Contacts and Companies
Ahoy builds your contacts and companies for you, mostly from your email and calendar, and keeps each record filled in as it learns more. What makes a record in Ahoy different is how much it holds without you doing anything: an enriched profile, an automatic timeline of every interaction, research on demand, and notes.
This guide covers:
- How contacts and companies get created
- What enrichment adds
- The automatic timeline
- Research on demand
- Notes
- Contacts and Companies views
How records get created
Most of your contacts arrive on their own. Anyone outside your company that you email, or who emails you and looks business-relevant, or who’s on a meeting invite with you, becomes a contact. Ahoy leaves out the addresses you wouldn’t want cluttering your list – automated senders like no-reply addresses, meeting-room resources, your own colleagues, and promotional or transactional mail.
Companies come from email domains. When a contact is created, Ahoy groups them under their company using their email domain. Personal-email domains like Gmail, Outlook.com, and iCloud won’t create a company.
You won’t see every one of these right away. To keep your Contacts list from filling up with people you’ve emailed once, Ahoy holds auto-created contacts back until you engage with one. You can still view these contacts, just search for their name or email, or click them on an email or meeting. If you want them to stay visible in Ahoy, just interact with the contact record, for example, edit a field, set a lifecycle stage, or link a deal. They’ll stay in your lists from then on, along with their company.
You can add records yourself in a few ways:
- Manually: Add a contact or company directly, filling in the fields you know.
- Via import: Bring contacts, companies, and deals in from a CSV or Excel file. See Importing your contacts and accounts.
- From Chat; Say something like “Add Jane Foster as a contact,” and Ahoy prepares it as a proposal for you to approve.
- From your address book: Connecting Gmail or Outlook brings in your saved contacts, and those appear straightaway.
You can also ask Chat to find people matching a description, for example, “heads of sales at fintech startups in New York”. It’ll research the web and propose contacts for you to approve. Anything Ahoy’s AI Actions create or change in your CRM comes to you as a proposal first; enrichment is the exception, filling in blank fields on its own, as below. Check out the AI Actions article for more info.
What enrichment adds
When a contact arrives with an email address or LinkedIn URL, Ahoy fills in a fuller profile automatically. For a person, that’s details like their name, job title, phone number, LinkedIn headline and summary, location, and when they started the role. For a company, it’s the industry, a description, headcount, location, website, and LinkedIn. To do this, Ahoy sends the contact’s details to a third-party enrichment service. The Where your Ahoy data comes from article covers what’s shared and how.
Ahoy enriches contacts, so a company’s details are filled in as a by-product of enriching someone who works there. It's important to note that Ahoy will only ever fill blanks through this process, it won't overwrite something you’ve entered. A correction you make by hand is permanent, a later enrichment will leave any field that already has a value alone.
The contacts already in your email history when you first connect aren’t enriched by default, just new ones going forward. If you do want to enrich a batch of older contacts, you can use the bulk action in the Contacts list.
Automatic timeline
Every interaction with a contact lands on their record automatically so there's nothing to log manually. The timeline captures emails (including when one you sent was opened), LinkedIn messages, meetings, notes, deal and stage changes, and the actions Ahoy has taken.
The timeline carries emails, including subject and body, collapsed to a preview you can expand, with a reply option. It's good to note that your team can see contact and company records, but whether they see the emails and meetings on a timeline depends on that account’s visibility setting. You can check the visibility of your account in Settings > Email & Calendar.
Research on demand
The Research button on a contact or company runs a fresh pass across the web, gathering recent information about the person or company, and adds a summary onto the record. If Ahoy spots something worth acting on, we'll raise it as an AI Action for you to approve.
Notes
You can add notes to any contact or company – and to deals and meetings too – with rich text, @-mentions, and links to other records. You can add one from the record or just ask in Chat.
Notes are shared by default so they'll be visible to your whole team unless you mark it private. This can be done on a note-by-note basis. Notes can prompt follow-up AI Actions and they're taken into account when creating meeting prep briefs.
Contacts and Companies views
Contacts is the detail view. The table lists people by name, company, job title, email, phone, and lifecycle stage, and you can also switch to a board laid out by lifecycle stage to work them like a pipeline.
Companies is the roll-up view. Each company row shows its people and its deals inline, so you can see who you know and what’s in play without opening a single record.
Open a company and you get its people, its linked deals and total deal value, an account-level timeline, and its own Research and Notes – the same building blocks as a contact, gathered at the account level.
FAQs
Why isn’t someone I’ve emailed in my contacts?
Search for their name or email, or click on their name in an email or meeting, and open the record – then edit a field, set a lifecycle stage, or link a deal, and they’ll appear in your Contacts list from then on. Some addresses never become contacts at all, though: automated senders, your own colleagues, and promotional or transactional mail.
Will enrichment overwrite something I corrected by hand?
No. Enrichment only ever fills fields that are empt, it never changes a value you’ve entered.
Can I turn enrichment off?
Enrichment runs automatically for new contacts and isn’t a setting you switch off. Since it only fills blank fields, it won’t alter anything you’ve entered. What it shares to do its work is covered in Where your Ahoy data comes from.
Can my teammates see my emails on a shared contact?
It depends on that account’s visibility setting. The contact record is shared with your team, but the emails and meetings on its timeline are shared only if that account is set to share with your team. You can see your visibility settings in Settings > Email & Calendar.
Does all of this work on Microsoft as well as Google?
Yes. Contact creation, enrichment, the timeline, and research all work the same whether your email and calendar are on Google or Microsoft.