How to use Streak CRM in Gmail & Google Workspace, Sheet, Calendar 2026 Easily

Add the Streak extension to Chrome and connect it to your Gmail account; once installed, a Streak sidebar with Mail, Contacts, Organizations, and Pipelines appears down the left edge of Gmail. Click New pipeline to start, and Streak opens a template picker rather than a blank form — templates cover Sales, Projects, Business Dev, Hiring, Job Search, Investor, Fundraising, Orders, Real Estate, Support, and a fully custom option, so you rarely need to build stage names from scratch.

Choosing Sales pre-fills a full deal pipeline from Lead through Closed - Won, color-coded by stage, which is ready to use immediately without configuration. If you're tracking something other than sales — hiring candidates, support tickets, or a client project — pick the matching template instead; each one comes with stage names suited to that workflow, and you can always rename or reorder stages afterward. Click Create once you've settled on a starting template.

Once a pipeline has entries, Streak displays it as a spreadsheet-like table with colored stage headers running across the top, each showing a live count of how many records sit in that stage. Rows underneath list each entry with editable columns — Name, Stage, and contacts and organizations linked to it — and a right-hand panel offers quick actions like Quick add and Import data for populating the board fast. This is the core Streak experience: a CRM that looks and behaves like a spreadsheet but stays tied to your actual email threads.

A freshly created pipeline starts empty, and Streak's onboarding panel prompts you toward Quick add, Import data, or Learn more rather than leaving you to guess. Quick add is the fastest way to get a handful of contacts in manually; Import data is worth using instead if you're migrating an existing spreadsheet of leads or clients, since it maps your columns directly onto Streak's stage and contact fields.

Once contacts are in a pipeline, Streak automatically links matching email threads to the right entry based on the sender's address — so a reply from a lead shows up tied to their pipeline row without you doing anything manually. This is what actually saves the tab-switching the tool is built to avoid: the conversation history for a deal lives right next to that deal's stage and value, inside the inbox you're already checking.

Streak ties into Google Calendar so you can schedule follow-ups and reminders directly from a pipeline entry, keeping deadlines attached to the deal rather than floating in a separate calendar app disconnected from the context. When you need reporting beyond what Streak's own views offer, export a pipeline to Google Sheets for pivot tables or sharing with people who don't have Streak installed — useful for a monthly summary a manager wants without giving them inbox access.