Use HubSpot conversation history in Twain

Mohamed ChahinMay 3, 20265 min read

Updated

Your team has been talking to these prospects for months. Twain can read what HubSpot already has on them (emails, calls, notes, meetings) and use it to write the next message, so follow-ups pick up where the thread left off instead of starting cold.

  • Imports & exports
  • Message writing

How conversation history shapes outreach

If your team has already spoken with a prospect, the next message should pick up that context. Importing HubSpot conversation history gives Twain the emails, calls, meetings, and notes behind the relationship, so the research and writing can account for what has already happened.

After research, open the lead's Research tab and read Relationship. It explains the relationship with the person or their company using the context available to Twain. It is a synthesis for the outreach, rather than a copy of HubSpot's activity timeline. Keep HubSpot open when you need to inspect an individual email, call, or note.

Where to enable it

Conversation history is opt-in. There's no global switch. You turn it on in the place where you actually need it.

  • Campaign creation. The HubSpot import step has an Import conversation history toggle right next to the field-mapping options. Flip it on and every lead in that campaign comes in with their HubSpot timeline.
  • Standalone leads import. Same toggle, on the modal you use to add HubSpot contacts to an existing campaign. Use it when you want to backfill context without rebuilding the campaign.
  • Automations. The HubSpot steps of a campaign automation (HubSpot Import and HubSpot Sync) have the same toggle. Once it's on, every automation run pulls fresh history.
Campaign creation. The toggle sits on the HubSpot leads step.
After choosing a HubSpot segment, enable Import conversation history before adding its contacts to the campaign.

For automations, treat the toggle as a setting, not a one-off action. Whatever you save on the step is what every future run uses, including scheduled and trigger-based runs nobody is watching in real time. Change your mind later, edit the step once, and every run after that picks up the new behaviour.

The first time you turn the toggle on, Twain checks the HubSpot permissions already on your connection. If anything is missing, you'll be asked to reconnect HubSpot and approve the extra access — email history, plus read access to the deals and companies a contact is associated with. That second part matters more than it sounds: HubSpot associations don't carry over on their own, so a note logged against the deal instead of the contact stays invisible without it. Until the reconnect is done, conversation history is paused for that integration and nothing partial is brought in.

How to validate it

Use one contact whose recent conversation your team can recognize:

  1. Check the contact's emails, calls, meetings, and notes in HubSpot. Pick a specific prior exchange to verify, such as a reply or a completed meeting.
  2. Import the contact with Import conversation history enabled, then generate or update the lead's research in Twain.
  3. Open Research and read Relationship. Check that the relationship described agrees with the source conversation. A filled field alone does not prove that every activity was imported.
  4. Review the next message in Sequence. Its opening and proposed next step should respect the prior exchange rather than treating the contact as a stranger.

Relationship is a summary, not a chronological list of events. If Twain finds no prior relationship, it says so; that is a valid result, not an error. If a known conversation is missing from the context, check the import toggle, the HubSpot connection's permissions, and the activity on the source contact. After correcting the setup, re-import the contact and update the research before reviewing the next draft.

What data we collect

Twain reads the four kinds of HubSpot activity that count as conversation, and turns them into a short summary the assistant can use. Nothing is written back to HubSpot. The summary stays private to your Twain workspace.

  • Emails. Both sides of the thread, so the assistant knows which messages came from your team and which came from the prospect.
  • Calls. What the call was about, the outcome, and when it happened.
  • Meetings. Agenda, notes, and outcome.
  • Notes. Free-form context your reps captured outside of email or calls.

We pull recent activity from these sources and make the conversation context available to research and writing. Both your team's messages and the prospect's replies matter when deciding how to continue the exchange. The original activity records remain in HubSpot.

Lifecycle stage changes, system-generated workflow events, and other non-conversational HubSpot activity are left out on purpose. They add noise without helping the assistant write a better message.