Briefs, revisions and approvals: your agency's real workflow
Agencies turn client requests into finished work through many steps: briefs, drafts, internal review, client feedback, approvals and reporting. Years of that history in your project tools, email, chat and CRM is the kind of real operational workflow AI labs are asking for.
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Who fits
- Full-service marketing and advertising agencies
- Digital, SEO, paid media and social agencies
- Creative, design, video and PR firms
- Account, project management, creative and strategy teams
What a provider looks at
- A desk team: employees and contractors who work at a desk in your company's email and software. Field and hourly crews who aren't in the systems aren't the desk count.
- Several years of history in your systems.
- Work across systems, such as email, chat, file storage, CRM, tickets and billing.
- Requirements vary by provider, sector and dataset, and the provider confirms fit.
What a licensable workflow can look like
A client sends a campaign brief. The account lead writes a creative brief, the team drafts concepts in a project board, the client's feedback comes in by email, the team revises, approval is logged, the campaign launches, and the monthly report goes out.
A generic illustration, not a real client. Labs value the sequence of steps, decisions and handoffs across systems; how personal details are handled belongs in the agreement.
Records that count
- Briefs, proposals and statements of work
- Project boards, tasks, revisions and approval history
- Client feedback threads and meeting transcripts made with permission
- Campaign planning and reporting workflows
- Internal playbooks, SOPs and templates
- Time tracking, invoicing and billing workflows
Good to know
- Client deliverables, ad accounts and client-owned assets may belong to your clients under your agreements. Your own briefs, process, project tracking and billing are usually yours, and the provider's review sorts it out.
- Client names and personal details are handled as the agreement specifies, and client agreements are excluded upfront.
- Licensed stock images, fonts and music belong to their licensors and aren't part of a license.
- Kept out unless a review and the agreement say otherwise: privileged material and client matter files, health information and biometric data, payment card and bank account numbers, passwords and credentials, data about minors, export-controlled or classified information, another party's data or licensed third-party content, and sensitive personnel, safety or critical infrastructure details. Scope is a choice, so you can leave out anything else, such as pricing or trade secrets.
- Workflow data from QuickBooks, NetSuite and HR systems still counts.
- Usually not a fit anywhere: data involving minors, export-controlled or classified data, mostly paper records with little digital history, or records you don't have the rights to license.
- How personal details are removed or replaced belongs in the agreement, and the provider's review sorts out what's licensable. When in doubt, it's worth a conversation.
Tools your team already uses
Common marketing agencies software we see. Don't see yours? Other systems can hold the same kind of work, and old or retired systems can count too.
Projects & agency management
- Asana
- Monday.com
- ClickUp
- Teamwork.com
- Workamajig
- Function Point
CRM & communication
- HubSpot
- GoHighLevel
- Slack
- Zoom
Time & billing
- Harvest
- QuickBooks
What counts is your team's own work in and around these tools: the emails, tickets, notes, tracking and billing. No files are collected on this site, and we never ask for passwords.
Product names are trademarks of their respective owners and are listed for reference only; no affiliation or endorsement is implied.
See If You Qualify
A few quick questions. No files needed, and we never ask for passwords.
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