You watched the video, so here's the whole thing in one place. Two ways to use it. Do it yourself with the steps and the prompt below, which is what most people will do. Or have it done for you: that's what my agency does at tobin.agency, and there's a form at the bottom of this page. Either way, the full setup is on this page, nothing held back.
Why your answers are bad right now
Most founders download Claude or ChatGPT, ask it a question, get a terrible answer, and bin it. The tool isn't the problem. The setup is.
Your business runs on a handful of apps: Notion, Slack or Teams, Excel or Google Sheets, HubSpot, your email, your files. You and your staff spend the day jumping between tabs, and the AI you just installed can't see any of it. So when you ask "where are we with the Murphy deal", it goes to its training data and the internet and hands you back a generic paragraph about sales pipelines. It has no knowledge of your business until you give it some.
Connectors are how you give it some. The technical name is MCP, Model Context Protocol, and you don't need to understand it. It's the bridge between Claude and each of your apps. Once it's in place, "where are we with the Murphy deal" makes Claude go and read the HubSpot record, the last three emails, and the Slack thread, and answer from what's actually there.
Step 1: get the right plan
If more than one person will use this, get the Team plan at claude.com. At the time of writing it's $20 per person per month billed annually ($25 billed monthly), for teams of 2 to 150 people. Check claude.com/pricing for current numbers.
The reason you want Team and not a scatter of personal accounts is control. On Team, one person (the Owner) decides which apps Claude is allowed to reach, and can limit what it does with them, for example read your CRM but never write to it. On personal accounts, everyone improvises their own connections and nobody knows what's plugged into what.
If it's just you, Pro works fine. The connector steps below are the same, minus the admin part.
Step 2: install the desktop app
Get the Claude desktop app from claude.com/download and have everyone on the team install it. Connectors work in the browser too, but the desktop app is what lets Claude also work with the files on your computer, and it's where the scheduled automations live later. Start there and you won't have to move.
Step 3: switch connectors on for the team (Owner only)
On a Team plan, connectors are off until the Owner turns them on. Only the Owner or Primary Owner can do this. Verified against Anthropic's help centre at the time of writing:
- Go to Organization settings, then Connectors.
- Click Browse connectors at the bottom of the page.
- Pick the app and click Add to your team.
- Repeat for each app on your list.
Turning a connector on makes it available. It doesn't give anyone access yet: each person still signs in to each app themselves in the next step, and they can only ever see what they could already see in that app. Claude mirrors your existing permissions, it doesn't bypass them.
The Owner can also limit what each connector is allowed to do across the whole company, for example read from HubSpot but never write to it. Set that conservatively at the start. You can loosen it later once you trust the setup.
Step 4: each person connects their apps
Now everyone plugs in their own accounts. In Claude:
- Click the + at the bottom left of the chat box.
- Hover Connectors, then Manage connectors (or go to Settings, Customize, Connectors).
- Click the app, then Connect, and sign in when the app asks.
The first set I put in place with every business, in this order:
- Your email, calendar and files. One connector covers all three. Google businesses: the Google Workspace connectors (Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive). Microsoft businesses: the Microsoft 365 connector, which covers Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams, so your Excel files living in SharePoint come along with it.
- Slack if that's where the team talks. (Teams is already covered by Microsoft 365 above. Claude can read Teams, it can't post there.)
- Notion if your processes, wiki or client notes live there.
- HubSpot or whichever CRM you run, so pipeline questions get answered from the live record.
Connect only the accounts you'd be happy for a sharp new employee to see. Skip anything you're unsure about. You can add connectors any week.
Step 5: prove it works
Open a new chat and ask something you'd normally have to go and look up. "What did the last email from [customer] say and have we replied?" "What's on my calendar Thursday and which of those meetings has an open deal attached?" "Summarise what's been decided in the [project] Slack channel this week."
If Claude asks permission to use a connector, say yes. If it answers from real data, you're set up. If it answers generically, the connector isn't on for that app yet: go back to step 4.
The setup prompt
If you'd rather not do steps 3 to 5 by hand, paste this into a new chat in Claude. It becomes your setup guide: it checks your plan, helps you pick which apps to connect first, walks you through each one with a single question at a time, tests each connection with a real question, and finishes by pulling your first proper answer from live business data. Here's how it starts:
You are my setup guide. Your job today: get Claude connected to the apps my business actually runs on, and get me one real answer from live business data before we're done, all in this one session. I may be a complete beginner, so explain everything in plain English, keep your messages short, and ask me ONE question at a time. Never ask me two things in one message. STEP 0 - WHERE ARE WE Ask me, one at a time: 1. Am I on a Claude Team plan, a Pro plan, or not sure? (If not sure, tell me how to check.) 2. If Team: am I the Owner of the workspace, or is someone else? (If someone else, we'll write them a short message with the exact steps at the point we need them.) 3. Am I in the Claude desktop app or the website? (Both work for this. If I'm on the website, tell me the desktop app is worth installing later for files and automations, then carry on.) STEP 1 - THE APP MAP Ask me which of these my business uses, one short question at a time...
The prompt keeps going: it maps your apps, gets the Owner steps done (or drafts the message to whoever is), connects each app one at a time with a test question after every one, then runs your first real data-backed question and shows you how to change it. The full copy-paste version is just below.