I’ve been experimenting with free products to organise my projects and pipelines.

So this week I’m sharing how I’ve been using a lesser-known product to turn my standard Gmail interface into a de-facto CRM. This isn’t an ad whatsoever.

Dancing the line between conservative and stingy aside, let’s dive in! 🚀

1. Newsletter News

2. Free CRMs?

3. Recommended reading

4. Inbox Banter

Make your own free CRM!

A lot of small and medium-sized newsletters have asked me when to invest in a proper CRM.

There are 2 ‘free CRM’ options that I’ve dabbled with:

(a) Turning my own Gmail inbox into a CRM, for personally keeping track of new opportunities, deals and businesses.

and

(b) A separate platform, to be used within a business, tracking a specific sales pipeline.

These could be useful for a small/medium newsletter managing a pipeline, that isn’t ‘ready’ to fork out money for Hubspot/Salesforce. Or, for entrepreneurs managing multiple businesses or projects.

Again, none of the companies are aware of this write-up, this is a genuine recommendation. Plus, I only managed to find 1 affiliate link out of the 3 main products (for Apollo).

A - Turn your Gmail into a CRM

I am always fighting an internal battle of wanting to use interesting new products, versus sticking to as few platforms as possible. So I thought this was pretty neat.

You can do this using a combination of Streak and Apollo. Let me show you how.

🧐 Streak

Streak enables you to make pipelines embedded into Gmail. I’m still on the free version, which is pretty useful. I’ve got 2 pipelines live right now which are quickly accessible on the left-hand side of the below screenshot.

In the pipeline view below, you can customise deal fields, stages and more.

You can quickly add email threads or contacts to new or existing deals and set reminders that get delivered via email and calendar.

The UI could be better, but on the whole it’s super helpful, especially for a free version.

The paid version, which I haven’t used, offers a bunch of additional features, automations and so on.

🐐 Apollo

Most of you probably know Apollo, the data and LinkedIn extension is sweet. But the Gmail integrations are also insanely useful.

The UI is also very sexy and easy to understand. 

Templates

You can save templates to use straight from Gmail, which is pretty neat.

Snippets

Right next to templates is something called snippets, which are blocks of text that you can insert into an email. This could be used to insert financial case studies, or B2B audience stats, into an existing email.

Nudge 

Set reminders to follow up, which can be set to cancel if they reply.

Meetings

Apollo also has their very own Calendly clone, which works well! Their free plan includes multiple event types, booking page questions and automated email reminders. All the good stuff, which normally requires Calendly premium.

I actually only just realised this. Sorry Calendly, but my premium plan is going in the bin.

Notion

Perhaps this is more well-known, but the free version of Notion has a nice pipeline view. I first noticed this when a client was using it to track a sales pipeline.

Again, it’s nowhere near as comprehensive as a ‘proper’ CRM. It won’t offer you email solutions like the Streak/Apollo combo above.  

But it’s surprisingly effective for tracking a pipeline.

The pipeline view is easy on the eye, and so is the deal view. The fields, like most things in Notion, are extremely formattable to suit your needs.

You can also toggle views to give you a view of deals organised by close date, predicted close date, deal size, and so on.