Contacts, CRM and meetings

Everything about the people you reach: A single list of your contacts, what each contact record shows, and how replies turn into conversions and booked meetings.

What it is

Once your outreach is running, the people you have reached out to collect in one place. Contacts is the master list of those prospects, pulled together from across your audiences and campaigns. Open any contact to see who they are, where they came from, their LinkedIn details, and the conversation so far. From there the platform helps you track the ones who convert: it records conversions and captures meetings that get booked off the back of a reply.

This page covers the whole "after they reply" side of Handshake. The "before they reply" side - finding and qualifying people, then sending - lives in Audiences and the Outreach Hub.

Why it exists

Outbound generates a lot of people and a lot of conversations, fast. Without one place to see them, prospects get lost between LinkedIn, email, and whatever spreadsheet someone is keeping on the side. Contacts gives you a single, searchable record of every person your outreach has touched, so you can find anyone, see their full story, and follow the warm ones through to a meeting without losing track.

Who can see it

  • The Contacts list is part of the main app. Partners, clients and admins see it, scoped to whatever client or seat they are looking at via the breadcrumb at the top. You only ever see contacts inside your own client/account boundary.
  • CRM, Conversions, Meetings and Calendar currently live in the client portal (the older /client address), not yet in the unified app. A client user sees these; a seat user sees their own Bookings and Calendar instead. The sections below say plainly where each one lives.

How it works

The Contacts list

The Contacts list is a table of every prospect your outreach has reached, for the client or account you are currently viewing. Each row shows the person and where they sit in your setup.

  • Default columns: Name (with photo and headline), Company, Campaign, Seat, and Warmth. You can switch on more columns - Headline, Status, Client, and Country - from the gear icon in the table header. Columns can be reordered by dragging and resized by dragging their edge; your layout is remembered for next time.
  • Warmth is a quick read on how engaged a contact is, shown as a coloured dot: Hot (red), Warm (orange) or Cold (blue). You can filter the list to just one warmth, and you can change a contact's warmth yourself.
  • Search matches on name, company, or headline.
  • The list is paged at 50 contacts at a time, with Previous and Next.

You will not see a separate "qualified" and "unqualified" split here. By the time a person reaches this list they are a live contact in your outreach; the qualification step that decides who is a good fit happens earlier, inside the audience. See Audiences for that.

There is a Kanban (board) view toggle next to the table view, but it is not built yet and shows a "coming soon" placeholder. Use the table view.

What a contact record shows

Open a contact to see their full profile. It pulls together:

  • Who they are: photo, name, headline, company, role, and location.
  • Where they sit: the client, account, and campaign they belong to.
  • Warmth: Cold / Warm / Hot, which you can change here (click to cycle through).
  • Active or Muted: mute a contact to stop further outreach to them. Muting also clears any messages still queued for them.
  • Contact details: their work and personal email (if known), and their LinkedIn profile link with its connection status - Connected, Pending (invite sent, not yet accepted), Declined, or Not connected.
  • Their background: an "about" summary and recent work history from their LinkedIn profile, plus recent LinkedIn posts where available.
  • Next activity: the next scheduled outreach step for this person, or "None scheduled".

The conversation itself - the back-and-forth of messages - is shown alongside the contact in the Outreach Hub.

How contacts get here from an audience

The flow is always the same:

  1. You build an audience and the platform qualifies each prospect against your brief.
  2. You review and approve the right people inside the audience.
  3. Approved people become live contacts and start moving through your campaign.
  4. From that point they appear in the Contacts list.

So the Contacts list is the "live" set - people who passed qualification, got approved, and are now in outreach. The earlier raw and pending prospects stay inside their audience until you approve them; see Audiences.

CRM (client portal)

The CRM brings your contacts and conversions together in one tabbed view. Its Contacts tab is the same list described above; its Conversions tab is described below. To track what happened with an individual prospect, open their contact record: notes and tasks live on the contact itself.

Conversions (client portal)

A conversion is a recorded outcome that counts toward what you are billed for - for example a contact replying with real interest, or a booked meeting. Conversions are recorded automatically as these events happen; you do not log them by hand.

Each conversion shows the contact, the seat, the campaign, and the date. A conversion you accept needs no action and shows as Confirmed.

If you think a conversion was recorded in error, you can dispute it within 7 days of the date it was recorded. You give a short reason, and the dispute then moves through review (Pending, Under review, and finally a resolved state). After the 7-day window closes you can no longer raise a dispute on that conversion.

Meetings, calendars and bookings

Handshake includes a built-in booking system so prospects can book time with your team without leaving for a separate tool.

How a booked meeting is captured. Each person on your team can have a public booking page (a link like app.handshake.live/book/your-name). When a prospect fills in that page, a booking is created and becomes a meeting. Meetings are captured from your booking pages - they are not auto-detected from email or scraped from an external calendar.

Bookings (seat view) is the personal dashboard for the person who owns the booking page. It shows upcoming and past bookings, simple stats (upcoming, completed this month, cancelled this month), and for each booking the prospect's name, company, email, and any note they left. You can join the meeting (if a link is set), cancel it, or mark whether the prospect attended or was a no-show.

Meetings (client view) is the same information rolled up across your whole team, split into Today, Upcoming, and Past. You can search, cancel, mark attendance, or dispute a meeting.

Calendar is where booking pages are set up:

  • The client-level Calendar lists everyone on the team and whether each has an active booking page.
  • The per-person Calendar is where you configure the booking page itself: Your public link, whether it is active, your weekly availability, meeting length, buffers between meetings, how much notice is required, how far ahead people can book, and your timezone.

You can optionally connect a real calendar (Google, Outlook, or iCloud) so that times you are already busy are blocked from your booking page. This connection is still being finished and the connect button is not yet switched on, so for now availability comes from the weekly windows you set rather than from a live calendar feed.

My connections (seat view)

My connections is where a person manages the channels their outreach runs on - it is not a list of their LinkedIn contacts. It shows three cards:

  • LinkedIn - the connected LinkedIn identity used for search and sending (and its tier: Classic, Premium, or Sales Navigator).
  • Email - the connected mailbox messages send from (Gmail or Outlook).
  • Calendar - a connected calendar used to prevent double-bookings.

Each card shows whether the channel is connected, when it last synced, and lets you connect or disconnect it. If an email is already connected to another seat in your team, you can move it across rather than reconnecting from scratch.

For the bigger picture on connecting and keeping these identities healthy, see Seats and account safety.

Limits and what to watch out for

  • You only see your own scope. The Contacts list and everything below it is limited to the client and seat you have selected in the breadcrumb. Switch context there to see a different client's people.
  • Muting stops outreach. Muting a contact also clears any messages still waiting in their queue - it is the right way to take someone out of a sequence, not a temporary pause.
  • Conversion disputes close after 7 days. If a conversion looks wrong, raise the dispute promptly; once the window passes you cannot dispute it.
  • CRM, Conversions, Meetings and Calendar are client-portal features today. They are not yet in the unified app. The Contacts list is the part that lives in the main app.
  • The Kanban view and the Status column are not finished - use the table view, and do not rely on the Status column yet.
  • Calendar connection is not live yet. Booking availability comes from the weekly windows you set, not from a connected Google/Outlook/iCloud calendar.
  • Meetings come only from your booking pages. A meeting arranged purely over email or on a prospect's own calendar invite will not appear here unless it was booked through your Handshake booking page.