What agency buyers are actually deciding
Agencies rarely shop for a CRM because their pipeline is too large to manage. They shop because the pipeline is invisible: new business lives in a founder's head, a shared spreadsheet that is three weeks stale, and a set of email threads nobody else can read. The question being decided is not which product has more features. It is whether the people who hold the client relationships will keep a record without being nagged into it.
That question is settled on a phone, because that is where agency people are when anything worth recording happens. A chemistry meeting at a client office. A conference corridor. A dinner where someone mentions their contract is up in March. If capturing that takes a laptop and a quiet twenty minutes, it does not get captured, and no amount of process design changes that.
Agency selling is lumpy, relationship-led and badly served by generic funnels
A product sales team works a steady flow of inbound leads through a repeatable funnel. An agency works a small number of large, slow, referral-heavy opportunities where the decision involves several people and the timing is driven by the client's budget cycle rather than by your effort. A CRM designed around volume and conversion rates will feel wrong within a fortnight.
The expansion pipeline matters at least as much as the new one
Most agency growth comes from existing clients: a second brand, a retainer uplift, a project that was always going to happen if someone asked. That pipeline is structurally easier to work and structurally more neglected, because nobody assigns it to anyone. Holding it in the same board as new business, with owners and dates, is a small change with a disproportionate effect.