A CRM for marketing agencies that sell and set appointments by phone.

Why would a marketing agency need a CRM with a dialer?

Because much of the work that brings in revenue is a phone conversation: a discovery call with a prospect, or a call to a lead from a client's ad. A CRM with calling built in keeps those conversations, the follow-up and the pipeline in one place. There are two kinds of calling, and they need different setups.

• New-business calling: your team calls business owners and marketing leads to sell your agency's services. It's business-to-business outbound sales, with a pipeline from first call to signed retainer.
• Calling and texting for clients: you run appointment setting, lead follow-up or past-customer reactivation as a service. The contacts belong to your client, and the result is appointments or sales for them.
• Doing both: keep them apart from day one, because the contacts, the consent and the reporting are different.

How should an agency run new-business calling?

Pick a niche, build a list you can call every week and work it in fixed blocks. Calling a defined group, such as dental practices or roofing companies in one region, lets you talk about results you've had with businesses like theirs. Stages that each mean something specific keep the pipeline honest:

• To call: researched and on the list.
• Conversation: you spoke with someone who can decide.
• Discovery booked: a meeting is on the calendar.
• Proposal sent: scope and price are with them.
• Won: signed and handed over to delivery.
• Lost or not now: kept with the reason and a date to call back.

What should an agency track on each prospect, and how often should it follow up?

Track the deal's value plus the few details you'll sort and filter by. Put the expected monthly retainer, or a first-year value, on each deal, so the pipeline's value by stage shows what's really in play. Useful custom fields are website, services of interest, current agency or in-house team, rough monthly budget, decision-maker and lead source. Tags work for niche, city and campaign.

For cold prospects, a workable cadence is a call, voicemail and email on day one, another call on day three, then two or three more touches over the next two weeks, each with something useful, such as one finding from a quick audit of their site. When a call goes unanswered, TopReach can drop a voicemail, then send a text or an email on the days you choose, and it tracks every touch so nobody gets the same message twice. Save texts for people who've given you their number to text.

Once a client signs, TopReach's projects cover the work after the sale, so onboarding sits in the same workspace as the deal.

How do agencies run appointment setting and lead follow-up for clients?

Call new leads the day they arrive, try several times over a few days and book them into times the client has set aside. Leads from ads and forms cool quickly, so speed and persistence carry most of the value of this service.

Be clear on how leads arrive. TopReach doesn't connect to ad platforms, form tools or your client's CRM, so leads come in by spreadsheet import, which finds the phone number in whichever column the file uses. If your service promises a call within minutes of a form fill, check that a regular import fits your workflow before you commit.

Tag each lead with its client and campaign, and log every call outcome. A dynamic list of leads tagged with this week's campaign, leaving out anyone tagged Appointment set, becomes the callers' list and shrinks as they book. A simple rhythm is a call on day one with a text after the first missed call, then calls on days two, three and five.

Report what the client paid for: leads worked, conversations, appointments set and kept, and sales the client reports back. TopReach shows conversations and outcomes per caller and leaderboards for your team. There's no client portal, so you send clients the numbers in your own report, and since TopReach doesn't track ad spend, cost per appointment comes from combining its numbers with the ad platform's.

Should client campaigns run in your agency's workspace or the client's own?

Either works; the choice comes down to who should own the data. Running client campaigns in your agency's workspace keeps everything in one place for your callers. Tag every contact with its client, build each client's call lists from those tags, and keep the deals pipeline for your own new business.

For a large or long-term client, a separate TopReach account in the client's name is cleaner. The client owns its contacts, recordings and history if the engagement ends, its do-not-call requests stay apart from other clients', and the pipeline can be that client's lead pipeline. It's a separate subscription, with its own seats and phone licence.

Is TopReach a white-label platform like GoHighLevel?

No. TopReach isn't white-label: you can't put your agency's brand on it or resell it to clients as sub-accounts. It's a CRM and phone system your own team works in.

GoHighLevel is built for agencies that want to offer software under their own brand, with a sub-account for each client and tools such as funnels, websites and marketing automation. If reselling a branded platform is part of your business model, it's designed for that and TopReach isn't.

TopReach fits when the service you sell is people on the phone: new-business calling, appointment setting and lead follow-up. It has power and parallel dialing on one phone licence, two-way texting with a shared inbox, automatic voicemail, text and email after missed calls, and per-seat pricing. Nothing stops an agency using both for different jobs.

Which dialer mode should an agency use, and what rules apply?

Use parallel mode for large, cold new-business lists and power mode for anything warm or paid for. Parallel dialing calls several numbers at once and connects the caller to whoever picks up, which helps when most numbers ring out. When two people answer at once, one gets dropped: acceptable on a big cold list, wrong for a client's inbound leads or past customers, where a dropped call reflects on the client. Power mode calls one number after another, so whoever answers reaches a caller. Both modes come with the one $99-a-month phone licence.

When you call or text for a client, you and the client can both be held responsible, so agree in writing who keeps consent records and the do-not-call list. This is a general overview, not legal advice; check with your counsel.

• Consent: under the US TCPA, autodialed or prerecorded calls and texts to cell phones generally need prior express consent, and marketing ones need it in writing. The consent on a lead form has to cover calls and texts from the business you're calling for, and a dropped voicemail counts as prerecorded.
• Do-not-call and abandoned calls: consumer sales calls must be checked against the National Do Not Call Registry unless an exemption applies, and the Telemarketing Sales Rule limits abandoned calls to 3% of answered calls per campaign, which matters in parallel mode.
• Calls to businesses: the TSR exempts most business-to-business calls, but the TCPA's cell phone rules can still apply.
• States: Florida, Oklahoma and other states have their own telemarketing laws, some with stricter consent, calling-hour and call-frequency rules, and some states require every party's consent to record a call.
• Canada: the National DNCL and the CRTC's telemarketing rules cover sales calls, and CASL requires consent, identification and an unsubscribe option in commercial texts and emails, including business-to-business ones.