one roof—and at a starting price point of $18/user/month—it replaces several other point solutions by offering everything that you need, such as:
- Calendar booking
- Meeting agendas
- Call and meeting recording
- Meeting transcribing
- Sales coaching and feedback
- Revenue intelligence
- Sales enablement
- Voice of customers
- Competitor intelligence
For reference, other leading conversation intelligence software like Gong or Chorus start at a base price of $100/user/month and force you to sign annual contracts. Avoma offers more features at fair, flexible, and affordable subscription plans.
Avoma also integrates with several software that your agency might already be using. Here is a quick look at a few common tools that Avoma integrates with across different software categories:
- CRM—Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, Copper, Pipedrive, Zendesk Sell
- Video conferencing—Zoom, GoToMeeting, Google Meet, UberConference, BlueJeans, etc.
- Dialers—Aircall, RingCentral, ZoomPhone, Koncert, Kixie, Outreach, and Salesloft
- Calendar—Google, Outlook, Microsoft Exchange
4. Salesloft
SalesLoft helps your agency improve its sales and marketing outreach. It offers a wealth of features such as email automation, dialer capability, engagement tracking, analytics, reporting, etc.—all under the same roof—to help your sales and marketing achieve better outcomes.
On many fronts, Salesloft competes with Outreach.io in terms of its features and pricing. But Salesloft does a better job than Outreach when it comes to offering granular visibility into each pipeline opportunity, at each stage of the sales cycle.
Its capability to offer advanced, post-sales account data is probably the reason why Salesloft extends some of its offerings also to customer success teams. It’s a handy use case for agencies who want to improve client relationships and boost retention.
In Salesloft’s own words, the platform allows customer success managers to nurture customer relationships, scale account coverage, and improve contract renewal rates by up to 13%.
Coming back to its outreach features, Salesloft’s email design feature lets you build multi-step outreach cadences to increase your likelihood of booking more meetings. It offers three out-of-the-box steps that you can add to your cadence workflows—phone, email, and others.
This helps you strategically target prospects and share messaging that's aligned with your cadence goals—giving you an advantage in your multi-touch prospecting efforts.
Its analytics and reporting capabilities help you keep track of your email performance and score leads. Salesloft also sends you email notifications every time there’s a new lead so that you don’t have to check the platform for new updates.
Salesloft doesn’t have a free trial or a free plan and its paid plans start at $75/user/month (plus, a one-time onboarding fee that can go up to $3000).
5. ClickUp
ClickUp is an all-in-one productivity suite that's mostly known for its project management product. But it also has a wide variety of offerings ranging from word processing to CRM.
ClickUp offers a suite of apps that allows your agency teams to manage various projects under one roof. With ClickUp, you can streamline multiple projects such as task management, document collaboration, spreadsheets, goals tracking, wikis, chat, process automation, and team-specific templates for all kinds of projects.
Without a tool like ClickUp, every function within a company uses different favorite project management apps: sales and marketing teams usually prefer Asana or Trello while the implementation and engineering teams favor JIRA. While the individual teams are able to streamline the workflows within their team, they lack visibility of other teams’ workflows.
As a result, the GTM teams like marketing and account management have no clue about the implementation team’s plans and the latter don’t know what’s happening with the GTM team’s campaigns. Using different project management tools creates more silos and breaks collaboration between different teams.
ClickUp solves this problem by bringing all team’s projects in one place while letting the individual teams control access and visibility into their projects—if they want. Having all projects in one place makes it easier for your agency teams to improve productivity, collaborate with each other, and save costs.
For agencies, ClickUp offers specific features such as Workspace and Spaces. You can create a Workspace to include everyone that works in your agency and structure workflows across the different functions. Spaces are sub-units within Workspaces that allow you to add select members in a space and define workflows between different teams, departments, or groups at a high level.
ClickUp is easy to customize, which makes it a perfect fit for agencies of all sizes and shapes. The same thing applies to its pricing, too. ClickUp has a free-forever plan with loads of good functionalities in it while its paid plans start at a surprisingly low cost of $5/member/month.
6. Figma
Adobe recently bought Figma at reportedly $20 billion. It’s a rather large sum to pay for a design platform, but it’s also a reminder of how critical design is for businesses. If you run a creative agency that also undertakes design-related projects—or have an in-house design team for branding your agency—Figma is a must-have.
Figma allows your design team to brainstorm new ideas, collaborate on wireframes and designs, or execute ideas faster. Figma’s FigJam allows you the creative space to bounce off ideas virtually, share feedback, refine a design project, and whiteboard complex design concepts.
The designers can then take the project to the next level and start building design prototypes for feedback and iterations. Because the brainstorming and design happen in a shared virtual space, Figma leaves no room for miscommunication and silos between different teams and individuals.
Figma organizes all your design files as a single source of truth in the cloud, which means you can use the revision history to review all iterations of a design without the risk of losing any files.
Much like ClickUp, Figma offers some useful agency-specific features like the ability to create a virtual “workspace” where you can save all your client projects. You can also use this folder to create client-specific brand guidelines such as fonts, themes, color palettes, styles, and other design components.
Unlike ClickUp which doesn’t allow members outside of your agency to collaborate on a Workspace (i.e. clients), Figma lets you invite clients to collaborate on projects within the platform. This helps you speed up the feedback cycle and build better client relationships.
