Using the Google Streak CRM
It’s finally time to put away that Rolodex/notepad combo—Google Streak has got you covered.
And Cami Macnamara is going to be the one to tell you all about it.
Cami is the founder, brains, beauty, and talent behind webcami.com, and she and I are GoDaddy Pro ambassadors together. I absolutely treasure her for her commitment to the community, but also for our countless times and laughs together at camps and conferences. Her work and expertise speak for themselves—she’s a one-woman show with 250 active clients.
Cami’s endless experience with the very relatable issue of keeping track of client communication made her the perfect choice to talk to us a little bit more about Google Streak and CRMs in general.
But before getting into the nitty-gritty details of Google Streak through the eyes of our stellar guest Cami, it’s important that we know exactly what a CRM is. After all, Google Streak falls right into that category. It’s also what we’ll be talking about in our next few meetups, so it’s far from the last time you’ll be hearing those letters!
CRM stands for “customer relationship management”. This can take the form of many different tools, Google Streak being one of them. It’s an easy way to keep track of interactions with your clients—if you’re like Cami, that’s a pretty Herculean task!—so that you know that no questions or issues have been left unanswered.
How you use CRMs can take a variety of forms, depending on what you’re doing, who you’re doing it with, and for how long, but Google Streak has proven to be a really worthwhile tool to solve a universal question.
I would not even consider trying to steal any of Cami’s thunder when it comes to Google Streak, so I’ll let her do the explaining. Here’s what I took away from what Cami had to say.
- When it comes to the tools you use, think “more all-encompassing” before “more tools”.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve got notebooks on notebooks. You got each one of them to stay organized, but they just ended up becoming the newest additions to your notebook drawer. This dilemma can also be applied to reusable shopping bags, lip balms, and CRMs.
There are many excellent tools out there, and any number of them could do wonders for your organization, but the ideal scenario would be to only have one that could keep everything in its place. Make a list of everything you’d like for your CRM to do, and find the one that covers all or most of your needs.
- There’s no “one-size-fits-all” in terms of CRMs.
Though obviously Cami is a big proponent of Google Streak, she’ll be the first one to tell you that it might not be the right solution for everyone. The CRM that works best for you might not be the solution for your fellow agency owner, and vice versa.
Variety is the spice of life, and we’re certainly not short on options for brilliant CRMs! Recommendations are great, but a good idea of your agency’s profile and your personal needs will ensure that your CRM is the perfect fit for you.
- Make things easier for yourself by creating those extra pipelines.
Cami is a big fan of dividing her many, many clients into categories by their needs or current contracts—that way, she can more easily find information and cross-examine her own work when she needs to. CRMs are great for helping you do that, though you’ll need to do some of that organizing yourself to get the most personalized and effective results.
- No tool on the market can replace the benefits of some self-starter motivation and extra effort.
Cami is not just extremely organized. She’s a hardworking, consistent problem solver who goes above and beyond to deliver for her clients. Sure, Google Streak can help her with that, but it’s a tool, not a robot servant.
In order to get the best results, you’re going to have to put in your own effort, too. That means setting yourself up for success with your CRM by anticipating errors, organizing beyond what your tools do automatically, and actively ensuring that any potential problems that might arise from technology have contingency plans and associated change processes.
I am so thrilled to have had the opportunity to host and hear from Cami on Can We Talk. I hope that we’ll see her around these parts more often. In the meantime, check out Google Streak as a possibility if you haven’t already, and get to strengthening your client relations through organization!
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