# Research new HubSpot leads and brief their owner in Slack

> When a new contact lands in HubSpot, we read their company website and recent news, fill in the record, and send their owner a short brief.

- Workflow type: agent
- Services: Notte, HubSpot, Slack
- Categories: Sales
- Published: 2026-08-07

## What it does

- Watches for new contacts in HubSpot and starts researching the moment one is created.
- Reads the company's own website for what they sell, who they sell to, and which customers they name publicly.
- Searches the web for recent funding, hiring, and product launch news worth knowing before the first call.
- Fills in industry, company size and location on the contact, attaches the full write-up to their timeline, and sends the owner a three bullet brief with a suggested opening line.

## What you'll need

- A HubSpot account where you can add contacts and connect an app that gets notified when new contacts are created.
- A Notte account, which provides the cloud browser that reads company websites and searches the web.
- A Slack workspace. Reps who own contacts in HubSpot should use the same email address in Slack so we can find who to message.

## Prompt

When a new contact is created in HubSpot, research the company behind them and write what you find straight back into the CRM. Use a HubSpot webhook trigger that fires on contact creation.

Before doing any research at all, check the contact's email domain. If it is a free consumer provider such as gmail.com, outlook.com, hotmail.com, yahoo.com, icloud.com, aol.com or proton.me, stop immediately and take no further action. Personal signups are not worth spending a browser run on, and this filter is what keeps the workflow affordable at inbound volume. Keep the domain list somewhere easy to edit.

For everyone else, start with HubSpot Get Contact using the contact ID from the webhook payload. Pull the email, first and last name, job title, company name, website property and the HubSpot owner ID. Work out the company website: use the website property if it is set, otherwise derive it from the email domain. If neither gives you a usable company site, log that the contact could not be researched and stop.

Use Notte Scrape Webpage on the company website to pull positioning, products and named customers. Start with the homepage, then decide for yourself which further pages are worth reading based on what the homepage did or did not answer. About, Product, Solutions, Pricing and Customers pages are the usual candidates. Keep this to a handful of pages: you are after what they sell, who they sell it to, roughly how they are positioned, and any customers or logos they name publicly.

Then use Notte Search Web to catch recent news about the company: funding rounds, leadership hires, hiring pushes, product launches, acquisitions or market expansion. Judge what is actually material. A funding round, a new office or a senior hire is worth reporting; a routine blog post or a generic press release is not. Prefer anything from the last twelve months and note the date and source link for each item you keep.

Now fill in the record. Use HubSpot Update Contact to set firmographic fields such as industry, company size and location, plus the company website if it was missing. Only write a field when the research genuinely supports it. Where you are unsure, leave the property untouched rather than filling it with a low confidence guess, and never invent a value to make the record look complete.

Use HubSpot Create Note to attach the full research write-up to the contact so it lives on their timeline, associated with the contact record. Structure the note clearly: what the company does, their main products, any named customers, and the recent news items with dates and source links. Write it as prose a salesperson can skim in under a minute, not as a raw dump of scraped text.

Finally, tell the contact owner. Use HubSpot Get Owner with the contact's owner ID to get the owner's email address, match that email against Slack List Users to find their Slack user, then use Slack Open a Conversation to get the direct message channel and Slack Send a Message to send the brief. If you cannot match the owner to a Slack user, or the contact has no owner set, send the brief to a fallback sales channel instead so the research is never silently lost.

The direct message should be short and immediately usable: the contact name, their company, then exactly three bullets under a "why this lead matters" heading, then one suggested opening line the rep could actually say on a call or paste into an email. The three bullets should be the most relevant things you found, not a summary of everything. If the research turned up very little, say so plainly in the message rather than padding it out.

Handle failures gracefully. If a page will not scrape or a search returns nothing useful, continue with what you do have rather than abandoning the run, and be explicit in both the note and the Slack message about what could not be found.

## How to customize

- Edit the list of free email domains that get skipped, or remove the filter entirely if you want every signup researched.
- Choose which fields get written back to the contact record and which are left blank for a human to confirm.
- Send the brief to a shared sales channel instead of a direct message, or change it from three bullets to a longer summary.

## FAQ

### Will this work on HubSpot Free?

The contact records and timeline notes this uses are available on every HubSpot tier. The one thing to check against your plan is your ability to connect an app that gets notified when a new contact is created, which is how the research gets kicked off.

### What happens when someone signs up with a personal Gmail or Outlook address?

Nothing. Free consumer email domains are skipped before any research starts, so personal signups never use up a browser run. You can edit that list of domains or switch the filter off if you would rather research everyone.

### What if the contact has no company website on their record?

We work the website out from their email domain instead. If that still does not give us a real company site, the contact is left alone rather than filled in with guesses.

### Will this overwrite information we already have in HubSpot?

Only where the research genuinely supports a value. Anything uncertain is left untouched rather than filled with a low confidence guess, and you can restrict which fields are allowed to be written at all.

### Does the rep still get a message if the research turns up very little?

Yes. A new lead was still assigned to them, so they get the brief either way. It says plainly when there was little to find, so nobody is misled into thinking a quiet company looks more promising than it is.

Use this prompt in General Input: https://www.generalinput.com/prompts/research-new-hubspot-leads-and-brief-their-owner-in-slack