What's really going on

An influencer agency lives or dies on follow-through. You're tracking creators, brands, pitches, and live campaigns all at once, and each one has its own clock. With 2-3 people, the problem isn't volume — it's that no one knows what the other two touched today. A shared pipeline fixes that in an afternoon. A spreadsheet won't, because campaign stages don't sit still.

What to do instead

1. Folk (per-seat paid, check current pricing in CAD) — one pipeline for brand outreach, one for creator outreach, one for live campaigns. It's built for agency relationship work, not sales quotas.
2. HubSpot Free CRM (free, unlimited users) — if budget is tight, this covers the three of you with shared deal stages and email tracking. Expect nudges toward paid Sales Hub; ignore them at your size.
3. Today, one person opens Folk or HubSpot, creates three pipelines (Brand Leads / Creator Outreach / Live Campaigns), and drags in every open thread from the last 30 days. Two hours, done.

What you're being oversold

Nobody should be pitching you Apollo, Outreach, or Salesloft — those are for 20-person cold-email floors, not a three-person agency running warm relationships. Skip anything with "sequences at scale" in the demo. The cost of stalling isn't a number I'll invent for you, but it looks like this: one dropped follow-up on a mid-tier brand is a five-figure campaign that goes to a competitor who replied Tuesday.

When to revisit this

When you're juggling more than ~10 live campaigns at once, or you hire a fourth person — then you'll need real reporting, not just a pipeline.

The part worth getting right

Decide what a "stage" means for you before you pick the tool. If your work is mostly brand-side (pitching agencies and marketing teams), your pipeline is a sales pipeline and HubSpot or Folk both work clean. If it's mostly creator-side (sourcing, negotiating, managing talent), you need a relationship tool with rich contact profiles — Folk fits, HubSpot fights you. Pick wrong and you'll migrate in six months with half your notes lost. So which side of the deal are you actually spending your days on?