How do you keep notes on customers and clients?
If you use Gmail, I am a very big fan of Streak CRM. It's free for solopreneurs and expands with teams as needed. I use it to pipeline sales, track workshop participants who become clients, track collaborators and more.
Here's a few ways you can use it (all within Gmail!). 😍
Pipelining and Managing Sales
Inside a Sales Pipeline in StreakCRM
StreakCRM is made up of Pipelines. The above example is a pipeline I created for my Sales Process which typically went something like this:
Lead → Contacted → Consult Booked via Calendly → Estimate Sent → Deposit
It works right within your Gmail so little checkboxes appear on the side of every single email and if you want to add an email thread into a Pipeline, you simply check it and select “Add to Box.” By default, it will start with the initial Stage. In this case, that initial stage is “Lead.”
Big things to note regarding the pipelining feature of Streak:
You can customize as many pipelines as you want (I had Sales, Media Contacts, Creative Support)
Each box expands into a Customer Profile where you can add notes, client-specific tasks, and more. The best thing about that is it automatically pulls in emails from that specific client.
Streak has what we call “Magic Columns”—automatic columns that update based on things like “Freshness” aka how long its been since you last spoke to this lead.
Keeping Client Notes Automatically
Within StreakCRM, you can keep notes on clients manually while the extension automatically pulls email threads and keeps everything in one place.
Streak uses a person (or organization’s!) email address to automatically pull communication with them.
You can create custom columns for specific things you’d like to track (in my case, “Lead source” was important to me), and any additional notes like reference sites or inspiration.
You can also create automatic follow-ups for the client, pull all attachments from them in one place, and share specific emails with your team members by sending a thread-specific link (which saves them from scrolling through all messages).
Creating snippets and email templates
Creating text snippets is an automation hack that speeds up the process of writing emails. You can use snippets for things you say often and avoid typing them repeatedly.
Here are some examples of snippets you can create:
Introduction: Use a snippet to introduce yourself and your company in emails.
Closing: Use a snippet to include a standard closing in your emails.
Follow-up: Use a snippet to follow up on emails that haven't received a response.
Tip: You can also include links within your snippets, which is great for embedding commonly referenced articles, a Calendly link, or anything else you might be typing repeatedly.
Streak in Summary
Streak CRM is a customer relationship management tool designed for Gmail. It allows users to manage sales pipelines, track emails, and create custom workflows within their inbox. The tool is accessed as a browser extension.
Additionally, Streak CRM offers features like mail merge (so helpful for emailing people in specific stages), email tracking (for that client who says they never got the email), and thread splitting (segmenting topics) to help streamline communication and improve productivity. It’s an excellent tool for sales teams, solopreneurs, and small businesses looking for an affordable and easy-to-use CRM solution. As a solopreneur, I’ve used the free version for years and been super happy with it.
If you want to learn more about Streak CRM, you can check out their dashboard and use my partner link here. I’ll update this post with a video run-through shortly!
