To import leads, go to Sales → Leads → Import CSV, download the sample file,
replace the example rows with your own data, and upload it. Only one column is required —
name. Everything else is optional, and a missing column is never an error.
Why start from the sample file
The sample has the exact headers the importer expects plus two filled-in rows, which answers the question "what should this look like?" faster than any list of column names can. Download it, delete the two example rows, and paste your own data underneath the header row.
You do not have to use every column. Delete the ones you have no data for — a file with just
name and phone imports perfectly well.
The columns
- name — the only required column. A row without one is skipped and reported.
- email — an invalid address is dropped and the lead still imports, rather than the row failing. You are told which rows this happened to.
- phone, whatsapp — keep the country code. See the warning below.
- company
- source — free text, e.g.
referral,walk-in,exhibition. Defaults tocsv_importso imported leads stay distinguishable from ones your ads generated, which matters if you ever report on cost per lead by source. - stage — must match one of your pipeline stage names. Anything unrecognised goes to your first stage rather than failing.
- priority —
low,mediumorhigh. - deal_value — numbers only, no ₹ symbol and no commas.
- notes — added to the lead as its first timeline entry.
Column names are matched loosely: capitalisation and spaces do not matter, so Phone and
phone both work. Extra columns the importer does not recognise are ignored rather than
causing an error, so you can upload an export from another system without stripping it first.
The one thing that will ruin your import: Excel and phone numbers. Excel treats a long
number as a number. It strips the leading +, and on numbers past about eleven digits it
converts them to scientific notation — 9.19877E+11 — permanently losing digits.
Before typing or pasting phone numbers, select the column and format it as Text. If a
number has already been mangled this way the importer will leave that field blank rather than store a
wrong number, because a wrong phone number is worse than a missing one.
Import ten rows first
Genuinely worth the extra minute. Copy ten rows into a separate file and import that. You will see immediately whether your columns mapped the way you expected, and fixing ten rows is trivial compared with sorting out five thousand.
Files are capped at 5,000 rows. Larger lists should be split — that limit exists so a very large import cannot time out halfway through and leave you unsure what actually went in.
What happens to duplicates
If an imported row matches an existing lead's email or phone number, it is imported and flagged, not skipped. This is deliberate and matches how every other way of creating a lead in this CRM behaves.
Two enquiries from the same person are usually two real events — and if the second one exists because nobody followed up the first, silently discarding it destroys exactly the information you needed to see. Flagged leads show a duplicate badge and link to the original, so whoever opens it has the full history. See what it means when the same phone number appears on multiple leads.
Reading the results
After an import you get four numbers — imported, flagged as duplicate, skipped, and total rows read — plus a per-row list of anything that needed attention, each with its line number so you can find it in your file.
A row is only ever skipped for a missing name or a save failure. Everything else — a bad email, an unknown stage, a mangled phone number — imports with that one field left out and a note telling you which row it was.
Exporting
From Sales → Leads, click Export CSV. The export honours whatever filters you currently have applied, so searching for one stage or one owner and then exporting gives you exactly what is on screen rather than the whole database.
Two details worth knowing. Phone numbers are exported in a format that stops spreadsheet software reformatting them, so a round trip out and back in does not corrupt them. And the file is written with a UTF-8 marker so names in Indian languages open correctly in Excel on Windows instead of appearing as mojibake.
Export is controlled by its own permission. If you cannot see the button, your role does not have export enabled for leads — an admin can grant it from Roles & Permissions. It is a separate permission from viewing leads on purpose: being able to read the pipeline on screen and being able to walk out with the whole customer list in a file are different levels of trust.