Streak

Pros

I've been in the recruiting field for more than two years now, and it has been a bottleneck for me sending emails outside of our candidate database. I usually do this whenever I need to update the candidates regarding next steps, and also if they have been turned down by the client after our presentation call with them.

What I usually do before is to send each candidate an email even if the context is just the same. This dilemma has been resolved by Streak! I was able to maintain the personal connection atmosphere with my candidates with the use of just a few seconds. All you need to do is to put the details of the candidate plus any personalized matter you want to add in the email context on a csv comma delimited excel sheet.

One more good thing about Streak is that you can schedule when an email should be sent. You can also monitor the acceptance and the open rate of your emails via Streak. Truly, Streak is the best platform for sending and email management.

Cons

I really don't have negative experience with Streak! I really love how the platform helped me do my job responsibilities without compromising human touch. Maybe this message is a sort of recommendation. I hope they can upgrade their system so that they too will upgrade to an applicant tracking system. If that time come, I will propose this to our company since I know Streak will help us in driving great ROI, and client engagements.

Pros

As a part-time resume editor, and a full-time workforce planner, I need to email a lot of clients. Emailing them takes so much time even if the emails are just the same, and I just need to edit one or two words in the message I will be sending them. Before, it took me a great deal of time wasted doing it one by one, but because of Streak, it made it easy for me now!

I can now email 100 people in just one click and one email template, but you will not sound robotic because it lets you modify some variables you want to populate by just editing it in one .csv excel file!

Streak also helped me keep track of my senders. It provides me the information if the person I sent the email already opened the message once or twice. This helps me to know whom to follow up or whom I need to call because they haven't opened my email which saves so much time for me!

Cons

I am using a work email powered by Gmail, and sometimes whenever I clear my cookies and cache, the Streak extension crashes and I need to rerun it. If I am using a different computer, I need to rerun it too again. It is not that time consuming, but I hope they can find solution to that so that it will be sync on all computers that I am using and only needs me to run it once per device.

Pros

I'd never really thought of using CRM software before, as I'm not the typical target audience for that kind of product , yet ended up installing Streak for the extra tools in Gmail.

After installing and playing around with it a little, I suddenly found I WAS using the CRM features, albeit in a probably unintended way, to manage pretty much all my work. The fact you can completely customise pipelines, very easily, makes it easy to make it fit what you're doing.

I ended up using it not just for snoozing emails but as a task tracker, creating stages for who tasks were waiting for responses from (completely ignoring the built in "Assigned To" section since I was the only person using it at that point), which were blocked and which were complete.

You aren't limited to using only one pipeline for a single purpose, so you can use it in several different ways.

I thought manually adding conversations to boxes would be slow and unworkable, but it really isn't. Add the notes and magic columns and it's REALLY an improvement on Gmail for any emails you're actually at all interested in.

The separate naming of boxes from email subjects also makes it easy to find repetitive problems - if the autocomplete when entering a box name comes up with the same thing you're typing, you probably have had that problem before and if you used the Notes feature to record how you solved it, it saves you trying to recreate what you did months back.

Cons

None of these are really serious, just "things to improve":

- You can't have emails in multiple boxes - irritating as you sometimes have conversations covering more than one topic, or changing from one to the other (and thread splitting isn't really applicable if you end up discussing multiple things in a single email)

- No way to merge boxes except deletion and recreation - along with occasional bug preventing already created boxes from being selected (fixed by refresh)

- No easy way to give say a client a way to view a pipeline, except getting them to install it and adding them to the team, which brings up:

- Billing / team structure not really suited to freelancers - all team members must be on same plan so it's an active DIS-incentive to move off the paid version, as if I wanted to share a pipeline with a client they'd have to subscribe at the same level as me, which isn't really feasible for smallish or one-time jobs.

- If you have more than one pipeline the UI is a little fiddly to select which you want - should be big buttons, not single lines of text. This slows down adding to boxes.

Pros

It's definitely handy that streak is integrated with gmail. You don't have to log into a separate CRM and toggle back and forth between your email and the CRM. It is easy to create leads, sort them by status, and keep track of several contacts. I also really like the email tracking feature - it shows you a history of when the people you have emailed have opened the email you sent on the side. This helps to know if they ever received your email or if they have looked at it multiple times etc. The other handy tool I use a lot is the "snippet" tool where you can save an email template to use and you have the option to keep it private for yourself or you can share it with those in your gmail organization so they can use the template or "snippet" as well.

Cons

There are a few annoying things abut using the software that aren't deal breakers but certainly seem like they missed the mark a couple of times. For example, you have to continue to manually sort contacts into categories that are obvious. They have a "contacted" category. So you click the lead, click email, send an email from a template you've saved, all within the software and then you have to go back and manually click that you contacted them. It seems like they should move that to the contacted category for you since you emailed the contact within the software. I've accidentally emailed a couple people twice because I forgot to click move to contacted and then sent them an email again later. Again, I'm using the free version so I can't really complain about these issues but there are a few things like this that seem obvious to me that they haven't implemented.
I am using the free version so I do not have full access to all of the features so maybe some of these things are fixed in the paid version? In the free version you also run out of space pretty fast. You can only store 50 contacts at a time and then you have to delete them to make more room which can be a pain and sort negates the usefulness of tracking the leads or contacts in categories.

Pros

For my product-based small business, I have a number of sales streams where I cultivate leads. Streak allows me to manage these leads right inside Gmail so I can quickly view all of our correspondences. Since most of my business is done through email, Streak creates a perfect bridge. Specifically, I can create a new box for each lead and categorize it under a specific pipeline (sales stream). Within the pipeline, I can create different sales stages and view all of my leads in one place along with data about our interactions (days since last interaction, days in stage, etc) so I can prioritize my outreach efforts. Within each lead, I can view all of the email correspondences and make notes on the lead. An additional feature in Streak is email open tracking so you can see if your leads have opened your emails. It shows up automatically and displays the times of each open. That's a huge value just to know if your emails are going through. All of these features are completely free and just a simple add-on, which frankly is hard to believe and so valuable for my business!

Cons

I really love Streak--for a free program, it offers so much! If I could add anything, I would love to be able to have all correspondences with a specific email address automatically assigned to the same lead box.