We at Streak believe that a strong CRM is more than just a tool for tracking sales interactions. In an industry where the definition of “customer” is constantly expanding and becoming more inclusive, we believe that a strong CRM should follow suit. It should be directly integrated into your inbox, flexible enough to use across your organization, and brawny enough to manage thousands of relationships.

Blake Nielson is one of our many customers that are using Streak to build and manage partner relationships right out of his Gmail inbox. He uses Streak with the rest of his team at BASE Search Marketing to keep track of thousands of relationships. His story, like many others, shows just how well Streak enables you to maintain, scale, and act, on a single source of truth while growing both your team and your business.

I’m the Managing Director of an SEO Agency called BASE Search Marketing. We currently create and publish over 1,000 pieces of unique content for our clients every month, which means we have a lot of customers and partners to keep track of.

Most companies already know they need to track new clients through a sales process, but not many people think of partnership outreach as a process that needs tracking. We classify a partnership as a website or publication that we provide content to on a regular basis. As an SEO and PR Specialist, I’ve built out numerous workflows and spreadsheets to track outreaching and manage partnerships, but it wasn’t until I started looking at outreach from a sales perspective that I realized I needed a CRM to scale.

That’s where Streak came in.

Streak provides a perfect solution completely inside of Gmail which is where I spend most of my day anyway. It allows us to better manage relationships with current publications and track our progress when finding new partnerships. It also made it possible for our teams to collaborate without stepping on each others toes.

Our first pipeline took only a few minutes to setup, and we were able to quickly customize the stages and fields to the way our company runs our outreach program to sign up new web publications as BASE partners.

Streak for building new partnerships

Using Streak, we created a cadence of very targeted emails to send at each step of the outreach sales process. And with the Mail Merge feature, we were able to create personalized email templates and send 100+ emails per day to ensure that interested partners wouldn’t fall through the cracks.

The flexibility of Streak also allowed us to create a separate pipeline to track new clients.

Streak for acquiring new clients

We were previously having issues with team members working on the same lead at the same time, which caused communication problems with the lead. We also had a worse issue of leads coming in, but never being contacted. Since the majority of the communication with our partnerships is through email, we didn’t need a bulky complicated CRM. We needed something that would track the progress from lead to partnership, and add a layer of transparency that was not previously there.

Better structuring and organizing of our workflows has made a difference in helping us to scale and grow as a company. Since implementing Streak, our team at BASE has more than doubled, which has enabled us to take on nearly 3 times more client work than before. Our partnerships are better maintained and nurtured, which allows us to provide better ongoing results for our clients. And just like in sales, nurturing a partnership is just as important as finding a new one. Streak has a been that critical component in moving the needle at BASE.

If you’re interested in learning more or seeing a demo, please contact us.

Author bio: Blake Nielson is the managing director to BASE Search Marketing. He oversees all SEO Link Acquisition, Guest Posting, and PR Outreach. When he’s not working on marketing campaigns you can find him hiking, biking or canyoneering in his home state of Utah.