How To Import Contacts To HubSpot CRM From A Spreadsheet (Google Or Excel)

Getting your team off of spreadsheets and on the CRM is a huge first step, but it is only the first step. What's going on, everybody? It's your dude, Devin. And today I'm going to show you how to bring contacts into HubSpot. And I'm not just talking about one by one, we're talking all of your spreadsheet into HubSpot at once. Before we get started, a few things to keep in mind. As a wise uncle once said, with great power comes great responsibility. This is a very powerful tool and it's very tempting to abuse. But don't do it. First thing you don't want to do is import cold lists. You don't want to bring in something that's old, where you can have old names, old email addresses. Because what can happen is you can send emails to these people, they no longer exist. Completely ruins your email deliverability. Also, you don't want to import bot lists or you don't even want to buy lists. You want to only bring in people who have opted in, people who know that they're going to hear from you. Be a good person. Next thing, let's keep your data clean. Remember that garbage in means garbage out. There's no need to have a messed up spreadsheet and try and figure it out later when you can clean up your spreadsheet first. Well, let's actually talk about how to prep your spreadsheet. So this is an example of a good spreadsheet perfect for HubSpot. Import has a first name, last name, email. The three most important things that you're going to need if you plan on importing. We've also got phone numbers and we have the company field. Now what we're going to do is we're going to leave the company field out, but instead of deleting it out of the spreadsheet, we're just not going to import it into the system. Show you how to do that later. But let's say you have a spreadsheet that doesn't have first name, last name, has the entire name in the same field. Easy way to fix this is to take this field, select it, we're going to do the whole column and go to split text into columns. Then we're going to go down here and select space and that's it. Now we have your first name and last name split and you're ready for a clean import into HubSpot. Speaking of which, let's go ahead and get started right now in HubSpot. What you want to do is go to Contacts and then select Contacts. And right over here in the upper right hand corner is Import. So we have a couple different options. Here you have started Import or Sync. Sync is very powerful. Sync is great if you want to connect to a legacy CRM or if you're using something older like a different marketing automation tool or email tool, you can connect directly to it and bring all your data right over. But for this case, we're going to go with starting an import. So here we have three different options. We can repeat a past import and we'll use that as a template for the new import. But that's not what we're doing today. You can import an opt out list. This one is extremely important. You want to make sure that the people who have opted out in your previous email marketing tools or your previous CRM don't accidentally get email sent to them from this one. So we're going to make sure that we're importing clean lists. But in this case we're going to be importing a file from the computer. So we can import multiple files with associations or we can import one file. Multiple files is something you can do, but it's really a tool for advanced users. It's not something that I would recommend if you're just getting started out with HubSpot. So we're going to go ahead and select one file now. One object or multiple objects. This one can be kind of tricky technically. Technically we could use our existing spreadsheet to import multiple objects, but we're not going to do that today. Now, if you're curious about what objects are, let's go and select one object and go to next and we can break it down. Objects within HubSpot are companies, contacts, deals, products, shipments, tickets. But you can also import activities like calls, emails, meetings, notes, tasks. All of these are able to be imported into HubSpot from a spreadsheet. But what we're doing today is importing contacts. So the next thing we're going to do is to choose our, in this case, CSV. And now we have the options of how we want to import these contacts. We can create and update contacts, create new contacts only or update existing contacts. The reason why this is important is because you might have to import from multiple data sources. But if you've ever worked with numerous systems, you know, typically only one of them is your source of truth. So you want to make sure that whatever it is that you're importing first is your source of truth. And if you need to add data to that, but don't want to corrupt your existing data. That's when you start relying on whether or not to only add new names or only update the existing names. So that way you're not messing anything up in your CRM. Like I said before, garbage in, garbage out. And we want to make sure our data comes in clean. But in this case, since it's going to be our first one, we're going to go ahead and select Create and update Contacts. Now, you can see here it's scanning for some of your common errors and it said it didn't find any. That's great news. But if it does, it'll let you do something about it. We'll talk about that a little later. But first let's look at what we want to import. So we can import our contact properties. We can use our record id, which is something if we're using a unique identifier to make sure that we don't want to duplicate, we don't have to worry about today. Or you can select don't import column. We are going to be using that today. We're going to be doing contact properties. We know that this is the first name field. We know that this is the last name field. And if we look, we can see it's already selected, emails, already selected, phone number, and we are not going to import the company names, even though there already is a space for it. So what we'll do is we'll select don't import. Now we've identified everything. However, let's say that this column doesn't have a property that we want to associate with it. What we can do is we can create a new property. Creating new properties can be very tempting, but what you don't want to do is completely inundate your system with new properties, especially properties that you might never use. Again, we don't necessarily need to import all of the data that comes in from the system. What I'd recommend is taking a moment to think before you create new properties. Ask yourself, does this data really need to be in the CRM? Do I really need to know this about this person? Is it relevant? Or is there already a property that exists that I can use to put this in? In this case, we're not going to create a new one. So what we're going to do is we're going to go over to cancel and we're going to make sure that we do not import this column. And as you can see now, everything's clear. We can hit next and we can name this import and so I highly recommend naming your imports not just going off of the file name so we can go back and find them later. So we can do full CRM list and we can put in the date here. The reason why I'm selecting create a list from this import is because maybe you want to go back and just use the names that came in off the spreadsheet for a targeted email. Or maybe I want to enroll them in a workflow and I want to be able to easily access them later. This is how you do it. And of course the all important I agree that all contacts in this import are expecting to hear from my organization. Now that I've clicked finish you can see that the import is processing. It's going to let me know when the import is done so we can sit back, relax, do other things or we can see how this was in okay, so we see that there were some errors. It went to import 511 rows but it only added 30 new records. Something must be wrong. And the error is in the email. There was duplicate IDs so we can click on that and it'll give us more information on what that means. Once you read through it, you can see what errors it was giving, how to fix it, and you can even download the errors as a CSV so you can correct it manually. Simple as that. I happen to know that there were duplicates in this. I kind of did it on purpose just so you can see how it works. And that's it, you're all done. Uploading from spreadsheets is a huge time saver. It can be tempting to rush through it and fix it later, but what you really want to do is make sure your data is clean before you put it in. Remember, be responsible. Don't get into bad habits doing bad things. Before you go, be sure to click the link below and try HubSpot for free today. That's it for me everybody. Hope to talk to you soon, but until then take it easy.