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Software and tools can help your agency run more efficiently, free up your time, give you more visibility into projects, and help you grow your business faster.
It’s always worth revisiting the tools that are in your agency’s arsenal to see if there are ways you can improve your systems and facilitate better work.
In this guide, we’ve brought together some of our favorite tools to help your agency grow. From process management, to outreach1, to automating tasks, there’s going to be at least one tool that’ll be useful for your agency.
We’ve broken the guide up into different sections, based on what the tools are best for.
Let’s take a look.
How to Pick the Best Tools for Your Agency
1. Decide on Your Goals
There’s no point signing up to 10 different tools and hoping they’ll transform your agency and processes. Before you test any out, make sure you know why you’re considering them.
Do you need a tool to help you connect with more leads?
A platform to manage your projects and tasks?
A place to store documentation and SOPs?
A platform to speed up your monthly reports?
By starting with the goal you have in mind, you can reverse engineer the problem you have and fill the gaps in your current systems with the right tool, not just the tool with the best marketing.
2. Look at Potential ROI
Rather than looking at software as a cost, look at them as a tool to deliver your agency a return on investment.
For example, if you’re paying for a cold email tool, consider how many new leads you can generate and close. If it’s a project management tool, how many hours will it save you or your employees every month on manual tasks?
If you’re unsure, make sure to map out current costs and time spent on tasks, and compare it to when you start testing a new tool. If the ROI is there and it makes your life easier, it’s nearly always going to be worth the investment.
Now, let’s jump straight into the recommendations.
Best Tools for Agency Client Acquisition and Outreach
1. QuickMail
Cold email automation software to help your agency start conversations with new prospects and run outreach campaigns for your own clients.
Reach Key Prospects and Decision-Makers
QuickMail is a cold email and sales engagement platform designed to help you start more conversations with your prospects.
You can personalize every email you send with attributes unique to every prospect, like their name, city, company, or even entire custom sentences. You’ll get more replies, and ultimately, more customers for your agency.
You can create campaigns with multiple touch-points and automatic follow-up emails if your prospect doesn’t reply, and considering our research found that over half of replies come from a follow-up email, it’s a vital step.
Collaborate as a Team
Most cold email software isn’t built for teams. QuickMail is. As your agency grows, you can add your teammates and run multiple campaigns for your agency, or for your clients from each of their inboxes. It means you can spread out your sending volume and ensure you don’t run into email deliverability problems that could damage your agency’s results.
There’s also an Audit Log to keep track of your team's activity that shows you which campaigns they’re running and what they’re working on every day.
Track Every Key Metric for Your Client Campaigns
With QuickMail, you can track every key metric that matters, such as open rates, positive reply rates, and unsubscribe rates.
You can even run A/B tests to find your email templates and variations that perform best and show your clients your results with real data to back it up.
Keep Your Agency’s Inboxes Safe
Another unique feature QuickMail offers is a native integration with MailFlow, which is a free email warmup tool that helps prevent your emails from landing in the spam folder.
MailFlow will send and receive emails on your account, and if an email you send to another inbox in our network lands in spam, it will be automatically removed and replied to. It’s the perfect way to show ESPs like Google and Outlook that your emails generate engagement and deserve to land in your prospect’s primary inbox.
QuickMail is the best cold email tool for agencies that want to start more conversations with qualified prospects.
Pricing: Basic plan starts at $49 a month
Key Features:
Automate multi-step cold email campaigns
See campaign-level and email-level metrics
Easily personalize every email using attributes
Native integration with MailFlow, a tool that will improve your email deliverability
2. UpLead
Lead database to help you find high-quality leads and prospects that match your buyer profile.
UpLead allows companies to find and target potential customers. Their prospect database contains 62+ million prospects, and you can filter prospects by company size, revenue, or any of their 50+ search filters. You can then access information such as their email and phone number, which you can use as starting points when getting in touch.
Agencies can use UpLead to find prospects that are a perfect match for your services, without needing to manually sort through LinkedIn profiles or company websites.
There’s an email verification system built-in to help improve the validity of contacts in the database. For the price, it’s one of the best options out there.
Pricing: The trial version is free; paid plans start at $74 a month
Key Features:
Find verified email addresses for key decision-makers
CRM integration to add leads to your outreach tools
Search by demographics, firmographics, and tech stacks
3. Lyne
AI email writing tool that helps you write personalized email opening lines.
AI Email writing tools are growing in popularity. First, it’s important to note that these aren’t going to replace you or your email copywriter. But, they might help spark some inspiration and speed up your email writing process.
One interesting tool out there is Lyne. It’s designed to help you write completely personalized opening lines using AI. It searches platforms like Crunchbase, LinkedIn or news sites for mentions of your prospect and their company, then, it generates an opening line that you can use in your cold emails to show you’ve done some background research when reaching out to potential clients or agency partners.
