A CRM integration means more than an export button. What is synchronised, how writeback of status and amount works, and how you create a proposal from a deal in HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive or Monday in two clicks.
A CRM integration is a connection between your proposal software and your CRM in which data is exchanged automatically and in both directions. Contacts, companies and deals from the CRM appear in the proposal tool, and the status and the amount of a proposal are written back to the deal. The difference with an export button or a manual copy is that nobody has to retype anything and that both systems show the same truth. That sounds like a small thing, but anyone who has ever presented a pipeline overview in which half the amounts were out of date knows what it is worth. In this article you can read what exactly is synchronised, how writeback works and which CRM systems you can connect to Proposal Expert today.
A good integration works on three objects. Contacts: name, email address, job title and phone number of the people you send the proposal to. Companies: company name, address and VAT number, so you do not fill those in again for every proposal. Deals: the name of the opportunity, the stage in your pipeline, the expected amount and the owner. In Proposal Expert the sync runs through a worker that picks up and writes back changes at a fixed interval, with encrypted storage of the access tokens. You choose per connection which direction leads. Usually that is the CRM for contact details and the proposal tool for amounts, because that is where the price is actually built up. The tool shows in the integration overview when the last sync ran and what changed, so you can look back if you are ever in doubt.
Writeback is the writing back of information from the proposal to the deal. Two fields are central to it. The status: draft, sent, viewed, signed or declined. And the amount: the total of the proposal, including any optional lines the client ticked. In Proposal Expert writeback can be switched on per workspace and is off by default, so you can first check that the field mapping is right before you let your pipeline be overwritten. Once it is on, this is what happens. Send the proposal and the deal moves to the stage you linked to "sent". If the client signs, the signed amount is written to the deal amount and the deal moves to the stage for "won". That way a salesperson never has to close a deal by hand again, and the revenue forecast in the CRM matches what was actually signed.
The short route starts in the proposal tool, not in the CRM. Step 1: on a new proposal, choose the option to select a deal. You see the open deals from your CRM, with name, company and amount. Step 2: pick the deal and the tool fills in the client name, the contact person, the company details and the expected amount for you. After that you write, or you let the AI produce a first draft based on the deal notes. A manual proposal in which you retype data from two screens costs about a quarter of an hour of preparation, taken here as an example. With a linked deal that is a minute. The gain is not only in time but in errors as well: a misspelled company name or an out-of-date email address no longer happens, because the CRM is the source. The article on what actually syncs goes through the criteria to compare vendors on if you want to see the process from end to end.
The status per CRM at the time of writing, September 2026. HubSpot: live, connected through the HubSpot marketplace app, with a sync of contacts, companies and deals plus writeback. Salesforce: live, connected through an External Client App with PKCE, with opportunity sync and writeback. Monday: live, with a sync of items from your sales board, without refresh tokens, so you reconnect occasionally. Pipedrive: the adapter is built and tested, activation in the marketplace still has to follow, and until then the connection shows as "coming soon". Teamleader and Exact Online: on the roadmap, not available yet. Dynamics and Zoho are there too. Always check the current status on the integrations page, because it is updated the moment a connection goes live.
Do not wait to start writing proposals until the connection exists. There is a CSV route that works well in practice. Export a list of contacts and companies from your CRM (name, email, company name, VAT number) and import it into the client list of your proposal tool. Do that weekly, or whenever you are about to send a new batch of proposals. For the way back, export the signed proposals with their amount and date and load them into your CRM as a bulk update. It is less elegant than a real sync, but it saves the retyping and you already build the habit of treating the CRM as the source. As soon as the connection for your CRM is live, you link the existing clients to the CRM records and everything runs automatically from there.
Four points to agree with your team in advance. 1. Which system leads for contact details? Choose the CRM and change data there. 2. Which pipeline stage belongs to which proposal status? Write that down before you switch writeback on. 3. What happens with duplicate records? Match on email address, not on name. 4. Who owns the connection? One person who manages the tokens and notices when a sync stalls. In Proposal Expert you see the last synchronisation and any errors per connection, and you can pause the connection without losing data. Start with one connection and a small team, watch the results for two weeks, and only then roll it out to everyone.
Only if you switch writeback on, and then only the fields you have mapped: deal stage and deal amount. Contact details are read from the CRM, not overwritten. Writeback is off by default.
Basic CRM features such as importing clients are available on every plan. The live connections with HubSpot, Salesforce and Monday including writeback belong to the paid plans. The pricing page shows per plan what is included.
The Pipedrive adapter is technically finished. What is still missing is the approval and activation of the app on the Pipedrive side. As soon as that is done, Pipedrive appears as an available connection in your integration overview. Until then the CSV route from this article works.