There are three ways leads flow into LeadSigma: 1) You receive them from any digitally connected source like Facebook, Google, or a web form (check out our article on integrating through Zapier to get those set up); 2) You manually create a lead (another sweet article for that here); 3) our focus in this article - you add them by importing something called a CSV file.
Imagine you attend a business event and net a bunch of lead contact information. Sure, you could manually add each lead in LeadSigma, but that’s time-consuming and you have plenty of other brilliant deeds to accomplish. Say hello to the CSV file. CSV stands for “comma-separated values”; for our purposes, it’s basically a list of names and contact info in a spreadsheet. In Google Sheets, you can make a spreadsheet into a CSV file by downloading your Sheets file as a CSV; in Excel, you’d Save As and choose CSV as the file format.
While we can skip the minutiae of CSVs, let’s skim this LeadSigma-ready example to quickly learn what works and what doesn’t:
Notice that first names are in one column and last names sit separately in the next column. For reasons that’ll be apparent below, we want to avoid combining those two in the same column. Notice also that we didn’t input column headers like “First Name” or “Last Name.” That’s because we don’t want LeadSigma to think that “First Name” and “Last Name” are really lead names, that is, we don’t want LeadSigma to include “First Name Last Name” as an actual lead. For a little extra help on how to separate first and last names before you import your CSV file, scroll to the very bottom of this article. Continuing on, to the right of the name columns, there’s a column for phone numbers, likewise without a column header. We could add further columns for emails and any custom fields (learn what custom fields are and how to set them up here). So in sum, LeadSigma can import first name, last name, phone, email, and custom fields. If it’s not one of those, leave it off your CSV sheet.
Okay. You’ve squared away your CSV file. Time to pull everything into LeadSigma:
1. Log into the app. From your Dashboard view, select Import on the left sidebar:
2. This takes us to our Import page. Your first job is to figure out the sequence you want applied to your imported leads. Click on that sequence, or if you need to craft a new one specific to them, click Create New Sequence and detour to the Sequences page (If you need to know what sequences are and how to create them, we’ve got your back. Check out this article:
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3. Once you’ve selected the sequence you want to assign your CSV leads, click Continue:
4. We’re now ready to select our CSV file. Use the browse button to locate the file, then press Continue.
5. Using the example CSV from above, here’s what we’d see next: Each column from our CSV file produces a column in this new view. Even that blank column on the left in our CSV file creates a blank column here, and that’s totally fine; we can ignore it. What we want to zero in on are the dropdown menus at the top of the filled-in columns:
6. Clicking on the dropdown menus lets you tell LeadSigma what type of data is in each column. If the column is full of first names, choose First Name, if it’s last names, choose Last Name, and if it’s phone numbers, choose Phone. LeadSigma will fill in each lead’s profile information accordingly.
7. Scroll to the bottom of the page. Before we can finish up, we need to choose whether we want all these new leads to start on their assigned sequences right away or if we want to stagger their sequence kick-offs over the next several days. If you want them all initiated right now, select Start sequence now for all leads; if you’d like to stagger it, choose the second option and tell LeadSigma over how many days you the leads’ sequence initiation staggered. When you’re done, click Finish.
8. LeadSigma gives you a final confirmation that the leads have been successfully imported.
9. When we navigate to Leads using the left sidebar, we can see all our new leads appear. Since we’ve sorted our Leads list in descending order based on the date the lead was added, all of our newly imported leads show first:
It's that simple. Snagging leads without LeadSigma:
Contacting them with LeadSigma at your side? Well -
You got this!
Alright, we promised you a quick side tutorial on how to separate first and last names in your spreadsheet before you try importing it into LeadSigma.
Here's how to do it in Google Sheets:
1. Suppose you have a data set that looks like this, with first and last names combined:
2. We’re going to split the data in column B in two, leaving the first names in one column and moving the last names into the next column. To do this, so that the last names shifting to the left doesn’t overwrite the phone data, let’s create an additional in-between column. Highlight one of the filled-in columns and then insert a new column to its left or right so that there’s space in between them:
3. You’ve now got an extra, empty column. This will become the parking lot for those split-off last names once we separate them from the first names. Now, highlight the combined first and last names column:
4. Click on the Data tab and go to the bottom of the dropdown menu to select Split text to columns.
5. A small box will show up at the bottom of your screen. It says, “Separator” and wants you to tell it how it should know to separate the first and last names. Choose Space.
6. Google Sheets separates the first and last names, moving last names into the column to the right of first names. You’re done! Back to step 1 of importing a CSV file!
If you’re using Microsoft Excel, the process is almost identical, but for the unabridged version, check out this article.