CRM

simonquin5
Participant

Importing google contacts and number of interactions...

SOLVE

Hi there

 

I've been evaluatiing several CRM solutions and I'm narrowing down at Hubspot CRM and a competitor.  

With the competitor CRM they scanned my gmail account and brought up my list of contacts within the CRM and allowed me to either add or ignore the contact and assign the contact to a particular group in the process.  Nice feature.

 

Plus the competitor CRM automatically scanned my gmail account for the total amount of emails send back and forth 'interactions' and when I last contacted them and things like this.

 

That means that pretty much right away the competitor CRM is already looking fuller and more informative than Hubspot CRM, which gives me that feeling like 'oh hey this seems useful'

 

So there's two parts to this comment.  First is the suggestion that hubspot should do the same thing.  Because no other CRM does this that I've tried and it really makes a difference. 

 

Secondly is can I do this with Hubspot?

 

1)  Can I import google contacts easily?  Without having to export them via CSV and them import or something fiddly like that.

 

2)  Can I see the total amount of interactions I've had with a customer?  I see the option to see the total amount of emails sent.. but that's not including the emails they sent me.  I'm more interested in how active that customer is being and how many times they are opening my mails and replying to my mails, then how many mails I've sent them as that metric is meaningless without customer interaction.

 

 

2 Accepted solutions
BrettLanguirand
Solution
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

Importing google contacts and number of interactions...

SOLVE

Hi @simonquin5

 

Thanks for your question!  I certainly see the value in being able to import contacts directly from your Google account, but the Hubspot CRM doesn't have this functionality.  The Hubspot Import tool requires that the contacts be on a CSV.  If you'd like to suggest that the functionality to import directly from Google be added to the Hubspot CRM, you can do so at the Hubspot Ideas Forum.  

 

To answer your second question, there isn't currently a way to see the total number of interactions between you and your contacts.  Hubspot Sales Pro customers have access to properties like Recent sales email open date and recent sales email reply date, but that's different than a counter type property.  This would also be something that is worth adding to the Ideas Forum.

 

I hope this helps.  I'm sure the answers probably aren't what you were hoping to hear, but if you post these suggestions to the Ideas Forum hopefully our developers will see them and be able to implement them in future product releases.  

 

View solution in original post

nicolebrenner
Solution
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

Importing google contacts and number of interactions...

SOLVE

Hi @simonquin5, and welcome to the Community! 

 

As far as importing contacts from google, there are a couple of options worth noting. The only way to get a large batch of contacts into the CRM from Google would be to export those contacts into a CSV and import them using our standard import process, however once you have your inbox connected using HubSpot Sales tools (free or premium) you can add contacts to the CRM directly from your inbox by using our contact profiles in Gmail or in Outlook, or by sending them an email that is logged in the CRM

Once you've started engaging with a customer, you can see an entire history of your interactions with the customer, including emails sent and emails recieved on the contact timeline. For each individual email, you can see the number of opens and the number of clicks, and if you are looking at "All Properties" you can see the total number of email opens and email clicks.

At this time, we don't record the total number of email replies recieved, however this would be a great suggestion for our Ideas Forum! This is a great platform for communicating feature requests to our Product Team. It also allows other customers to vote on and comment on the idea. As a result, it helps us better prioritize features that are having the greatest impact on our customers. 

 

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any follow up questions! 

 

 

 

View solution in original post

0 Upvotes
14 Replies 14
Wilderness
Participant

Importing google contacts and number of interactions...

SOLVE

What was the competitor Simon? I'm might look at that instead...

PamCotton
Community Manager
Community Manager

Importing google contacts and number of interactions...

SOLVE

Hello @Wilderness , are you currently facing any issues currently?  The more information, screenshots, and details you can provide, the better I can advise on the next steps.

 

Thank you!

Pam

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PNWLifestyle
Member

Importing google contacts and number of interactions...

SOLVE

Hey Simon,


I need these features too...can you point me in the right direction? What does the competition rhyme with? 😉 

nicolebrenner
Solution
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

Importing google contacts and number of interactions...

SOLVE

Hi @simonquin5, and welcome to the Community! 

