HubSpot Excel Integration: Import Contacts with 10 Easy Steps

If you are a newbie to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems or have just started out but are stuck in configuring how to import your new Customer Contacts in HubSpot, this guide is here to help you.

While many Businesses prefer HubSpot’s award-winning Functionality and vibrant Community Perks, transferring your Data from frequently used Software Applications like Microsoft Excel can be a daunting job, since HubSpot does not presently provide HubSpot Excel Integration support in its App Marketplace.

To achieve HubSpot Excel Integration you’ll have to export your Data into supported CSV, XLS or XLSX file formats, modify and arrange Spreadsheet Fields according to sample formats defined in HubSpot Help Directory and then map those fields with existing or new HubSpot Properties.

Read along this guide to know more or navigate to any topic you would like to start with.

Table of Contents

• Introduction to HubSpot
• Key Features and Benefits of Using HubSpot
• Introduction to Microsoft Excel
• Key Features and Benefits of Using Microsoft Excel
• HubSpot Excel Integration: How to Import Contacts
  • HubSpot Excel Integration: Import Requirements
  • HubSpot Excel Integration: Sample Excel Sheets
    • When Importing One Object
    • When Importing Multiple Objects in One File
    • When Importing Multiple Objects in Two Files
• Conclusion

Introduction to HubSpot

HubSpot is a Comprehensive Suite of Tools that provides Businesses with Inbound Marketing and Sales Operations functionality. It is designed to help Marketing, Sales, Service, and Operations Teams achieve their goals by empowering Users with paradigm-shifting actions such as 

1. Increasing Web Traffic and Nurturing Customer Relationships
2. Getting in touch with Leads as soon as possible
3. Driving Conversions
4. Boosting Customer Lifetime Value

HubSpot serves as an All-in-One Content Management System, with simple to deploy, drag-and-drop features and low-cost pricing options. HubSpot may be used by any Business Professional, whether or not they know how to code. HubSpot includes interactive features such as Blogs, Videos, Email Marketing Campaigns, Smart Content, Landing Pages, CTAs, A/B Testing, and other SEO Features. HubSpot also has extensive Reporting and Analytics built right in the Software. HubSpot comes with Sales, Marketing, Service, CMS, and Operations Hubs to support the work of each Team in your organisation.

At its heart, HubSpot provides real-time visibility into your Sales Pipeline with a Consolidated Platform and an intuitive User Interface. The CRM enables you to retain strong ties with your Customers while also streamlining tasks between the Marketing and Sales Teams.

Along with such features, there is an additional functionality of HubSpot Integrations. HubSpot Integrations like HubSpot Excel Integration allow you to connect HubSpot Software to third-party Apps. HubSpot’s App Marketplace displays all of its available integrations, which include major integrations like Facebook, Magento, MailChimp, Slack, Zendesk, Lifeform, and many more.

Visit our other complete guide here for more information about HubSpot CRM.

Key Features and Benefits of Using HubSpot

Growth-Driven Design

HubSpot has a feature called Growth-Driven Design for Designers, Marketers and UX Strategists. As HubSpot calls it, Growth-Driven Design lets Users launch their own Business Websites, with less headache, better results, and half the time. A Growth-Driven Design drives more Business Impact, and you can see results sprouting in just 60 days against a traditional Web Design which normally takes 108 days. To teach Marketers the new Web Design Playbook, HubSpot has launched a free Growth-Driven Design Certification which will teach you everything you need to develop a peak performing Website.

Automated Workflows

HubSpot’s Workflow Automation tool automates your Marketing, Sales, and Service activities to increase the efficiency of your Team. You can set Custom Criterias to initiate records and perform actions on your Contacts, Deals, Quotations, and Tickets automatically.

Complete Customer Journey Visibility

HubSpot can help you manage and track a Customer’s Journey and their Preferences. In a single, clean integrated HubSpot Dashboard you can sort Deals, log Sale Activities, view Appointments Scheduled, Contracts Sent and see Customer’s Interactions from a Unified Timeline.

Customer Segmentation

HubSpot Users may categorise their Customers depending on their Age, Occupation, Hobbies, Demographics, or Preferences. With Customer Segmentation, you can provide your Consumers with a Personalised Web/Product experience based on their preferences.

Pricing

HubSpot offers four different pricing options to choose from:

• Free: HubSpot’s Free Subscription comes with access to a User-Friendly CRM Platform for effective Contact Management.
• Starter: HubSpot’s Starter Subscription includes more advanced tools for capturing, engaging, and converting Leads, such as Ad Retargeting, Email Marketing, Forms and ChatBots. The plan starts at $45 per month.
• Professional: HubSpot’s Professional Subscription is designed for SMEs who want a higher degree of Customisation like incorporating Smart Content & Omnichannel Automation, Video Hosting, Multi-Language Content, Custom Reports and Advanced Support. This plan starts at $800 per month.
• Enterprise: HubSpot’s Enterprise Subscription is designed for companies who require Enterprise-Grade Capabilities without the acceptance and implementation challenges of other options. This tier provides you with a complete range of Marketing Alternatives. Enterprise plans start at $3200 per month. 

