How CRM Connections Work

Who connects a CRM, why it's one per person, what Tenali reads and writes, and what disconnecting does.

Salesforce and HubSpot share the same connection model in Tenali, and three rules decide how CRM behaves for your team: connections belong to individuals, each person gets one CRM, and Tenali acts under your own CRM login. Learn the model once here and both connector pages become a two-minute job — the pages themselves cover where the two differ.

One CRM per person

You can have either Salesforce or HubSpot connected — never both. The rule applies to you individually, not to your workspace, so your teammate's choice doesn't constrain yours.

Every teammate connects their own

A CRM connection belongs to the person who authorized it. It powers that person's chat answers and pushes — and nobody else's.

If your teammate connects HubSpot, your own Integrations page still shows Connect until you connect your own account.
Two people in the same workspace can be on different CRMs — one on Salesforce, one on HubSpot.
Because Tenali reads and writes through your CRM login, you only ever see the records your CRM user can see, and anything Tenali writes is attributed to you.

There are no admin controls

CRM connections sit outside the admin console entirely. An admin cannot:

connect a CRM on the team's behalf, or provision an org-wide connection;
see which CRM a teammate has connected;
disconnect someone else's CRM;
require the workspace to standardize on one CRM.

Connecting is not restricted to admins either — any member can connect their own CRM. Removing someone from the workspace does not revoke or delete their CRM connection.

What Tenali reads

With a CRM connected, Tenali can read the records your own CRM login can already reach — companies and accounts, deals and opportunities, contacts, pipeline stages, activity, and on Salesforce any object your permissions allow — in three places:

Chat in the web app, where CRM details are pulled into the answer and listed in its Sources panel — on HubSpot with a link straight to the record.
A Slack DM with Tenali, which reads your CRM the same way chat does. Channel mentions never touch your CRM — see Tenali in Slack.
The Push panel on a meeting summary, where Tenali finds the company and deal for that meeting.

Nothing is copied or synced. Tenali holds no cache of your CRM and runs no background import — every lookup goes to your CRM at the moment you ask, so you always see current values and nothing of yours sits in Tenali waiting to go stale.

Tenali never holds your CRM credentials. Authorization runs through a dedicated identity and OAuth provider that stores and refreshes the tokens; Tenali keeps an opaque account reference and the list of scopes your login granted.

What Tenali writes

Tenali writes to HubSpot. With Salesforce connected, Tenali reads, and when you ask for an update it drafts the note or field text for you to paste into Salesforce.

The Push to HubSpot button opens a side panel where Tenali finds the company and deal for that meeting and proposes the update, under the same rules as chat below. See Push a Summary to Your CRM.

From chat

Chat can update HubSpot from your meeting content — updating a deal, logging the meeting, creating a task, adding a contact, or creating a company and a deal that don't exist yet. Connecting HubSpot is all it takes: there's no separate setting to switch on.

How much it does on its own depends on the change. By default, any change to a field on a record that already exists — stage, amount, close date, or any text field, whether it was filled or blank — pauses on a Review CRM changes card for your approval; telling Tenali to go ahead without asking can let those through without a card, but moving a deal to closed-won or closed-lost always needs your confirmation. Additive changes — logging a meeting, creating a task, adding a new contact — are written on their own when nothing in the batch needs review; when something does, they wait for Apply with the rest. Either way, you can ask chat to undo them. See Update Your CRM from Chat.

From Slack

The same write-back runs in a Slack DM with Tenali, with one difference worth knowing before you use it: Slack approves nothing automatically. Every change — including additive ones — waits on an approve-or-discard card, and the buttons act on the whole batch rather than individual rows. See Tenali in Slack.

The boundary

However the change was made, the limits are the same. Tenali never touches tickets, quotes, leads, custom objects, or custom fields; never changes a record's owner; and never deletes a record you or your team created. The only records it removes are ones it created itself: contacts, companies and deals it can take back when you ask it to undo, plus a deal it has just created but couldn't attach to a company. On HubSpot, notes and tasks can't be deleted at all — undo cancels them in place instead. See Update Your CRM from Chat.

Disconnect

Clicking Disconnect on the Integrations page removes the connection from Tenali immediately: chat loses CRM access on your very next message, and no further reads or writes happen. The CRM logo button on each row of the All Meetings list disappears, and the button on the summary toolbar reverts to a generic Push to CRM that simply prompts you to connect one.

When a connection breaks

If your CRM ends Tenali's access (a password change, an admin revoke or an expired session), the CRM's row on the Integrations page shows an amber Needs reconnect badge with the reason and a Reconnect button. The push button on your meeting summaries changes to Reconnect Salesforce or Reconnect HubSpot.

Click Reconnect and sign in to your CRM again. Until you do, chat answers from your meetings and knowledge base without CRM data. See CRM Issues.