If you sell with HubSpot, at some point you have assumed your team's email gets logged on its own. It is a reasonable assumption and an expensive one, because your forecast, your pipeline reviews and the phrase "this client has had no activity for a month" all hang off it.
We checked on a real portal. Here is the result and how to repeat it.
What we did
A freshly created free HubSpot portal, signed up with a Google account. No Sales extension installed, which is how most portals sit unless somebody configured it deliberately.
On sign-up, HubSpot imported sixteen contacts from the mailbox by itself and created the associated companies. Of those sixteen, six were real people; the rest were newsletters and automated senders, including one from HubSpot itself.
Then we sent a real email from another domain to the connected mailbox. The contact already existed in the CRM, with that exact address.
What happened
The contact record still said there were no emails, and offered a button to log one by hand.
Out of the box, with no extension, the leak was one hundred per cent. Not thirty, not half: all of it.
What it logs and what it does not
In order, and this is not a criticism of HubSpot: it is how the product is designed, and their own documentation says so.
- Incoming email from a contact that already exists. Logged, if you have the inbox connection on. This is the case that makes people believe everything else works too.
- Outgoing email. Needs every rep to install the browser extension or the Outlook add-in, and to leave it on. It is per person and per device.
- Email sent from a phone. Not logged. The extension lives in the desktop browser, and no documented method covers mail somebody sends from their handset, which is where half of all follow-up gets sent.
- Anything with somebody who is not a contact. Nothing is logged, and nothing can be: the CRM has nobody to attribute it to.
That last point is the most important and the least visible. A CRM logs email from the contacts that exist, so by construction it cannot show you the ones that do not. That is not a bug: it has nothing to compare itself against.
Why this matters more than it looks
Because the numbers you decide with come from there.
"Last activity 40 days ago" means "nobody logged anything for 40 days", not "nobody has spoken to them for 40 days". Those are very different sentences and only one of them is on the screen.
And it fails in both directions. It flags a stalled deal that is actually alive, because the rep has been emailing from their phone every day. And it fails to flag a dead one, because somebody left a note two days ago even though the client has not answered in six weeks. The second one is what wrecks your forecast.
How to check yours, in five minutes
You do not have to take any of the above on trust.
- Pick a contact that exists in your CRM and that you have exchanged email with this week.
- Open their record and look at the activity tab.
- Count how many emails appear there, and how many are in your inbox with that person.
If the two numbers match, your setup is one of the good ones and this article is not for you. If they do not, that gap is what is missing from your forecast.
What you can do
First, and it is free: if your team works on desktop, rolling out the Sales extension fixes outgoing email. It is worth doing even if you do nothing else.
What it does not fix is the phone or, above all, the people who are not in the CRM at all. That needs reading the mailbox from outside and crossing it, which is what CERUNA does: it reads your team's email headers, compares them against what the CRM has on record, and names the difference.
If you want your own company's number instead of an estimate, that is the Revenue Blind Spot Audit: €750, report in 72 hours, refunded if it does not find three things you did not know.
A caveat about this figure
The hundred per cent comes from a freshly created portal, with no extension, on the free tier. That is the bad extreme on purpose: it measures the starting point of somebody who has configured nothing.
A portal with the extension rolled out and the team on desktop will give a far better number. What no configuration will fix is the contacts that do not exist.