Introduction to Microsoft Excel

Microsoft’s Electronic Spreadsheet doesn’t need an introduction. It’s one of the most widely used Spreadsheet Applications with a plethora of tools for organizing and performing calculations on data. Microsoft Excel can Analyze data, calculate Statistics, generate Pivot Tables, represent data as a Chart or Graph and export for usage into multiple formats.

Microsoft Excel is part of the Microsoft Office Suite and is compatible with a variety of Operating Systems, including Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. Microsoft Excel’s strength comes in its ability to determine the layout and structure of the data you wish to manage. Basic activities do not need any particular expertise, and Microsoft Excel allows you to deal with Text, Numbers, and Dates in a pretty much free and unstructured manner.

Microsoft Excel is frequently used for 

1. Basic data organising and tracking, such as a Sales Lead List, Project Progress Reports, Contact Lists and Invoicing. 
2. For doing Scientific and Statistical Analysis on huge Data Sets. 
3. Statistical Formulation and Financial Modelling
4. Graphing Capabilities 
5. Assisting Researchers with Variance Analysis, Chi-Square Testing, and charting Complicated Data.

Key Features and Benefits of Using Microsoft Excel

Ease of Storing and Recovering Data

Microsoft Excel doesn’t have an upper limit on the amount of information that your Teams can store and work upon. Along with the ease of storing data, Users can Filter, Save or Analyse data in combination while working in real-time.

Microsoft Excel also allows you to recover and repair a corrupted Workbook, using its File Recovery Tools. Use these options from your File Menu, File > Open > Open and Repair. 

Connectivity and sharing

Through Share Point or OneDrive, Microsoft Excel allows you to share and work with other Team Members of your project. It is as simple as providing the link to the same file to everyone. Once you’ve saved your Microsoft Excel file to OneDrive, you and other Users may collaborate on it in real-time.

You can also connect Microsoft Excel Data and export it to supported formats which could be imported onto another third party SaaS Apps like HubSpot to achieve HubSpot Excel Integration and Record Sync.

Powerful data analysis 

Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet improves your capacity to examine vast volumes of data. You may quickly and simply narrow down the factors that will help you make decisions by using Advanced Filtering, Sorting, and Search Capabilities. These tools combined with Pivot Tables, Charts and Graphs can quickly Map and Visualise the information you need, even if you have hundreds of thousands of data pieces. 

Protection and Security

Microsoft Excel has three layers of user Information Security: File, Workbook, and Worksheet. You can secure your work, whether it’s to prohibit someone from entering a Workbook without a password, or allow Read-Only access, or to just protect a Worksheet so you don’t remove any formulae unintentionally.

Pricing

Microsoft Excel comes as a part of Microsoft 365 Subscription, which starts at $6.99 per month. If you would like to purchase Microsoft Excel alone for 1 PC or Mac, that costs around $139.99.

HubSpot Excel Integration: How to Import Contacts

In HubSpot, you can import Customer Records and update your HubSpot Customer Database from Microsoft Excel. When you import to HubSpot, i.e. from HubSpot Excel Integration, HubSpot automatically deduplicates Customer Records for you, so that your Database is clean and organised right from the start. HubSpot Excel Integration of Customer Records is a pretty easy process, however, do keep in mind certain requirements for importing a file:

HubSpot Excel Integration: Import Requirements

File Requirements

As HubSpot lists on their Website, all files being imported into your HubSpot must:

• Be a .csv, .xlsx, or .xls file.
• Have only one sheet.
• Contain fewer than 250,000 rows and 1,000 columns.
• Be smaller than 150MB.
• Include a header row in which each column header corresponds to a property in HubSpot. You can confirm if a default property already exists to match your header or create a custom property prior to importing. Learn more about HubSpot’s default properties for contacts, companies, deals, and tickets.
• Be UTF-8 encoded if foreign language characters are included.

Property Requirements

Your file must have the following columns, depending on the Object(s) you are importing:

• Contacts: First name, or Last name, or Email (Unique Identifier)
• Companies: Name or Company Domain Name (Unique Identifier).
• Deals: Deal name, Pipeline, and Deal stage.
• Tickets: Ticket name, Pipeline, and Ticket status.
• Products: Name, and Unit price.
• Notes: Activity date, and Note body.

Date values in Properties containing a Date must be expressed as one of the following: 

• mm/dd/yyyy (e.g. 10/28/2020)
• dd/mm/yyyy (e.g. 28/10/2020) or 
• yyyy/mm/dd (e.g. 2020/10/28).

