Per month, the published US agency price for ten to forty hours of CRM management. Ours is $749 or $1,199 with the platform license included, and the onboarding fee is published too, which none of the five CRM pages we reviewed do.
Source: Published rate cards, Modern Driven Media and INSIDEA, August 2026The effective hourly spread for outsourced CRM admin: roughly $58–$72 from offshore delivery pools, $185–$200 from US platform partners. A 3.4× range for work described in almost identical words.
Source: Published rate cards, VRP Consulting and Modern Driven Media, August 2026Top-ranking CRM and email service pages we reviewed that tell you who owns the account, the records and the logins. In a category whose loudest buyer warning is lock-in, nobody answers the question. We answer it below.
Source: Southern Tide Media review of 10 top-ranking agency pages, August 2026What’s included
A CRM only earns its keep if somebody works it every day. Most businesses buy the software and stop there. This service is the somebody: AI does the daily labor, and a person owns every judgment call.
Focus areas · AI services
The CRM, included
We bring the platform and the license. Enterprise-grade, and no separate software bill to manage.
Full onboarding
Audit, cleanup and setup to match how you actually sell. It’s the work a vendor charges thousands for.
AI lead engine
New leads sorted and tagged, a daily call sheet sent to your sales rep, and warm leads flagged the day they warm up.
Data hygiene
Duplicates, typos and stale records cleaned up automatically, so you can trust the pipeline.
Email & drip content
Follow-up sequences drafted by AI, approved by a person, and kept current instead of quietly going stale.
Integrations
Call tracking, forms, your site and the tools you already run, connected so nothing falls between systems.
Quarterly optimization
A re-audit and recommendations every quarter, so the system keeps improving instead of silting up.
Monthly scorecard
A plain-English report showing what your CRM did this month: the hours used and on what, what shipped, what’s still open, and how clean your data is. See a sample monthly report →
What a month on your CRM looks like
Two of the biggest CRM agencies build their whole pitch on transparency about where your hours went, and neither will show you what that report looks like. Here’s ours, item by item. See a sample monthly report →
Within the day. Source recorded, duplicates caught before they’re created, and the lead put in front of the right person instead of into a list nobody reads.
A short, ranked list in your rep’s inbox each morning: who to contact, why they came up today, and what was said last time. The whole service lives or dies on whether this gets opened.
Duplicates merged, dead records archived, missing sources chased, stale deals flagged. Reported as numbers that moved, not as a claim that it happened.
Drafted by AI, edited and approved by a person, and reviewed against what they actually produced. Sequences that quietly stopped working get rewritten, not left running.
Platform updates break workflows silently. A routing rule that stopped firing can cost you a month of leads before anyone notices. We check, and we report the failures we caught.
Hours used and on what, what shipped, what’s still open or escalated, and the health readings. Written by the person who did the work.
What a CRM that’s being worked looks like
The whole category sells dashboards, pipelines and reporting, and not one of the five CRM pages we reviewed shows you any of it. If you’ve never had a working pipeline, you’re being asked to buy an idea. So here’s the picture: a fictional business, invented deals, and one of them deliberately stuck, because a board where everything is moving is a brochure, not a pipeline.
- Every card carries an owner, an age and a next step. Those three fields are the difference between a pipeline and a spreadsheet. If a deal has no next step, nobody is working it, and that’s exactly what the daily call sheet is built to catch.
- One deal is visibly stuck, on purpose. Thirty-one days in Proposal with three unanswered touches. A board where every card is healthy has been curated for a screenshot. The job isn’t to hide that deal. It’s to escalate it.
- Illustrative only. Pelican Point Outfitters is a fictional business and every company, name and figure here is invented to show the shape of the thing. Yours would be built around how you actually sell. See the monthly report that goes with it →
What’s breaking it now, and what operated looks like
Most businesses don’t need convincing that a CRM is a good idea. They already bought one. These are the five ways it quietly dies, and what each one looks like once somebody is working it.
The CRM you have now
- Duplicate and half-finished records, so nobody trusts the numbers
- Automations that broke during a platform update and nobody noticed
- Leads arriving in a list that nobody opens in the morning
- Reporting that can’t answer “what happened to the inquiries we got in June?”
- Set up once, for how you sold three years ago
The same CRM, operated
- Duplicates merged and stale records archived continuously, with the counts in the report
- Workflows checked monthly, failures caught and named before they cost you a lead
- A ranked daily call sheet in your rep’s inbox: who, why today, and what was said last
- Every inquiry sourced and tracked end to end, in a written monthly scorecard
- Re-audited quarterly and reconfigured as the way you sell changes
Where it starts
$1,499 one-timeCRM OnboardingWe set it up right: full account audit, data cleanup and de-duplication, pipeline and field setup. Replaces the vendor’s setup fee.
How pricing worksIs a managed CRM really your problem?
If you get a handful of inquiries a month, a CRM service will organize a short list very tidily and change almost nothing. Fix demand first. That’s advertising, search or AI visibility, and we’ll say so rather than sell you this.
This service produces a call sheet every morning. If there’s nobody whose job it is to open it, nothing downstream matters. One named person is enough, but it has to be someone.
We audit before we automate, because automation on top of messy data just scales the mess. Sometimes the finding is that a clean rebuild beats a migration. Either way you hear it in week one, not month six.
Usually that’s a part-time admin or “we’ll get to it ourselves.” Compare them plainly: $749 a month with the license included, against a salary plus benefits plus software, or against another year of leads going cold in an inbox.
