Sales & CRM

How to set up your first crm as Chief of Staff and Founder's Office

Sales & CRMFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

As chief of staff, you're the person everyone comes to when the CEO says 'who are we close with at that logistics company?' or 'can you prep me for tomorrow's call with the Series B lead?' You don't run sales, but you're constantly in the weeds of it — pulling HubSpot exports into Google Sheets, forwarding email threads to the CEO with a handwritten summary, manually checking whether anyone actually followed up after last quarter's conference. The CRM your sales team uses was configured for a sales team. It has fields you don't care about and is missing the context you do: which relationships belong to the CEO, which investors are also potential customers, which board member intro is still pending a thank-you note.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Sales & CRMFor Chief of Staff and Founder's Office2 apps12 steps~24 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A CRM tailored to your actual relationship map — not just sales pipeline, but investor relationships, strategic partners, exec-level contacts, and board intros, all tracked in one place with context from Gmail threads

An inbox assistant that handles the email side of relationship management — surfaces unanswered threads, drafts follow-up notes from the CEO's voice, and flags messages that need a human decision vs. a quick reply

A living contact record that pulls in LinkedIn profile data and email history so the CEO walks into every call knowing when they last spoke, what was discussed, and what still needs to happen

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

CRM Email Agent

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule — email threads, labels, and contact history flow into both the CRM and the Email Agent automatically. LinkedIn enrichment runs through browser automation (no LinkedIn API needed) to keep profiles current. HubSpot connects from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live if you want to pull in existing deal data or sync sales contacts across.

Prompts to copy

Build me a CRM that tracks three relationship types separately: sales prospects (with deal stage and close probability), investor relationships (with last touch date, fund size, and whether they're in the current raise), and strategic partners (with relationship owner, last meeting date, and next action). Pull email thread history from Gmail and enrich LinkedIn profiles automatically.

Set up an email triage assistant for the CEO's Gmail that flags unanswered threads older than 4 days, summarizes any thread longer than 5 messages in two sentences, and drafts a follow-up for threads where the CEO sent the last message but never got a reply.

Show me every contact I haven't emailed in the last 30 days where the relationship type is 'investor' or 'strategic partner', sorted by last touch date ascending.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Start from the CRM starter app in the Starch App Store — it comes with contacts, companies, deals, email thread history, and LinkedIn enrichment pre-wired. This is your starting point, not your final shape.

2 Tell Starch how your relationship map actually works: describe the three or four categories of contacts you manage (sales prospects, investors, board contacts, strategic partners) and what fields matter for each. Starch rebuilds the schema around your description, not a generic sales funnel.

3 Connect Gmail as a scheduled sync — Starch starts pulling in email threads and surfaces conversation history directly on each contact record, so you can see the last ten messages with any person without leaving the CRM.

4 Set up LinkedIn enrichment via browser automation — Starch updates job titles, company names, and headcounts in the background so you're not manually fixing stale profiles before an important intro.

5 If your sales team uses HubSpot, connect it from Starch's integration catalog and ask Starch to import your existing contacts and deal data. Starch cleans field mapping inconsistencies during import so you're not inheriting a mess.

6 Add the Email Agent app and point it at the same Gmail connection. Configure it to flag unanswered threads in the CEO's inbox, summarize long chains, and draft replies in a voice you describe to Starch.

7 Create a 'CEO prep' view in the CRM: any contact the CEO is meeting in the next 7 days, with last touch date, open action items, and a one-paragraph summary of recent email context — generated by the AI on demand.

8 Build a 'relationship health' dashboard: contacts grouped by relationship type, sorted by days since last touch, with a red/yellow/green indicator you define (e.g., red = no contact in 45+ days for investors, 21+ days for active prospects).

9 Set up a weekly automation — every Monday morning, Starch pulls the week's calendar events from Google Calendar (synced on a schedule), cross-references attendees against your CRM, and sends you a Slack message with a prep brief for each external meeting: who they are, last contact, open threads.

10 For investor relationships specifically, add a field for 'last update sent' and link it to your investor reporting workflow — so you can see at a glance which LPs haven't received an update in over 90 days.

11 Test the natural-language query layer: ask 'which investor contacts haven't had any email activity since the Series A close?' and confirm the result matches what you'd expect. This is your day-to-day interface, not the table view.