You’ll still need to manually verify that the opening lines make sense, but it’s a good way to get a head start and can greatly streamline things when working with large volumes of potential leads. It’s one of the most useful tools for agencies running high-volume cold outreach that want to ensure every message is personalized.
Check out our list of AI email writing tools for other good options.
Pricing: Free plan available, paid plans start at $25 per month for 100 lines
Key Features:
Only requires your prospects email or LinkedIn profile to start
Create custom opening lines at scale
2,500 introductory lines per hour
4. Zopto
LinkedIn outreach tool that helps you easily generate leads for your agency at scale.
Zopto is a LinkedIn lead generation tool to help you automate your outreach. With a quick setup and easy-to-use interface, you can start using it in no time. Zopto can help you search for potential clients using Linked Sales Navigator or Premium filters and then add those prospects to campaigns, automatically sending InMails, messages, or connection requests to them.
There is also an A/B testing feature and advanced analytics reporting to help you improve your lead generation campaigns each time and easily share reports with clients if you’re running LinkedIn campaigns for them. Zopto integrates with your CRM and other agency tools via Zapier to keep all of your work in sync.
If you’re considering running any lead generation campaigns on LinkedIn, check out our other recommendations here.
Pricing: Monthly plan starts at $160 a month
Key Features:
Send automated messages and connection requests
Track campaign results from your dashboard
Link it to your other sales automation tools via Zapier
Best Tools for Agency Client and Project Management
1. Service Provider Pro
Agency management software to manage your workflows and client engagements.
Service Provider Pro (SPP for short) is an agency tool designed to help you manage client relationships.
There are a variety of features, such as the ability to create payment forms for different plans your agency offers, easy project management systems that you can use to communicate directly with clients, a CRM-like area to track your customer information, and a members area where your clients can log in and manage their subscription or view past invoices.
SPP is excellent if your agency is growing fast and you want to ensure no client or deliverable gets lost in a busy Google Drive or email thread.
You’ll streamline your team's workflow and ensure everyone is focused on high-priority tasks, and customers are never worried about where their deliverables are. It’s one of the best tools for agencies that want to perfect their client communication and deliverables process.
Pricing: From $99 per month for 5 team members
Key Features:
Manage all client communication and deliverables from one place
Use your own custom domain
Let clients view and manage invoices and billing details
2. SocialBee
Social media management tool to centralize all social media efforts in one platform.
SocialBee is a social media automation tool that allows companies to add, organize, schedule, and share content across multiple social platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and Google Business Profile.
With its user-friendly interface, agencies can effortlessly manage multiple social accounts for various clients. This centralized approach ensures teams can access and monitor all client accounts in one place, saving time and avoiding the hassle of switching tabs.
SocialBee facilitates seamless teamwork with features such as inviting team members, assigning roles and permissions, and collaborating on content creation and scheduling.
Pricing: Start with a 14-day free trial (no credit card required). Agency-appropriate paid plans start at $99 per month. However, lower tiers start from $29 per month.
Key Features:
Organize your accounts in multiple workspaces and easily collaborate with your team
Set up a posting schedule and add your content to a category-based system
Use AI to create images and captions you can schedule in advance
3. Airtable
Airtable is a database management solution that allows you to track projects, clients, and progress.
Airtable is a bit like Google Sheets but comes with more visual workflows and options to help you track and manage your client relationships and projects.
You can rely on templates or build your own custom databases and work setup to suit your agency's needs. You can assign team members to tasks, set to-do’s and due dates, and easily understand if your client projects are under control.
You can also use Airtable to publish forms, so it can double-up as a way to collect client information early on in your engagements. It also connects with Zapier, so you can build automation sequences to speed up and eliminate manual, repetitive tasks.
Pricing: The trial version is free; the Basic plan starts at $12 per user per month.
Key Features:
Create forms to onboard clients
Link databases together to easily manage multiple client projects and timelines
Connect with Zapier to link with other useful tools
4. ClickUp
A project management system with customizable features to help you track projects your way.
ClickUp is a project management platform and workflow management tool for agencies that’s user-friendly, straightforward, customizable, and affordable — making it ideal for agencies ready to grow from a couple of clients to many.
You can organize your workspace into different sections, which makes it easy for you as an agency owner to give permissions to certain employees, or jump between client projects to see if your team is on track and will hit their deadlines.
One useful feature to keep your processes consistent is the ability to create task templates that auto-populate with the next steps you, or your team, need to take to complete a project. For example, once you move a task into ‘in progress’, it can show a checklist that someone needs to follow and complete before it’s complete.
It’s a great platform to use as you’re scaling your agency, and it connects with all of the other agency tools you’re using.
Pricing: The trial version is free. The unlimited plan costs $9 per member per month.
Key Features:
View projects in a Gantt chart, calendar, board, table view, and more.
Create shared or private boards to quickly onboard extra freelancers
Easy-to-use and affordable tool for agencies
Create templates for repetitive tasks
5. Asana
Project management software that helps you track work visually and effectively.
