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Bruno Ashford @brunoashfordSubscribeModule 6 · Lesson 6.3 · 12 min
Your CRM and Spreadsheets
Read and update client data in your CRM and spreadsheets safely, with a preview before any change is saved.
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1Connect your CRM
Many CRMs now publish an official remote MCP server. HubSpot is one; the command below is the form used in the Claude Code documentation. For other CRMs, look for the vendor's official MCP page and use the URL they publish, or check whether a connector exists in your claude.ai settings. After adding, run /mcp and sign in.
claude mcp add --transport http hubspot --scope local https://mcp.hubspot.com2Start with a health report, read-only
Ask for a data quality report before you ask for anything else. It shows you how the agent reads your CRM and gives you a cleanup list you probably needed anyway.
Using the CRM connection, read all open deals. Do not change anything. Report: deals with no activity in 30 days, deals with no next step, contacts missing email or phone, and duplicate companies. Give totals first, then a table of the 20 worst records with a suggested fix for each.3Use the preview, approve, write loop
When you want changes, make Claude show every change as a table first: record, field, current value, new value, reason. You approve the whole table, some rows, or none. Only then does it write. Keep permission mode on default so each write asks for confirmation.
Prepare updates to mark the stale deals from your report as 'Closed lost' with reason 'No response after 30 days'. Show me a preview table first and wait for my approval. Do not write anything until I reply 'approved' with the row numbers.4Work with spreadsheets through Drive or local files
For Google Sheets, the Drive connector lets Claude read and often edit files. For Excel or CSV exports, the simplest safe method is to export a copy into your project folder and let Claude work on the copy. You then import the cleaned file yourself, which gives you a natural checkpoint.
5Keep a change log
Ask Claude to append every approved change to a simple log file in the project: date, record, field, old value, new value. When your sales manager asks why a deal moved, you have the answer in seconds.
Your CRM is probably lying to you. Deals that died three months ago still show as open, phone numbers are in the notes field, and nobody has updated the stage since the first call. Every owner I know says the same thing: we have a CRM, but we do not trust it.
An agent connected to the CRM can read every record in minutes and tell you what is stale, missing or wrong. It can also update records. That power is exactly why this lesson is built around one habit: preview, approve, then write.
Key points
- Start every CRM connection with a read-only health report.
- Preview, approve, write: every change shown as a table first.
- Work on spreadsheet copies when in doubt, then import yourself.
- Log every approved change for accountability.
Avoid
- Asking the agent to 'clean up the CRM' with no preview step.
- Running bulk updates on live data without exporting a backup first.
- Guessing an MCP URL instead of using the one the vendor publishes.
A roofing company in Texas had 1,140 open deals in HubSpot, of which the owner guessed about 200 were real. The read-only health report found 612 deals with no activity in 60 days and 94 duplicate companies. The owner approved the changes in batches of 50 over two afternoons. The pipeline dropped to 318 open deals, and for the first time the weekly forecast matched what the sales team said on Monday calls.