Streak – CRM Inside Your Inbox

Many of the busiest professionals spend the majority of their days sifting through emails and responding to the most urgent matters. Streak is an application that can make the time people spend going through their email inboxes more efficient and effective. The web-app puts CRM tools right inside its users’ Gmail inboxes, making it easy to complete deals and manage client relationships without clicking around from tab to tab.

Streak can be used for sales management, bug tracking, customer support, or hiring, just to name a few of the many uses for this innovative tool. If you’re the kind of person who spends most of your time browsing through an overflowing inbox, then you’ll want to give Streak a try. To get started, add Streak to your browser – the app only works on Google Chrome at the current time – login to your account, and then visit your Gmail inbox. Streak will group the emails in your inbox by customer, making it easy to sort messages by client and see where each deal is at in the project pipeline. Deals are organized into a spreadsheet view, with the lead name and project status clearly visible. The application also offers a Send Later feature that you can use to send marketing messages at the ideal date and time.

Members of groups and work teams can use Streak to find out the status of any project by viewing the most recent emails sent back and forth, even when those emails were sent by a different associate at the company. Streak makes it possible to selectively share parts of your email inbox without giving your colleagues access to every message you’ve ever sent.

Practical Uses:

• Find out the status of a customer your colleague is working with
• Track how many customers you have in the sales pipeline
• Group emails by sender or based on the status of a project
• Create reports showing the status of each project in your pipeline

Insider Tips:

• Streak can be used for sales, bug tracking, customer support, and hiring
• Emails can be scheduled to go out at the optimal time of day
• Sales leads are organized into a spreadsheet
• Streak never alters any of a users’ data in Gmail

What we liked:

• Users can see how many customers they have at each point in the sales pipeline
• Colleagues can determine which parts of their inbox to share
• The critical details of each deal are available in a user’s Gmail inbox
• Special indicators show which emails are coming from important clients

What we didn’t like:

• Streak only works on the Google Chrome browser

Alternatives:

• Insightly – http://insight.ly
• Nimble – http://www.nimble.com

Company Info:

• Launched: January 2012
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: San Francisco, California
• Founded by: Raj Ramamurthy, Omar Ismail, and Aleem Mawani
• Web site: http://www.streak.com

Costs:

• Free in beta