At Streak, we built a CRM with the idea of a deep and embedded integration where salespeople have access to relationship management from their primary work surface—their email inbox. The deep integration with Gmail and the rest of G Suite is a result of our close relationship with the Google team.
While it takes a moment to wrap users’ heads around the fact that a CRM could actually be run inside their email, it makes perfect sense. It means that salespeople will actually use their CRM, a problem that has plagued the industry for years. The future is where salespeople don’t use two different tools to communicate with their leads and manage those leads in a pipeline.
Unfortunately, even in today’s age of technology, salespeople spend the majority of their day on administrative tasks and not enough time actually selling. At Streak, we believe that the next most effective CRM will aim to flip that ratio by having the CRM do all the basic follow-ups: updating the status of a deal, scheduling next steps, or even sending documents to customers. Streak accomplishes this by using hundreds of millions of data points from their customers.
By making the input of data easy and integrated with the inbox, we’re able to use these data points to build and train a machine-learning AI engine that will do the administrative work for our users. We also realize, however, that no algorithm is ever perfect, so the automation interface we’re building will always ask the salesperson for confirmation before taking action.
This lets a salesperson finish all their administrative tasks in minutes as opposed to hours and also helps us learn from any mistakes the algorithm might make. The future is where humans spend time on what they do best—building relationships, understanding their customers business and closing deals—while all the administrative work is handled by the machine.
Another major problem we think CRM’s need to solve, is helping sales teams work together. Often times a salesperson would not even know that a teammate has a relationship with a customer they are trying to partner with. At Streak, we’re solving this by letting teams selectively share their emails with customers in an automated fashion.
Salespeople can easily see who on their team has talked to a customer before. The future is where every salesperson has the collective customer knowledge of their entire company at their fingertips.
The future of CRM lives in your inbox but there are customers today who are living that future today. One Streak customer—a company delivering physical products to SaaS industry leaders at tremendous scale— was confident that the tool was saving them each, on average, ten hours a week. Those hours would have been spent looking for missed orders, historical conversations, and tracking down details that should already be available. Streak simplified that. By living inside their inbox, their whole team has been able to collaborate and track interactions with leads—providing newfound clarity to the sales cycle. As a result, orders have stopped falling behind and the team has been collaborating more effectively than ever. The future is where your sales team has clarity on what’s happened before and what’s happening next.
Being a thought-leader in the CRM space means that we’re always looking to the future. At Streak, we’re already leveraging big data in our automation efforts but we have more exciting initiatives ahead of us. By bringing the benefits of machine-learning to the sales inbox, we’re hoping to enable more sales teams to close more deals, more efficiently.
About the Company
Streak is a next-generation CRM that offers spreadsheet-style tracking capabilities built directly into the inbox. With over 4500 customers, Streak is disrupting the CRM space to offer a system of engagement different from their competitors’ systems of record.
About the Author
Aleem is the Co-founder at Streak. Prior to Streak, Aleem was a PM at Google. He studied Software Engineering at the University of Waterloo and received an MBA from Harvard. Aleem was legally allowed to fly before he could drive.
