New to CRM - adding contacts

[evansgaz]

Hi there, 

I'm new to Hubspot and using any CRM to be honest. I was told it's good for managing sales leads etc and jeeping a database of contacts. I dont sell products to the general public or anything so i'm not going to be capturing hundreds of email addresses.

I currently have no database or spreadsheet of contacts, any contacts are just in my inbox buried amongst hundreds or thousands of emails. 

I read Hubspot Ai is good to combing through new emails and adding them to the CRM, but what about all of the customers and potential customers i've had correspondence with in the past, is the only way to manually go through and add these?

I very much doubt I'll be using hubspot to send emails or email campaigns etc, i kind of just want somewhere to manage contacts and track leads.

Anmy help for a beginner would be appreciated!

Thanks

[AdamLPW · Accepted solution]

Hi @evansgaz,

Even if you aren't going to be adding hundreds of contacts, it's well worth integrating your inbox with HubSpot.  Whenever you open an email to/from a contact you'll have the option to add them to the CRM (this includes old emails from years ago!).

I can also strongly recommend the HubSpot Academy (click on your account pic in the top-right then "HubSpot Academy") for getting started.  If you're unfamiliar with using CRM in general then there are short, simple training videos and practice articles to ensure you're doing everything right from the start.

Bear in mind HubSpot is a CRM system based primarily around email addresses.  If you don't have a list of email addresses in any format then I don't believe there's any software that will rip through your inbox and grab a list of contacts, adding them to HubSpot as it goes. 

Depending on what email system you're using, you may be able to export a list of email addresses which you can then import into HubSpot.  Other than that, it's manual on an ad-hoc basis, as required or using the integrations to automatically create new contacts when sending/receiving emails moving forward.  

Hope this helps!

[evansgaz]

Hi there

Thanks for this. One more question. I've enabled CRM Sales integration to my g suite email address.

Do i need to use gmail directly for email addresses to auto automatically be added to the CRM. I use Spark as my email client. Not sure I want to switch to only using Gmail in a browser.

Thanks

[AdamLPW]

Hi @evansgaz,

Not sure on this one, I'm afraid.  

Your best bet is to mark this thread as answered and ask it as a separate question or search in the community to see if the question has been asked before.  Including "GSuite" and "Spark" in your forum post subject will ensure you get answers from people who use those tools.

Good luck!