 

As far as importing contacts from google, there are a couple of options worth noting. The only way to get a large batch of contacts into the CRM from Google would be to export those contacts into a CSV and import them using our standard import process, however once you have your inbox connected using HubSpot Sales tools (free or premium) you can add contacts to the CRM directly from your inbox by using our contact profiles in Gmail or in Outlook, or by sending them an email that is logged in the CRM

Once you've started engaging with a customer, you can see an entire history of your interactions with the customer, including emails sent and emails recieved on the contact timeline. For each individual email, you can see the number of opens and the number of clicks, and if you are looking at "All Properties" you can see the total number of email opens and email clicks.

At this time, we don't record the total number of email replies recieved, however this would be a great suggestion for our Ideas Forum! This is a great platform for communicating feature requests to our Product Team. It also allows other customers to vote on and comment on the idea. As a result, it helps us better prioritize features that are having the greatest impact on our customers. 

 

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any follow up questions! 

 

 

 

0 Upvotes
simonquin5
Participant

Importing google contacts and number of interactions...

SOLVE

@nicolebrenner "however once you have your inbox connected using HubSpot Sales tools (free or premium) you can add contacts to the CRM directly from your inbox by using our contact profiles in Gmail or in Outlook,"

Yes this is true.  However here are the issues with that
1) you had to do them one at a time.
2) it doesn't bring in as much info a competitors very similar feature

3) it's a lot more clumsy than your competitors

 

What I mean by clumsy is that your competitors, this side panel automatically opens if the contact is not been dealt with yet in the CRM.  Also all you have to do is open the email.  With HubSpot you have to open the email, then click on teh email address, then click on the icon which opens the side panel and even then sometimes I had to click on the email address again.  Mean while the other chrome extension built by your competitor had the side bar open already without me having to click a thing sitting in the background ready for me to click the 'add to contacts' button, laughing at me while I struggled with the Hubspot extension.

 

If the Hubspot extension for gmail would work as good as the competitors great, I might not mind so much the fact I can only add people one at a time.  Because it would be twice as fast at least as what it currently is having to use that chrome extension.  

Then for the CSV, yeah it's okay but compared to the alternative method offered up by the competitor it's a lot more work and not as user friendly.  

 

So I can't really accept either method when I see how someone else is doing it.  I know Hubpsot are amazing, so be amazing.  Don't settle for second best.try out your competitors product with a brand new trial account of their product and your product and just try importing your gmail contacts and see how it pans out for you.

 

Also the total emails sent is a great feature too.   Because of that I could see immediately 'okay these are the people who've contacted me the most already' so they're obviously going to be a) helpful with advice or b) more likely to purchase something I'm offering.  

 

I've posted my 'idea' here

 

https://community.hubspot.com/t5/HubSpot-Ideas/Automatically-search-LinkedIn-for-contact-and-add-con...

 

But honestly I'm not sure if it carries the weight of what I really have to say.  Hopefully I've been blunt enough in this response and you can pass it along to your team?  You really have to try both ways and give it a good go, pretend like you're actually trying to accomplish the task and allow yourself to get frustrated at something which isn't working quite right.  Especially coming from something else that does.  

bernardoj
Participant

Importing google contacts and number of interactions...

SOLVE

hey what was the competitor? i really need that feature so i am considering moving away from hubspot

roisinkirby
HubSpot Product Team
HubSpot Product Team

Importing google contacts and number of interactions...

SOLVE

Hey @simonquin5 thanks for posting! I see you have posted two ideas to the Ideas Forum based of this thread and your post / discussion with @MayPascaud.

 

Both are great / well thought out use cases and we do appreciate your contribution on Ideas. The reason we encourage users to post here is so that our Product Teams are able to track ideas and their popularity - see if the ideas/feedback you have, resonates with any other users. 

 

While our teams do pass this feedback on directly to our Product Team, without ecnoruaging end users to post publically we aren't able to measure how popular the idea / common the feedback. So thank you for taking the time to post publically to the forum. 

0 Upvotes
simonquin5
Participant

Importing google contacts and number of interactions...

SOLVE

@roisinkirby no problem

 

it would probably help even better if I were to make a short video or some side by side screen shots which would help illustrate things better  ...  the only problem with this is I can't due to private information that would be on the screens...  So really you guys need to check it out for yourselves first hand and you'll see what I'm talking about.  No doubt it will take some serious development work... 