Figma’s pricing plans start at $12/user/month but it also offers a free plan with decent capabilities.
7. Breezy HR
Breezy HR is an applicant tracking software that offers you an all-in-one solution to most of your HR problems like job advertisement, candidate management, and collaborative hiring.
Breezy HR has one of the best UIs we have seen in any HR tool, which makes using the platform a breezy experience. Unlike other human resources management software, using Breezy HR is not just limited to the HR team. The tool is simple enough for anyone in your agency to manage the hiring process.
Breezy makes it easy for you to find the right talent for your agency mostly because of its automatic distribution network across all major online job boards like Indeed, Glassdoor, LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, Stackoverflow, and We Work Remotely.
Most agencies outsource their hiring process to headhunter agencies that take forever to source the right candidates. They also charge a hefty cut out of every new hire. If your agency wants to move the hiring process in-house and if you are still in the process of building out teams, Breezy is a good fit for you.
Breezy is also a perfect match for remote-friendly agencies that want to widen their talent sourcing to attract the best minds across the globe. Breezy HR has a forever-free plan with basic offerings like job board distribution, GDPR compliance, branded career site, and resume parsing. Its paid plans start at $143/month with much more advanced capabilities.
8. Ramp
Recommending an expenditure management software was a bit tricky for us because a lot of it depends on your agency’s spending capacity, goals, and several other variables.
Our general assumption is that most agencies are comfortable spending somewhat around $5,000–10,000 per month on a handful of software that are essential for their day-to-day operations.
If the spending budget overshoots that benchmark, it becomes a problem for your agency. And that’s exactly why you need a software to put a tab on your software spending.
Ramp is one of the fastest-growing companies in the spend management and corporate card software segment. It helps your agency manage all things related to expenses, procurement, bill payments, accounting, and finance.
More than 10,000 businesses all over the world use Ramp as their go-to platform for managing their company expenses. With Ramp, you can close your accounting books at record speed (86% faster) in contrast to using half a dozen other tools to manage all the finances.
According to Ramp, the platform has helped its customer base collectively save over $270 million so far by offering them accounting automation, savings insights, software negotiations, and cashbacks.
The tool integrates with 1000+ software across accounting, expense automation, productivity, and security which makes it easy for your agency to manage all your expenses easily from a single place.
And the best thing about Ramp is that it is absolutely free! They have recently secured a funding round of $750 million—so they might start monetizing their platform pretty soon. But as of this writing, Ramp has no paid plans and everything on the platform is free to use.
The downside is that Ramp’s services are available only for companies based out of the U.S. So if you are located in a non-U.S. region (or have offices in other geos), you might want to consider Ramp’s competition such as Brex, Divvy, Spendesk, or Expensify.
9. Bonus: Don’t forget the software you sell
If you are a software reseller, a channel partner, a managed service provider, or a certified agency that sells or manages a software to clients as a middleman—you must also regularly use the tool that you represent. It might sound like a given, but it’s worth reminding yourself that you can’t take the partnership for granted.
A partner agency is often looked at as an extension of the brand that they represent. Your agency should be proficient in using the product, understanding it inside-out, and articulating its benefits to the end user as efficiently as the employees of that company.
This is especially important in an agency setup because the level of technical know-how varies greatly from one person to another across your agency. Of course, most vendor companies offer some training for all partners to let them know about the latest updates, upcoming features in the roadmap, and other strategic developments. But the training knowledge doesn’t flow evenly across all hierarchical chains within your agency.
Every product vendor with a partnership program employs dozens of agencies to distribute their solution. The ones that gross maximum revenue are the ones who can sell or implement the solution to the right clients with the highest degree of client satisfaction. And using the product day in and day out is what separates a top-tier agency from its run-of-the-mill counterparts.
Eventually, the exercise of heavily using the products in your affiliate chain pays off high dividends when you translate the product knowledge to help clients exceed their desired goals and improve your client relationships.
The other upside of using your vendor partner’s tool is that your agency gets to use it for free—or at least for a discounted price. Therefore, you can enjoy the benefits the software offers first-hand while understanding its nitty-gritty to serve your own clients better.
Instead of relying on the training programs offered by the vendor company, develop your own agency playbook and offer a comprehensive, step-by-step training program to everyone (especially the new hires) so that they have good knowledge of the product.
Once again, Avoma’s capabilities come in handy here because it lets you curate topic-based playlists, build a searchable knowledge base, and ramp up new recruits' onboarding time. Avoma’s offerings for agencies help you improve productivity, boost collaboration, and build company-wide best practices for everyone to follow.
Do more with less
Not having the right technology at your disposal is usually a disadvantage. At the same time, having too many software in your techstack can equally be a curse because they end up becoming a liability that eats up your profit and productivity.
The trick is to find the middle ground where your agency can accomplish more with less, i.e. a handful of must-have software to manage your mission-critical processes.
In that sense, all-in-one software suites are a boon for agencies that want to focus more time on serving their clients and less time playing around with the tools. We hope that the above recommendations add value to your research in finding the best tools to run your agency. Give them a try—start by signing up with Avoma for agencies to improve your teams’ efficiency at scale.
