How do you manage your sales & marketing activities without CRM?

Microsoft Outlook can accomplish some of the key aspects you're referring to. Because you can share your contacts and calendars with other users in your organization, you can take advantage of task and activity management processes typical of a CRM offering without the use of a formal CRM package.

2) One of the key elements of a CRM solution is categorizing processes and milestones, and turning them into relational data. Again, you can turn to the Microsoft Office suite (Access) to keep track of the information you need from an opportunity tracking perspective. I've even seen some organizations use shared Excel spreadsheets for opportunity tracking!

In a nutshell...

The foundation of CRM is about creating standards for the capture and sharing of information pertaining (in this case) to the sales cycle. Regardless of the tools you use, your company can achieve some benefit by mapping processes, determining data collection points and strategy, then deciding on your best technology to do so.