Perhaps you landed here based on our “Elements of a Successful Pipeline” post? If so: Same idea, opposite approach. Allow us to share with you the learnings of the (1 million+) people who’ve come before you in selecting Streak as the best way to manage Sales, Hiring, Support, Operations (and more). This post is dedicated to sharing 5 ‘anti-Best Practices’. Allow us to start with the Golden Rule of using Streak as a workflow tool:
If you click on Pipeline Name, you’re asking us to show you all boxes. If you create a View, we’ll show you only those relevant boxes that match your rule. If you want to…
…Then you need a View. Users of any plan can create a temporary View — saving multiple Views for future reference and Reporting is a premium feature.
Because you don’t want to work on all boxes at the same time, you don’t want to see all boxes at the same time. I can’t simultaneously work on the 500+ boxes in this pipeline, I just want to reach out to the 3 Leads that are Assigned To me:
We hope you take advantage of Streak’s many possibilities! We love seeing Streak running your whole business with different use cases like:
When you discover how easy it is to start a new Pipeline, you may be tempted to create multiple Pipelines for the same process:
… and this is to be avoided. In the example above: If we wanted to send outreach to our hiring candidates, we would need to check the 3 different ‘Leads’ Stages. And for every job type we added, we’d be creating more places to look for what to do next. Using 1 Pipeline we can instead create a single Saved View to see all relevant boxes in 1 place. Additionally, Reporting is done on a per Pipeline basis. To see a unified dashboard you’ll need to be running 1 unified Pipeline for each process you want to report on. Common reasons folks have mistakenly separated Pipelines:
This logic is to be avoided. All of these are best accomplished with a View. For more information on how to structure a new Pipeline, there’s a resource for that!
Streak can do math on columns that include numbers (and a period) only. If you add your own formatting, the computer will understand your input as a word instead of a number — and your input will thus be ignored by both Column Summaries and Reporting. Below you’ll see that when we enter the number ‘10000’ below, the Column ‘Sum’ updates. When we enter the word ‘$100,000’ the Sum does not update:
If you wish to see formatting on top of the numbers you add to Streak:
“Changing the stage of multiple boxes takes too long.”
Select multiple boxes, change the stage of any, and they all move. Voila!
Adding any/all information about a box to the Notes field may seem like an easy no-setup-required quick start. Although it may work initially, imagine a notes field like below multiplied times 5,000 boxes:
Instead, apply multiple columns to create a well organized Pipeline built for sorting, filtering, and reporting.
Free Form columns accept any kind of information in any format. This flexibility can be both a benefit and a trap. Here is just one example of a Free Form column run amok:
In the above, we can’t sort or report on that kind of mixed data. On the other hand, using the dedicated Date column gives us clean data (ready to sort, filter, or report):
Interested in making certain your whole team follows the same specific data format? We can help! Check out Data Validation as the best way to make sure your pipelines are complete and uniform.
Even when you’re sleeping, Streak tracks 50+ pieces of information automatically with Magic Columns. If you’ve added a manual ‘Date’ column to store data like ‘Created’ or stages for ‘Last Email Sent by Me’ — you’re using Streak in ‘hard mode’ unnecessarily.
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