A HubSpot-powered CRM inside Gmail changed how one sales team follows up
A sales lead used Manus to build a custom workflow that put HubSpot details into the places the team already worked: Gmail and Slack. The goal was simple. When a prospect emailed the team, the rep should not have to leave the inbox to figure out who the person was, whether the company was already in HubSpot, or whether the conversation mattered to an open deal.
With Manus, the sales lead built a workflow that moved the right HubSpot details closer to the email. The finished system brought HubSpot, Gmail, and Slack into one workflow. It could label Gmail messages when HubSpot information existed, show useful account information inside Gmail, and notify the team in Slack when an enterprise lead needed attention.
The project started with one everyday sales problem
The project started with a practical sales question: what should a rep know before replying to an email?
For example, if Priya from acme.com emails the team, the rep needs to quickly understand whether she already exists in HubSpot, whether Acme is a target account, whether there’s an open deal, and who owns the relationship. Those signals determine whether the reply should be fast, routed, or handled differently.
Manus helped translate that question into a usable data layer. HubSpot already stores this information across contacts, companies, deals, and ownership records. The challenge was identifying which of those fields actually matter at the moment of reply, and making them accessible inside Gmail.
That reduced the problem to a simple set of signals: who sent the email, which company they belong to, whether the company is known, whether there’s an active deal, and who owns the account. This became the foundation for the Gmail workflow.
The browser extension and label within Gmail
A small product decision made the workflow easier for reps to understand. The Gmail label was not used as a complicated scoring system. It was used as a simple signal.
In this fictional mockup, the label is the signal. When a rep clicks it, the browser extension opens with the basic lead or customer details needed before replying.
For example, if Priya from Acme emailed the team and Acme already existed in HubSpot, the email would be labeled accordingly. If the sender is already a customer, the rep may respond with more account history. If the sender is tied to an open enterprise deal, the rep may prioritize the reply. If the sender belongs to a company with no owner, the team may need to assign someone before responding.
Once emails are labeled, a sales rep can click the label and open the extension with the relevant HubSpot details inside the inbox.
Slack helped the team act on important leads
Gmail helped one rep respond with better information. Slack helped the team coordinate when an important lead needed attention.
In this workflow, Manus built a Slack bot to send Slack notifications for enterprise inbound leads from HubSpot. A Slack message could tell the team that a high-fit company had reached out, include the company name, show the likely owner, and point people back to the email thread or related record.
For example, if an enterprise prospect emailed from a target account and no owner was assigned, Slack could alert the team. That makes the lead visible to the group instead of leaving it buried in one person’s inbox.
Slack made the same lead information visible to the wider team. A high-fit lead could be seen, assigned, and followed up on before it slipped through the cracks.
What other teams can learn from this process
The project worked because HubSpot, Gmail, and Slack were treated as separate layers. Each layer was built separately, tested on its own, and then combined into a workflow that fit the team’s existing sales motion.
The first layer was the HubSpot data model. The team had to decide which fields were actually useful at the moment of follow-up, such as contact identity, company match, owner, deal status, lead source, plan, and next step. Manus was used to identify valuable HubSpot fields and create a synchronized database that the rest of the workflow could use
The second layer depended on access. In this case, the team was on Google Workspace, so Gmail authorization could happen through Google auth. That mattered because the workflow needed permission to read messages, compare senders against the HubSpot-derived database, and apply labels based on custom rules. Manus was then used to automatically tag emails according to those rules.
The third layer was the Gmail-facing experience. After the labels worked, Manus was used to build the browser extension that displayed HubSpot-style icons and loaded the relevant lead or customer details inside Gmail. The same build also required supporting pieces: host plugins, a login website, and the user authorization flow. That work was handled as a separate layer in Manus before being combined with the rest of the system.
The practical building tip for other teams is to start by checking access levels, then define the minimum useful fields, test the label logic, and build the visible interface. If any one layer is missing, the experience becomes either unreliable for the rep or too hard for the team to adopt.
Try Connectors
Try connectors today and supercharge your builds with data layers that you can access directly with Manus.
