Add a Little Wizardry to Your Imports

Have you ever been doing chores, and wish you could just press a button and they’d be done, just like that? (I know you have, I do every.single.time I have to do dishes.)

We all know that the ideal scenario would be to have no chore list at all — just tackle the task at hand right away and never have a backlog to catch up on. We also know that is not realistic. Hence why the button would be so nice…

I can’t help but notice the same principle applies to every company I’ve worked at when it comes to maintaining an up-to-date contact database. We know we’ve got our business contacts all over the place and need to get them into our one “source of truth” database. But this isn’t going to happen real-time, even no matter how many apps or integrations or even developers are pushing data for you. And all of these options require effort and maintenance, and Boom — you’ve got a backlog to manage.

Well how about adding some Mickey Mouse magic to your data consolidation?

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Well we have launched the Contact Import Wizard — designed just for this purpose. To consolidate data from multiple sources into your target database so you can have full confidence that you’ve got the right data in the right place for the right people to use (I’m talking to you marketers!).

This tool was shaped by our own experiences using native import tools, which leave much to be desired — which, not coincidentally, also led to our development of Import2. Now over 20,000 data migrations later, it’s safe to say we like solving import problems! What we found most lacking in these native tools was ease of use and a couple of smart features to add the magic. These roadblocks intrigued us and pushed us to solve the problem.

As Tomasz Tunguz notes in his article on the data fragmentation problem…

“consolidation isn’t happening as quickly as operators would like. How can it? We’ve seen a more than 7X explosion the number of tools being sold to sales and marketing teams in the last 3–4 years. The market demand exists for data centralization tools.”

We’ve launched the Contact Import Wizard for Hubspot (CRM and Marketing!), as we’ve seen countless cases of customers who require importing on a regular basis into their platform. I’m sure you are familiar with the scenario — you have marketing lists in CSV from various outreach efforts, contacts from your customer support team’s software like Zendesk which may benefit from product updates, or even contacts in your LinkedIn which may prove as fruitful leads. You need to get these into Hubspot to market to them. How?

A mishmash of CSV files later, prep the data to ensure it meets formatting requirements, upload and then go through the series of 20+ clicks per import to get them in. Have more data next week? Start the whole process over.

While we can’t take away the need to import, we can optimize how you do it. What the Contact Import Wizard does for you:

• Auto-Mapping. No manually mapping fields. Seriously. We use machine learning and our experience of 20,000+ imports to automatically map the fields for you.
• Deduplication. Some of those contacts already in your target database? Don’t worry, they won’t be duplicated with the import. We check on the unique identifier of your data to scan for existing records so you don’t end up with a mess.
• Smart Updates. You control how to update the contacts that do already exist in your database. Add new fields that they didn’t have before or overwrite existing if your incoming data is the most up to date.

What else is nice? It doesn’t require CSV files. That’s right — if you’re using any one of our many 23 (and counting!) compatible tools, we will export/import using the API so you you don’t need to manually export and prep the data. If you only have CSV, we handle that too.

How does it work? Simply click start and walk through the quick and easy steps (I mean quick, I’ve done it in less than 2 minutes!). We’ll email you when the data is imported and ready for your review. It really is that easy! See for yourself:

Hubspot is just the beginning, more tools are already in the works and you can even request the specific tools you are using to be added to the roadmap.

Give it a try now and you can bask in the extra time you have now to tackle those dishes! (button for those still in development…)