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Swan and your CRM serve different purposes, and Swan is built to work with or without one connected.
  • Swan’s database (companies and contacts) is the working set the agent researches, enriches, tags, and scores against your ICP. It’s optimized for what the agent needs at runtime.
  • Your CRM stays the system of record for your revenue team — deals, ownership, historical activity, reporting. Swan does not require a CRM connection to work; without one, it simply keeps everything in its own database and you lose the two-way sync described below.
A CRM integration (HubSpot today; Salesforce and others are covered in integrations) is entirely optional, and everything it does is configurable — you decide how much Swan writes back.

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What syncs to your CRM

Outreach activity. When a sequence contact is emailed, messaged on LinkedIn, sent a connection request, or replies, Swan logs that as a timeline activity on the matching CRM contact record — an email entry for email steps, a LinkedIn communication entry for LinkedIn steps (falling back to a note if that fails). This happens automatically whenever a CRM integration is connected; there’s no separate toggle to turn off activity logging specifically. Contact creation. Whether and when Swan creates a brand-new contact in your CRM is configurable, with three options:
  • Never — Swan never creates contacts in your CRM; it only updates ones that already exist there.
  • On first outreach (default) — a contact is created in your CRM the moment Swan sends them the first message or connection request.
  • When a sequence is approved — the contact is created only once you approve their enrollment in a sequence, before the first message goes out.
If a contact already has a matching record in your CRM (by email or LinkedIn URL), Swan links to it instead of creating a new one, regardless of this setting. Where: set this from your CRM’s integration card at agent.getswan.com/tools → Configuration tab → Automatic Contact Creation. Company creation. A separate setting controls whether Swan creates new company records in your CRM:
  • Only ICP-matched companies (default) — a company is only created in your CRM once it’s been classified as matching one of your ICP segments.
  • All companies — every company Swan works with gets created in your CRM.
  • None — Swan never creates new companies in your CRM, only updates existing ones.
Notes. Swan can attach a note to the CRM company record — for example, summarizing a website visit — or you can turn this off so Swan only touches structured fields, never free-text notes.

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Field mappings

Which CRM fields Swan reads and writes (e.g., which property holds a contact’s email or LinkedIn URL) is configurable per integration, so Swan can work with custom CRM field naming rather than assuming a fixed schema.

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Inbound: using your CRM to filter and exclude

The relationship isn’t only outbound. You can point a trigger at specific HubSpot lists in two directions:
  • As an exclusion set — on website-visitor triggers, an “Excluded Lists” picker treats companies on those lists as off-limits, the same way an excluded-companies entry would.
  • As a target/inclusion source — on business-event and Bombora-intent triggers, a “HubSpot Lists” picker pulls the companies on those lists into the set the trigger monitors.
Both are configured on an individual trigger (https://agent.getswan.com/triggers/{triggerId}), so they scope to that trigger rather than your whole org — there’s no org-wide HubSpot-list picker today.

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Common questions

If I turn off contact creation, does Swan still log outreach activity? No — activity logging requires a matching CRM contact to attach it to. If Swan can’t find or create one, there’s nothing to log the activity against. Can I have Swan create companies but never contacts? Yes — company creation and contact creation are controlled by separate settings, so you can mix and match. Does Swan overwrite fields I’ve already filled in on a CRM record? Swan overwrites: for any field it writes, it replaces the existing CRM value. It only writes fields it actually has data for, so fields it doesn’t touch are left alone — but there’s no “fill blanks only” or “don’t overwrite if already set” mode, and no setting to protect a specific field from being overwritten. (The “missing properties” configuration is a separate thing — it tracks Swan’s own custom properties that aren’t set up in your portal, not blank field values.) What happens if a contact already exists in HubSpot under a different email than the one Swan has? Swan matches by email or LinkedIn URL when looking for an existing CRM contact before creating a new one; if neither matches, it may create a second record. Is a CRM connection required to run outreach sequences? No — sequences run entirely on Swan’s own contact records. A CRM connection only adds the logging and sync behavior described on this page.