How to Import Leads in Salesforce Like a Pro

Importing leads into Salesforce. The digital equivalent of doing taxes.

Nobody enjoys it. It’s unnecessarily complicated, and one small error can create big problems down the line. And yet, it’s a critical process that determines whether sales teams thrive or struggle.

Step-by-Step Guide to Upload Leads in Salesforce

Salesforce’s data import wizard seems simple enough to use on paper:  

Step 1: On the Leads home page, navigate to Setup → Data Import Wizard → Launch Wizard

Step 2: Select Leads → Add New Records

Step 3: Upload your CSV file and map the fields

Step 4: Review your mappings and click Start Import

Step 5: Wait for completion and check for errors. You can check the details data load job in setup page.

Step 6:Refresh the Leads home page to see your newly imported leads.

Bonus Tip – Avoid problems with frequent manual uploads

Type of data in your lead lists typically comes from various sources—marketing automation tools and third-party enrichment providers—forcing you to spend valuable time unifying, cleaning, and formatting data in your spreadsheet.

Even after careful preparation, import processes often fail, creating a frustrating cycle of corrections and re-imports. It’s exhausting and drains productivity.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Imagine effortlessly pulling, cleaning, and enriching leads directly in your spreadsheet, then seamlessly importing them into Salesforce without the headaches.

Curious how?

Alternate & Automated Method to import leads into Salesforce

RevOps teams spend countless hours cleaning spreadsheets, fixing field mappings, duplicate records, creating custom objects and dealing with re-import errors. Every minute lost is time not spent driving revenue growth.

What if you can create an two-way automated sync between your spreadsheets, Salesforce, and other systems?

Coefficient helps you achieve just that.

Step 1: Install Coefficient on Google Sheets or Excel

Step 2: Connect your Salesforce Account to your spreadsheet via Coefficient.

Step 3: Map fields between Salesforce and Spreadsheet Columns.

Step 4: Setup Automation to automatically upload leads to Salesforce on a time interval of your choice.

The results:

• Faster sales cycles and higher conversion rates
• Dramatically improved hygiene in data management
• More accurate forecasts and confident decision-making

Here’s how this changes the game and makes lead management a breeze:

Reduce your CSV dependence when importing leads

The Painpoint – RevOps teams waste hours wrestling CSV files, cleaning fields, setting up permissions and fixing mismatched mappings.
The Fix – Coefficient eliminates this busywork by:

• Importing directly from spreadsheets to Salesforce: Create a two-way sync between your spreadsheet and Salesforce—no more CSV exports or manual uploads.
• Standardizing data automatically: Apply transformations (like field renaming, merging duplicates) directly in your spreadsheet that persist with every refresh.
• Empowering your entire team: Share connections across your org so everyone can pull and refresh data without requesting CSV files.

Create Single Source of Truth for all your lead data

The Painpoint – When leads come from multiple platforms like marketing automation tools, event registration software, and CRMs, data quickly becomes unreliable, and sales teams can’t trust what they see in their Salesforce fields.

The Fix – Coefficient fixes this by:

• Eliminating data silos: Pull data from Salesforce, HubSpot, and other platforms into a single spreadsheet with just a few clicks.
• Preventing field misalignment: Map fields with an intuitive wizard and save templates for recurring imports.
• Testing data safely: Experiment with data configurations and mappings in your spreadsheet before writing back to Salesforce, eliminating risky trial-and-error in your production environment

Get new leads to sales teams instantly

The Painpoint – Delays between lead capture and first sales contact kill conversions. 

The Fix – Coefficient reduces that lag by:

• Automating lead imports on a flexible schedule — Schedule data updates hourly, daily, or weekly, ensuring sales always has the freshest leads without manual intervention
• Triggering Salesforce workflows promptly — Get new leads into Salesforce faster, activating assignment rules that route prospects to the right reps when interest is highest
• Alerting teams to new opportunities — Set up automatic Sack and email notifications when specific conditions are met, enabling immediate follow-up on qualified leads

Build reports beyond Salesforce’s basic capabilities

Salesforce’s rigid reporting structure forces painful compromises: no historical tracking, blended data, or custom metrics functionality. 

Coefficient empowers you to:

• Capture historical snapshots: Preserve your pipeline state at each refresh for time-series or waterfall analyses.
• Blend data across multiple sources: Build report types to combine Salesforce, product usage, and marketing data to get a 360° view of your funnel.
• Customize forecasting in your spreadsheet: Build flexible forecasting models that auto-refresh with Salesforce data—no code required.l

Jumpstart your reporting with our free Salesforce templates and see these capabilities in action!.

Case Study – How Miro scaled lead management during 10X growth

Miro’s RevOps team was drowning. As the company surged from 200 to 2,000 employees, their manual reporting couldn’t keep up. Two people. Endless requests. Limited visibility into their sales funnel.

