Automatic contact capture

Automatic contact capture means the CRM reads the email and calendar accounts you connect and creates people and companies for you. It also adds each email and meeting to the right record. For example, when a prospect replies to you, the CRM creates the contact if it does not exist yet and logs the message on their timeline. Attio, HubSpot and Salesforce are among the tools that offer this.

Sales teams rarely keep records up to date by hand. Without automatic capture, conversations stay in individual inboxes, deals look quiet when they are not, and a colleague cannot see what was already discussed with a customer. Capture gives the whole team the same history. It matters most for small teams where nobody has time for data entry. It matters less if all your selling happens in a tool the CRM already receives data from, such as a web form.

• Ask which email and calendar providers are supported and whether Gmail, Outlook or both are covered.
• Check whether private or internal emails can be excluded, so personal messages do not end up in the CRM.
• Test how the tool avoids creating junk contacts from newsletters, receipts and automated mail.
• Find out whether capture runs for every user or only on higher plans.