Turn Google Docs into a Lightweight CRM in 5 Easy Steps

If you’re a small business entrepreneur, finding and choosing a CRM system is a time-consuming and expensive task. You could spend hours learning about different products, features, hosted vs cloud, SaaS vs ASP, and the list goes on. When your team is small, the best thing would be to find a simple solution that works, won’t take up too much of your time, and works with your existing tools.

Google Docs does exactly that. We’ve written a guide to show you how to turn your Google Docs into a fully functional CRM that integrates with your Gmail, provides team collaboration, and best of all, is free.

Step 1. Sign up for a Google Account

Get yourself a Google account which will include Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and plenty more. Also, grab the Chrome browser if you don’t have it already.

Step 2. Get Ecquire from the Chrome Web Store.

Grab this like one of of our 6,000 smart and attractive customers.

Ecquire integrates your CRM with Gmail to automatically update contacts in your CRM with each email.

Step 3. Connect a Google Docs spreadsheet to Use with Ecquire.

Once you add Ecquire to Chrome, you’ll be automatically prompted to select the CRM you want to use.  Select Google Docs.  Be sure to disregard the shameless plug here that we connect to other CRMs as well like Mailchimp for example.

Select Google Docs or others as well.

Step 4. Customize columns in the spreadsheet with information to your liking: demographic information, source, and lead stage.

Let Ecquire automatically create a spreadsheet with already defined columns. You can also customize columns for specific information that your users may need. For example, the sales team will need to know information on where in the funnel the contact is, how qualified of a lead, and what the next steps are.

Here’s a downloadable template that we created.

Step 5. Work as you normally would with your Google Docs CRM working in the background.

Record all your contacts and messages automatically into your Google Docs CRM – and without any data entry if you don’t want.

See it in Google Docs via easy to see link.

Here’s what it looks like in the spreadsheet….

Bam!

That’s it.  Ecquire gives you 15 credits each month for imports and updates to your CRM.  Unlimited imports and updates are available to our subscribers.  For more information about our premium service, contact us at support@ecquire.com.