UPDATE:

Well, it seems that enough people want to use Google Docs for CRM so we've went ahead and built a Google Apps Module for Tagle. See Tagle's Google Apps Module in live beta here:

http://www.tagle.it/google-apps

For those who came here for the "hack" version in the blog post, please read on...

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My default CRM (Customer Relationship Management) usually starts with a pen and paper because it's just remarkably simple, efficient, and flexible.  I can scratch as little or as much information as I want about a customer and I don't need to go through multiple screens to do it.  The only disadvantage is when I want to share this with my team.

Then I got to thinking - why not just use Google Docs?  It has excellent searchability, I can share everything with my team, and works great for ad-hoc notes.

Here's how we do it:

1 Doc per customer

Name the document with the full company name so others can search by it.  This way you can easily find a company record and avoid duplicate entries.

Add contact info in the first paragraph, and then insert comments for each update with the newest at the top.  Doc Comments automatically insert the writers name, date the entry, and are easily distinguishable by color.  Here are a couple of samples:

• ABC Company
• Acme Widgets

Once this document becomes unruly, you can organize it with headings and a Table of Contents.  The great thing about this is that you don't waste time organizing duds (one of my pet peeves about formal CRM packages).

Folders

Put everything in a root Folder that you can share with your team and then subdivide based on priority.

> CRM Folder

> Hot

> Cold

> Dead

 You can share entire folders or just individual files.  You can also upload other documents to these folders such as email messages, pdf's, etc, and relate them to the parent Doc using the following naming convention, which will show you a nice list of files when you search by the company name:

• CompanyNameDoc \ SomeRelatedDocument.pdf

Granted; large CRM packages can do so much more than this simple system with their ABILITY to offer business intelligence about customers.  However, I say ABILITY because business intelligence will only materialize if the system is meticulously maintained with high quality data.  All too often though, they are not, and then what you wind up with is a very high cost version of this Google Docs CRM.  

Besides, I have a feeling that this can work quite well for a company of 20 or less people who communicate well.

Tagle and Google Apps

We're experimenting with a lot of ad-hoc processes using Google Apps because it provides a great way to discover and iterate on valuable workflows for future Apps integration with Tagle.  

For example, Tagle could auto-generate Tags based on these document names and associate those names to company URL's in an email or web page automatically.  Result: filter by a  "Company" Tag and you see all the Docs, web pages, and emails in the Sidebar that are associated with that company.

Another idea is for a "Customer" Taglet that would create a new Customer Doc by Tagging an item with it.  The Doc would be auto-populated with the information above extracted from, say, an email.  We could also append info to an existing Customer Doc with it.  So, when you want to add some email correspondence to this Doc it would be as easy as Drag and Drop to the Taglet.

Have other ideas?  Please feel free to share.