For more detailed information on Property Requirements, please refer to the HubSpot Knowledge Base here.

HubSpot Excel Integration: Sample Excel Sheets

Standard HubSpot Objects are the Database Components – the types of information with characteristics that are translated to values. Below listed are sample formats of Spreadsheets with different formats for different HubSpot CRM Objects which you can refer to before proceeding to HubSpot Excel Integration by importing Customer Records. 

Every listed sample Sheet has some Standard Fields (Columns) and some New (Custom) Fields, which your Business may or may not be tracking. For such cases, you can always create Custom Fields in your HubSpot Dashboard, and map accordingly.

When Importing One Object

• Contacts sample spreadsheet: XLSX or CSV
• Companies sample spreadsheet: XLSX or CSV
• Deals sample spreadsheet: XLSX or CSV
• Tickets sample spreadsheet: XLSX or CSV
• Products sample spreadsheet: XLSX or CSV

Note: Please keep in mind that Products may only be imported as a single Object and cannot be linked with another Object via import. Discover how to manually link a Product to a Deal or Quote here.

When Importing Multiple Objects in One File

• Contacts and Companies sample spreadsheet: XLSX or CSV
• Contacts and Tickets sample spreadsheet: XLSX or CSV
• Companies and Deals sample spreadsheet: XLSX or CSV
• Companies and Notes sample spreadsheet: XLSX or CSV
• Companies, Deals, and Notes sample spreadsheet: XLSX or CSV

When Importing Multiple Objects in Two Files

• Companies sample spreadsheet: XLSX or CSV
• Contacts sample spreadsheet: XLSX or CSV

With all the File and Property Requirements are in place, let’s have a look at how you can get started with HubSpot Excel Integration using a step by step approach.

Step 1: Visit the Contacts section in your HubSpot Dashboard present on the top toolbar.

Step 2: Select Contacts > Contacts (if you are importing Contacts). You can otherwise choose to import Companies (Contacts > Companies), Deals (Sales > Deals), Tickets (Service > Tickets) or Custom Objects (Contacts > Contacts, then at the upper left, choose the name of the custom object from the dropdown menu).

Step 3: Select the “Import” button from the top right side of the screen.

Step 4: Click “Start an Import” on the next screen.

Step 5: Select the “File from computer” option and browse the file which you would like to import, then click the Next button.

Step 6: Choose “One File” (if you are importing a single file) or “Multiple files with associations” (if you are importing multiple files). Then click the Next button. 

Step 7: Select “One Object” or “Multiple Objects”, then click Next. 

Step 8: Select the Object you would like to import. For our case, we are selecting Contacts for Customer Records. 

Step 9: Click “Choose a file” and in the dialogue box, then select your import file. Click Next to finish importing the file. 

If you’re utilising the [Object] ID to deduplicate your Contacts, Companies, Deals, Tickets, Products, or Custom Objects, check the box. Leave these checkboxes empty if you’re utilising email addresses or corporate domain names. If you’re importing [Object] ID, include the column heading precisely as it appears in the export file in your file (e.g., Contact ID, not CONTACT ID).

When your HubSpot Excel Integration of Customer Contacts is completed and when your file is successfully imported, HubSpot will preview an information screen for you to match Header Fields. For every Spreadsheet Field, you select the desired HubSpot Property you would like to map to. 

In case if any Field is mapped incorrectly or you would like to modify an existing field, select the desired HubSpot Property from the drop-down menu and modify it accordingly. 

Additional Information for mapping an existing property

• To create a new Custom Property, select “Create a new property”, then enter the details for your new Property in the right panel. The column’s data will now be mapped to this new Custom Property.

• To skip importing this column, select “Don’t import column”. To skip importing data from all unmatched columns, select the “Don’t import data in unmatched columns” checkbox in the bottom right.

Step 10: Click “Next” on the bottom corner of the Screen, after verifying all mappings.

In the end, HubSpot will confirm the name of your file import. You can also choose to create a list of contacts from this list. 

Step 11: Click on “Finish import” to end your HubSpot Excel Integration of importing Customer Contacts. 

HubSpot will send you an Email Notification, informing you about the new import. To access your Customer Contact List you can visit Contacts > Lists from the HubSpot Homepage Navigation Bar.

Conclusion

HubSpot Excel Integration is an easy to follow procedure, wherein you can directly export Microsoft Excel into CSV, XLS, XLSX format, modify it like the sample formats available and import it to your HubSpot Dashboards to align and update your Marketing and Sales Activities. While you can perform all the steps manually, why not try an automated alternative which can enable you to seamlessly import and integrate data from 100+ different Sources? 

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And let us know in the comments below if you have any suggestions or experiences of HubSpot Excel Integration.