Alex Bugajski, Head of Go-to-Market Strategy, found a lifeline in Google Sheets. Not just any spreadsheet—one supercharged with Coefficient. Alex built three solutions that transformed their operations:

• Real-Time SLA Tracking: Miro built a daily metrics dashboard that shows how leads move through the funnel, allowing SDRs to monitor conversion rates and make immediate adjustments without waiting for weekly reports.
• Automated Account Routing: Their team replaced manual territory assignments with a self-sustaining system that requires just quarterly updates, saving hours of work while ensuring leads reach the right AEs, CSMs, and SEs without delay.
• Multi-Source Forecasting: By combining Salesforce data with product usage signals, Miro created more accurate forecasting that helps sales leaders prioritize opportunities with the highest likelihood to close.

“Not only could I design and optimize solutions, but I also could manage analytics, data modeling, hygiene reporting, and error checks with more scalability than ever before in Salesforce,” says Alex.

Read the entire story to see how Miro’s RevOps team unlocked real-time data empowerment with Coefficient.

Bulk Transfer Leads in Salesforce

Coefficient connects spreadsheets directly to Salesforce, eliminating tedious manual imports. For RevOps teams, this makes lead management faster and more reliable.

It’s quick to set up, free to get started, and lets you bulk update records in seconds. Here’s how it works:

• Step 1: Connect your spreadsheet to Salesforce and your other business systems using Coefficient (install from Extensions Menu in Google Sheets or Excel)
• Step 2: Unify, clean, and format your data directly in your spreadsheet – perfect for working with leads, contacts, opportunities, or any object
• Step 3: Export your changes back to Salesforce in bulk with just a few clicks – select your target object, map your fields, and click Export
• Optional: Set up auto-refresh to keep your data current without manual updates

That’s it! Your changes appear in Salesforce instantly, saving hours of manual work.

Ready to see how Coefficient can transform your lead management—just like it did for Miro and countless other teams? Try Coefficient for yourself today!  

Related resources

• Salesforce Dashboard Templates Library
• Salesforce SOQL: Write Queries & Import Data with GPT in Sheets
• How to Create a Sales Commission Calculator
• How to Export Data from Salesforce into Excel
• How to Connect Typeform to Salesforce
• How to Connect Webflow to Salesforce
• How to Connect Salesforce to PostgreSQL
• Forecast Categories in Salesforce: Complete Guide
• Integrating Salesforce Data into Google Sheets (Sales Pipeline Tracker)
• Automate Salesforce Commission Tracking with Coefficient
• How to Export Data from Salesforce
• Import Salesforce Report into Excel using Coefficient
• Expedite Data Cleaning and CRM Imports with Coefficient and AI
• Automatize Data Synchronization between Salesforce and PostgreSQL

Frequently asked questions

Can you import leads in Salesforce?

Yes, Salesforce allows you to import leads through several methods. The standard approach uses Salesforce Data Import Wizard, where you upload a CSV file with your lead data. 

For larger datasets, you can use Data Loader. Both methods require preparing your data in the correct format and mapping fields.

 Coefficient provides a more flexible solution that connects your spreadsheets directly to Salesforce, allowing you to prepare lead data in a familiar environment and import it manually or on a schedule.

How do I mass transfer leads in Salesforce?

1. Go to the quick find box and type “mass transfer”
2. Select the type of record (leads) from the list of objects
3. Enter the name of the existing record owner in the “transfer from” field
4. Choose the new owner for the leads
5. Select which leads to transfer based on criteria

While this process works for ownership changes, managing lead data more broadly can be challenging. 

Coefficient lets you analyze lead assignments in a spreadsheet and push updates back to Salesforce, giving you more control over your lead management process.

How to add bulk leads in Salesforce?

1. Click the Leads tab in Salesforce
2. In the View drop-down, select the desired view of leads and click Go
3. Choose the list of leads you want to work with
4. Click “Add to Sales Campaign” to add the selected leads

This approach works for adding existing leads to campaigns, but creating new leads in bulk requires different steps. 

Coefficient simplifies the process by letting you prepare bulk data in spreadsheets (where data cleaning is easier) and then import it directly to Salesforce, with options for scheduling regular imports.

How to import leads from Sales Navigator to Salesforce?

1. From Sales Navigator Admin Home, select Admin Settings
2. Click Change in the CRM Settings section
3. Scroll to “Allow lead creation from Sales Navigator” and set the toggle to Yes
4. Select a Lead Source value to associate with leads created from Sales Navigator

While this integration is helpful, it still requires manual work in Sales Navigator. 

Coefficient offers complementary value by allowing you to combine LinkedIn data with other sources in spreadsheets, enrich it with additional information, and then import the complete lead records to Salesforce, creating more valuable prospect profiles.