How to import leads into Salesforce from an Excel or CSV file

Salesforce's Data Import Wizard is powerful, but a raw lead export rarely goes in smoothly. You end up matching columns by hand every time, and rows get rejected because a required field is missing or an email is malformed. Here's how to get a clean, Salesforce-ready file.

Why the import wizard fights you

• Field names don't match. Salesforce wants "First Name", "Last Name", "Company", "Email" — your file says "Prénom", "Société", "Mail".
• Required fields missing or messy. A Lead needs Last Name and Company; blank or inconsistent values get skipped.
• Phone numbers and emails are formatted every which way.
• Duplicate leads create duplicate records you'll have to merge later.

Every new export means re-doing the column matching in the wizard.

The fast way with Importly

1. Upload your lead export (.xlsx or .csv).
2. Pick the "Salesforce — Leads" profile. Importly renames your columns to Salesforce's lead fields, cleans every value, and removes duplicate leads and empty rows.
3. Download the import-ready file and run it through the Data Import Wizard — the columns already line up.

What gets cleaned

• Column mapping to Salesforce lead fields (First Name, Last Name, Company, Email, Phone…).
• Emails trimmed and lower-cased, duplicates removed.
• Phone numbers normalized.
• Names and company tidied (capitalization, stray spaces).

You keep your original file; Importly produces a separate, import-ready copy. The same works for Pipedrive, Zoho CRM, HubSpot and other CRMs — just pick the matching profile.

Clean your lead list free →