If three of those four land, this service will pay for itself quickly. If they don’t, we’d rather point you at the thing that will. A paid audit is the cheapest way to find out which.
How pricing works
Three published numbers: a setup fee and two operating tiers, license included. Compare it to what the software alone costs direct. For context, the US agencies that publish CRM management pricing run $2,000/mo for ten hours up to $7,400/mo for forty, and not one of the five we reviewed publishes an onboarding fee at all. Ours is right here.
We set it up right: full account audit, data cleanup and de-duplication, pipeline and field setup. Replaces the vendor’s setup fee.
Your CRM, run for you: license included, the AI lead engine and daily call sheet, data hygiene, email and drip drafting, and the monthly scorecard.
Full marketing ops: everything in Operate, plus quarterly optimization, integrations like call tracking, and custom workflow builds.
Bundling is cheaper than buying the pieces.
See plans & pricingHow long it takes
What to expect
A CRM engagement has a beginning and then a rhythm. Here’s both.
Audit, cleanup, and setup to match how you sell. Everything after depends on this part.
Lead engine, daily call sheet, data hygiene and drip content run for you, with a person owning every sensitive call.
Re-audit and recommendations. The system gets better on a schedule, not when someone remembers.
Who we help
We run, or have run, the pipeline in every category below. Leads look different in each, and the follow-up has to match.
Hospitality & Resort
Group inquiries, owner relations and guest lists worked, not warehoused.
Explore →E-commerce & DTC
Customers segmented and re-engaged. The list becomes a revenue channel.
Explore →Medical & Med Spa
Consult requests followed up fast, with a person on every sensitive call.
Explore →Outdoor & Recreation
Seasonal buyers kept warm through the months they aren’t buying.
Home Services & B2B
Long sales cycles and distributor channels that punish dropped leads.
Legal & Professional
High-value inquiries where one worked lead pays for the year.
Chambers & Nonprofits
Members, donors and volunteers, tracked like revenue.
Restricted categories
When ads are limited, the list you own is the asset that isn’t.
When you win, we win
Real clients, real numbers. Ratios and rankings, sourced, with each client’s sign-off.
Thirteen years of showing up with the numbers
2013 – present
From break-even to 3.6× — then rebuilt for a new business model
2015 – present
Don’t take our word for it
“The Southern Tide Media team has smartly positioned itself as partners, versus “vendors.” Each step along the strategic path, I feel as if they are “all in” and have our best interests at heart.”
“Southern Tide Media increased our conversion rates on our SEO campaigns by 60% in short time… Brandon takes the worry out of all the technical jargon and translates that into workable applications you can understand as a business owner.”
“In every dealing I have ever had with Brandon Evans, he has been knowledgeable, fair, and has responded quickly. I would highly recommend using him for any of your business’s marketing or advertising needs!”
Questions, answered
Which CRM do you use?
We bring an enterprise-grade platform with the license included in your plan. No separate software bill. Already have a CRM you love? We can run that too. Worth knowing what the alternative costs: CRM software on its own generally runs $23–$100 per user per month before anybody uses it.
Who owns the CRM account and the data — is it in our name?
You do, and yes. The account is yours, the records are yours, and the admin logins are yours, including the ones we use, which are named accounts you can switch off. This sounds obvious and it isn’t. Across ten top-ranking CRM and email service pages we reviewed, not one says who owns the account. If a provider won’t put it in writing, that’s your answer.
What happens to our data, automations and reports if we stop?
Nothing disappears, because none of it lives on our account. We revoke our own access, hand over documentation for the automations and reports we built, and export anything that doesn’t travel with the account. If you want to bring it in-house, we’ll help you do it and train whoever takes over. That’s a normal ending, not a failure.
What’s included — and what isn’t?
Included in Operate: the license, the daily lead engine and call sheet, data hygiene, email and drip drafting, and the monthly scorecard. Operate+ adds quarterly optimization, integrations like call tracking, and custom workflow builds. Not included at either tier: new website or landing-page builds (that’s Websites), ad management (Paid Media), review campaigns (Reputation Management), and any custom development beyond a workflow, which is quoted at $95/hour and approved in writing before it starts. You’ll never get an invoice for something you didn’t agree to.
We already bought a CRM. Too late?
Not at all. Onboarding starts with an audit of what you have. Sometimes the right answer is setting up your existing system properly instead of moving, and if that’s what we find, that’s what we’ll say.
What does the AI do, and what stays human?
AI does the daily labor: sorting and tagging leads, flagging the ones warming back up, drafting follow-ups, keeping data clean. A person owns quality and every sensitive call, so nothing awkward goes out on autopilot. Concretely: AI never sends a message about money, a complaint or a medical matter without a person reading it first, and we don’t feed your customer records into anything that trains on them.
Is our customer data safe with you?
We’re a small firm and we won’t wave a certification we don’t hold at you. What we do instead: separate logins for every client, named accounts with only the access they need instead of shared logins, read-only access by default, access revoked the day an engagement ends, and every change reversible because we archive before we edit. If your industry requires a SOC 2 report from every vendor, we’re not the right fit for that requirement and we’ll tell you so on the first call.
Will AI predictions actually work on a pipeline our size?
Probably not at first, and anyone promising otherwise is selling. Lead scoring and forecasting need volume to learn from. A business closing forty deals a year gives a model almost nothing. On a small pipeline, treat AI output as a hint, never a verdict, and let the value come from the boring wins instead: nothing missed, data that stays clean, follow-up that actually happens. Those work on day one.