 

The two biggest difference I'm finding are
1) the ease of importing users and the amount of data that the import is capable of bringing in about the users
2) how good the chrome / gmail widget is.  The compeititor it's actually a side bar that instantly picks up the persons email address and presents that persons information / picture / social links / etc in that right side bar widget area.  With Hubspot it's a little icon that you click that opens something which doesn't have that much info and it doesn't really work unless you open the part of the email where the person replied or wrote to you (i.e. it won't work if it's your reply that's in focus) and then you have to click on their email address for it their more limited details to open in Hubspot widget).

 

Now apart from that... there's not a many other area where Hubspot falls behinid... and HubSpot is better in other ways.  Granted it is early days but I'm liking Hubspot a lot, otherwise I wouldn't be spending this time discussing the areas in which I see could use the most improvement. 

In my experience reducing barriers to consumers using your product results in more consumers using your product. I ended up spending a lot more time inputting data into HubSpot compared to the competitor which is a huge barrier.  Out of all the CRMS I tried over the weekend (all saturday and sunday probably a dozen of them) that one competitor was the only one I didn't have to import a CSV then have to create custom fields for.  Which mean't that CRM was the only one that without almost any work I had populated real world data that I could actually see, right way, wow this is working good.  

Now I've spent most of yesterday adding my data to HubSpot CRM it's looking good.  Still a bit more sparse than the competitor because of the data that the data the competitor was able to pull in automatically (social networks, gravitar, address details, phone etc) are missing.  But HubSpot still looks good, by far one of the best CRMs out there.  Just imagine how much better it could look and how faster it could get there...

So I'd highly recommend comparing exactly what I'm talking about, between the two CRMS in question and you'll see for yourself.   

simonquin5
Participant

Importing google contacts and number of interactions...

SOLVE
0 Upvotes
BrettLanguirand
Solution
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

Importing google contacts and number of interactions...

SOLVE

Hi @simonquin5

 

Thanks for your question!  I certainly see the value in being able to import contacts directly from your Google account, but the Hubspot CRM doesn't have this functionality.  The Hubspot Import tool requires that the contacts be on a CSV.  If you'd like to suggest that the functionality to import directly from Google be added to the Hubspot CRM, you can do so at the Hubspot Ideas Forum.  

 

To answer your second question, there isn't currently a way to see the total number of interactions between you and your contacts.  Hubspot Sales Pro customers have access to properties like Recent sales email open date and recent sales email reply date, but that's different than a counter type property.  This would also be something that is worth adding to the Ideas Forum.

 

I hope this helps.  I'm sure the answers probably aren't what you were hoping to hear, but if you post these suggestions to the Ideas Forum hopefully our developers will see them and be able to implement them in future product releases.  

 

CJfrut
Member

Importing google contacts and number of interactions...

SOLVE

I just tried this option, it is incredibly cumbersome. I was asked to assign each column with a Hubspot parallel. You can't move on to the next page unless you select a destination for each and every one of them.
I ended up giving up after a while - this doesn't work!

0 Upvotes
lgudeman
Participant

Importing google contacts and number of interactions...

SOLVE

Yes i know not direct from gmail only I cant seem to import from th MAC program Numbers

0 Upvotes
yogadawn
Member

Importing google contacts and number of interactions...

SOLVE

hello, according to this video you CAN import your gmail contacts - seems straightforward and that is why i opened an account with hubspot. but when i try and do the same as he did, i can't find the options. this was recorded in Feb 2017 and currently April 2017 so should be reflective of how it works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK0fczOWu_s

see around 2 minutes into the video 

thank you

 

 

0 Upvotes
nicolebrenner
HubSpot Employee
HubSpot Employee

Importing google contacts and number of interactions...

SOLVE

Hi @yogadawn - the email syncing described in that video is the process in which you can connect your HubSpot CRM to your Email client so you can use HubSpot to send emails. 

Once your inbox is connected, you can add contacts to the CRM when you email them on an individual basis. At this time, we still do not offer a bulk import option directly from Gmail to HubSpot. 

0 Upvotes