Spreadsheet to CRM in an afternoon

Moving from a spreadsheet to CRM takes about an afternoon. Most of that time goes on deciding what each column means. The import itself takes a few minutes.

An afternoon is enough to move the list you use every day. It's short enough that you won't try to rebuild 6 years of history on the way.

Here's how we'd spend it.

Your sheet already has the shape

A spreadsheet that's been in daily use for a year has been edited by everyone who needed it. What's left is what people reach for: a name, a phone number, a company, and a column that says where things stand.

That's the shape of a CRM record. Contact, business, deal. The sheet can't remind you about any of it, and it can't stop 2 people editing the same cell, but the columns are the right ones.

So you don't need to design anything this afternoon. You need to map the columns you have to fields that can do something with them.

Clean 3 columns and leave the rest alone

Fix these 3 before you export. Ignore everything else.

Names. If first and last name share one cell, split them. Sorting, search, and greetings all depend on it.

Company names. Pick one spelling per company. Acme Ltd and Acme Limited will import as 2 businesses, and merging them later is slow.

Status. Cut free text down to a short list of values you'd put on a board. A column with 40 distinct values is a notes column.

What slows a spreadsheet to CRM move down

The import is rarely the slow part. Wanting to bring everything is.

6 years of closed rows, a tab of leads that went quiet in 2023, a list from a trade show nobody followed up. It looks like data. Most of it is archive.

Bring the people you'd still call and the work that's still open. Keep the old file where it is. Liteo takes another CSV whenever you want to import more.

How to do it in Liteo

1. Export your sheet as CSV, one tab at a time.
2. If contacts and businesses share a tab, split them. A contact is a person. A business is the company they belong to.
3. Import the businesses first, so the contacts have something to attach to.
4. Map your columns to fields. Anything without an obvious home becomes a custom field: text, number, date, dropdown, link, or email.
5. Run the import in batches of 5,000 rows. A long list goes through as several runs.
6. Tag the rows you'd still call. Tags can be created from any table row, so you don't have to plan them first.
7. Open your first pipeline and rename its stages to match how you sell.
8. Create deals for the work that's open, and give each one a next action.

Steps 7 and 8 get skipped most often, and they decide whether the CRM is still in use next week. A board with your own stage names is a board people will update.

How to tell it worked

Don't judge the move by how many rows landed. Judge it by what people had to ask.

3 signs it worked: someone found a customer by name without asking you, a deal moved stage because the work moved, and a follow-up happened because a task came due.

If one is missing, it's usually the third. A task needs to sit on the record it belongs to, with one owner and a date. A task assigned to the whole team gets done by nobody.

The rest can wait. Custom fields, extra pipelines, and a catalog of what you sell go in better around week 3, once you know which columns you use.

From here on, every record keeps its history. Calls, notes, deals, what you installed and when it's due again. A spreadsheet never gave you that.

That's the whole spreadsheet to CRM move. One export, one import, and stage names you picked yourself.

See how contacts and businesses work once they're out of a sheet, or see the same record set up for your trade on our industry pages.