Asana is like ClickUp, but has been around longer, and with that, has had time to build more features.
It’s an excellent project management tool for agencies of all kinds. You can add as many team members as you need to, create projects, manage tasks, and you could even use it as a basic CRM.
Asana works well for process-driven agencies, as you can make sure tasks are completed in a specific order and follow set procedures before they get signed off on.
Asana also integrates with hundreds of other applications, so whichever other tools you’re using as part of your agency workflow, there’s a good chance you can connect it to Asana to keep your business running smoothly.
Pricing: The trial plan is free. The premium plan starts at $9.99 monthly per user.
Key Features:
Flexible project management tool that works well for agencies
Create repeatable processes and systems
Add team members and manage project visibility
6. Productive
Agency-focused alternative to Trello, with features designed to help agencies manage clients and projects.
Productive is an alternative to SPP that’s ideal for agency owners who need one place to manage everything from billing to task management.
It’s packed with features almost any agency needs. You can see an overview of your sales pipeline, track the time your team spends on tasks, resource plan based on your team availability, manage projects and tasks, and manage all of your client billing from the platform.
You don’t need to be particularly technical to set it up properly for your agency, and it’s perfect for helping you track your profitability and grow without putting excessive pressure on your team or systems.
Pricing: Starts at $12.50 per user per month.
Key Features:
Manage invoices, track budgets, and monitor costs
Easily collaborate on tasks and create custom task workflows
Resource management capabilities to track the availability of your team and resources
Best Tools for SOPs and Agency Process Management
1. Process Street
Tool for agencies to manage their recurring processes and workflows, as well as create SOPs.
Process Street is a tool for agencies that lets you manage recurring processes, create SOPs, and build checklists to make sure your business runs in a repeatable, predictable way. It’s an ideal platform for agencies who want to systematize their work, which is key to sustained growth.
There are a variety of pre-built process templates that you can use if you’re new to creating SOPs for everything from onboarding new clients, to a website launch checklist, but you can easily build your own.
You can connect Process Street with your other tools, such as your CRM, to make important client information or notes for your team readily available wherever someone is working.
It also integrates with Zapier and you can connect to over 500 apps.
Pricing: The trial version is free. The basic plan starts at $15 per user per month.
Key Features:
Easily build SOPs for your agency
Keep every process predictable and repeatable
Connect with other agency tools for easy data transfer
2. Notion
Manage all of your agency processes in easily accessible and visual documentation.
Notion is a tool you might already be using at your agency as it’s rapidly grown in popularity. It’s a versatile platform, but where it excels is creating documentation.
You can create a structured home for your process documents and SOPs that you can share with employees, freelancers, clients, or your agency partners.
The docs you can create are flexible, so you can add checklists, headings, images, videos, or any other useful resources you want your team to have access to.
Arguably the best thing about Notion is that it’s flexible. You can turn it into almost anything you want for your agency — as well as being excellent for documentation, you can use boards to make a lightweight CRM or project tracker, create client presentations, or even host all of your employee information there.
Pricing: Free plan available, paid plans from $4 per month.
Features:
Create visual documentation and processes
Add checklists, bullet lists, detailed text docs, and anything else you need to include
API to link it with your other agency tools
3. Zapier
Zapier connects all of your agency tools and apps for easy workflow automation.
Zapier is one of our favorite tools for agencies. It’s an automation tool that lets you connect various apps and tools you use in your business and automate repetitive parts of your workflow without needing to know how to code.
For example, if you ask new clients to fill out a form during onboarding, Zapier can automatically add that information to your CRM or into a Google Sheet, or if someone replies to one of your cold email campaigns, you can be notified in Slack.
With the right setup, Zapier is a powerful addition to any agency and will free up hours of your time every week to focus on high-leverage tasks and important projects. You can even hire Zapier consultants to come into your agency and find ways it can help streamline your day-to-day work.
For example, you can link your QuickMail account with Zapier to automate tasks like:
Notify your #sales channel in Slack when a prospect replies
Automatically add people who reply to an email to a new stage in your CRM
It’s an amazing agency tool to simplify tasks you’ve been spending time doing manually without needing to code or knowing how to use an API.
Pricing: The trial version is free. Paid plans start at $20 monthly for individuals and $250 monthly for teams.
Key Features:
Create Zaps to link your other agency tools together
See full task history
Works with almost every software on the market
Wrapping Up: Best Tools for Agencies
These tools for agencies are all excellent platforms to help you improve an area of your business. However, it’s important to remember that no single tool will transform your agency overnight.
As I mentioned earlier, make sure to review why you need each tool for your agency rather than simply subscribing to all of them and never using them.
If you have a real pain point, you’ll be able to make smarter buying decisions for your agency. When you onboard your team to your new tools, you’ll see tangible results.
And, if you’re ready to start growing your agency with cold email, or need a cold email platform designed for agencies, make sure to try out QuickMail with a free trial.
