Importing records from external sources is one of the most common ways of bringing in

leads into Zoho CRM.

You might purchase your business leads or you might transfer records between business

units for cross-selling.

Data importing feature comes handy when you want to upload such records into Zoho CRM.

With the latest UI revamp, Data Import and Migration in Zoho CRM is a very clean and

straight-forward process and there's more contextual assistance provided.

Let's say you are importing a bunch of contacts into CRM and these contacts come with some

additional information for which there are no fields in Zoho CRM.

You can now create necessary fields right during the process of an import.

With most information automatically captured from the source file by CRM, there is very

little left for you to do during an import.

Let's look at how you can import records into your Zoho CRM.

Go to the respective module into which you want to import your records.

For this demo, let's look at how to import leads.

So go to the Leads module, look to the top right and click on Import Button and choose

Import Leads.

Here, as you can see, you have two options, you can either import leads from Files or

if you are switching to Zoho CRM from another CRM and want all your leads pushed here, you

can select your respective CRM system from which you want to migrate and proceed further.

You can watch the video on Data Migration for more information.

Right now, let's go ahead with File option.

Before we proceed further, let's look at a sample Excel spreadsheet from which we are

going to import leads into Zoho CRM.

The first thing to know is the field names.

Your field names are basically the column headers.

Below your column headers are your list of records.

Remember that the mandatory fields like Last Name and Company must have data in the spreadsheet

for the import to take place.

Now, let's go back to Zoho CRM and choose the File.

Your file can be in CSV, XLS, XLSX or VCF formats.

In the next screen, you can drag and drop your file or click Browse to upload the file.

What you have here is a sample file that you can download and check for your reference.

Once you have uploaded the file, the system automatically detects the appropriate character

encoding based on your file characters.

In case you want it changed, you can always click the drop-down and choose another.

Once you are done, click Next.

When you have multiple page layouts, you need to choose one for the records that you are

importing now.

Let's go with the Standard Layout.

Next we are going to look at what you want to do with the records in the file.

You have three options.

You can add all the records as new leads.

You can update existing leads only or you can choose to do both, that is, add new leads

and update the existing ones.

I'm going to click Add as new leads.

Next, in order to avoid duplicates, you can choose to skip existing leads based on their

Lead Id or Email address.

Let's choose email address for this demo purpose.

When you are done, click Next.

Here comes the most important part of Data Importing, called Mapping the fields.

What you are essentially doing here is choosing appropriate Zoho CRM fields for all the columns

in the file.

As you can see, all the column headers in the file are automatically mapped against

fields in Zoho CRM.

The data type and the format of the columns are auto-detected thereby avoiding mapping

columns to incompatible fields.

For example, a date value is automatically mapped to a number field.

There is also sample data from the file on the right side with respective fields filled.

You can refer to them and confirm if the fields are mapped correctly.

If you want to change the mapping for a field, go the respective field in Zoho CRM, click

the drop-down and choose the appropriate field.

Alternatively, if you choose to do the mapping manually for all the fields, you can click

Reset Mapped Fields and do the mapping from scratch.

Here, you can check how many fields are mapped and how many are left unmapped.

For those fields from the file that are unmapped or for which there are no fields in Zoho CRM

currently, you can create new fields right from here.

Click Create New Fields and in the Create New Fields window, custom fields are automatically

suggested.

You can edit the field properties and hit Create.

You can click Apply Auto-Mapping to automatically map the remaining unmapped fields in Zoho

CRM with matching column headers if any in the file.

Now when you are sure that all fields from the file are rightly mapped, click Next.

We are going to Assign Lead Source, Lead Owner and Tasks for all the leads that get added

through this Import.

Under Assign Lead Source, you could either click the drop-down and choose a lead source

from the options listed or if you have a column in the file for Lead source, you could choose

Field mapping and the lead source field will get mapped from the file like all the other

fields.

Under Assign Lead Owner, you have three options.

You could click Users and assign all the leads to one User from the drop-down.

Or you could click Assignment Rules and assign owner based on an Assignment Rule.

Or you could again choose Field mapping and the lead owner field will get mapped from

the file.

Finally, you can add a new task for the newly added leads under Assign Task.

Let's say you want to add a task "Introductory Call" for all the leads.

You can either choose it from the drop down or create this workflow task right from here.

You can also Enable Manual Lead Approval by selecting this check-box.

Now, click Finish.

And that's it.

You will get an email notification once the leads get imported into Zoho CRM successfully.

If you want to undo an import, you can go to your Import history, where you will find

the latest import entries.

Move your mouse pointer to an entry and click Undo this import.

And that's about it.

Thank you for watching this video on Data Import.

I hope you found it to be useful.

For more information, please visit www.zoho.com/crm/resources