12 Share the CEO prep view and relationship health dashboard with the CEO and any EAs who manage scheduling — they can read from the CRM without needing to configure anything.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Q2 2026 Board Meeting Prep — April

Sample numbers from a real run

Board member contacts needing outreach before meeting	4
Investor contacts with no email activity in 60+ days	11
Strategic partner intros promised but not sent	3
CEO prep briefs generated in under 2 minutes each	6

Two weeks before the April board meeting, you open the CRM and run the query: 'show me all board-level and lead-investor contacts where last touch date is more than 30 days ago.' Eleven names come back. You sort by relationship owner — six belong to the CEO, three to you, two to the CFO. Starch surfaces the last email thread on each record. Four of the eleven are board members; for those, you use the Email Agent to draft a brief personal note from the CEO's voice summarizing what's changed since the last meeting. The drafts take 8 minutes to review and approve rather than 40 minutes to write cold. For the three promised intros that never went out, you find the original email threads in the CRM (pulled from Gmail), see that two of the intros were supposed to come from a board member rather than you, and draft a nudge to that board member with full context attached. The relationship health dashboard shows three strategic partners in the red zone — no contact in 52, 61, and 78 days respectively. You add them to the CEO's calendar for a 15-minute async video catch-up, booked via Calendly, and log the action in the CRM. Total time to complete what used to be a half-day of inbox archaeology: 90 minutes.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Days since last touch by relationship tier (investors, board, strategic partners, active prospects)

CEO calendar coverage rate — percentage of external meetings with a prep brief generated before the call

Open action items per contact (intros promised, follow-ups pending, docs to send)

Investor update cadence — days since last update sent per LP

Email response lag on inbound threads flagged as high-priority by the Email Agent

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

HubSpot (full CRM)

HubSpot is built for a sales team with a sales admin — configuring it for investor relationships, board contacts, and exec-level relationship tracking requires significant setup time, ongoing field maintenance, and a seat cost structure that doesn't make sense when only 2-3 people are actually using it as a relationship OS.

Notion CRM template

Notion is flexible but passive — it won't surface who you haven't spoken to in 30 days, pull email context automatically, or generate a CEO prep brief. You're still doing all the synthesis manually.

Google Sheets + Gmail manual tracking

Workable for 50 contacts, breaks down past that — no email thread sync, no LinkedIn enrichment, no natural-language querying, and the sheet is always out of date because updating it requires a human decision each time.

Salesforce

Salesforce has the depth, but the configuration overhead and licensing cost are sized for a dedicated RevOps function, not a chief of staff running relationship management as one of twelve concurrent responsibilities.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, email agent all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Does Starch actually pull in real Gmail threads, or does it just show metadata like sender and subject?

Starch syncs full Gmail message content on a schedule — not just metadata. The CRM surfaces actual thread history on each contact record, which is what makes the prep brief feature useful. One honest limit: the sync pulls 30 messages per page to avoid errors on very long HTML threads, so extremely old or long conversations may not fully appear.

We already use HubSpot for the sales team. Does this replace it or sit alongside it?

It can sit alongside it. Connect HubSpot from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live — you can import sales contacts into your Starch CRM without the sales team changing anything about how they use HubSpot. The Starch CRM is for your relationship map (investors, board, strategic partners, exec-level contacts); the sales team's HubSpot pipeline stays as-is.

Is the CEO's Gmail data stored somewhere I should be concerned about?

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today — that's worth knowing before connecting a CEO's inbox. If your company requires SOC 2 Type II compliance for any tool handling executive email, Starch isn't there yet. It's on the roadmap. Also, when you connect Gmail, the OAuth consent screen currently shows the underlying connector's name rather than Starch — that's a known gap being addressed.

Can I build a CRM that tracks both investor relationships and sales deals in one place, or do I need two separate apps?

One app, multiple relationship types. When you describe the schema to Starch, you define the categories and fields for each — investor contacts with LP-specific fields, sales prospects with pipeline stages and close probability, board contacts with a different set of fields entirely. Starch builds the data model around your description. You can run queries across all of them or filter by type.

What happens to LinkedIn data — how current does it stay?

LinkedIn enrichment runs through browser automation — Starch navigates LinkedIn the way a human would, no separate LinkedIn API required. It refreshes profile data (job title, company, location) on the schedule you configure. If someone changes jobs, the CRM record updates without you manually checking their profile before a call.

Can the Email Agent draft replies in the CEO's voice, not mine?

Yes. When you set up the Email Agent, describe the writing style you want — 'brief, direct, no filler phrases, always ends with a clear next step' or 'warmer tone for investor relationships, more formal for new contacts.' The agent uses that description every time it drafts. You review before anything sends; the Email Agent doesn't send autonomously unless you configure it to.