How to move contractor leads from a spreadsheet to a CRM

Many contractors start with a spreadsheet, and that's perfectly reasonable — it's inexpensive, familiar and easy to create. Eventually the business has hundreds of rows of customers, phone numbers, emails, estimates, job values, notes and statuses. At that point, moving to a CRM makes sense.

Start by cleaning the spreadsheet

Before importing anything, remove duplicate customers, outdated leads, blank rows, incorrect phone numbers and unnecessary columns. The cleaner the spreadsheet, the easier the migration.

Identify your important fields

Map name to customer, phone to phone, email to email, project to job, quote to quote value, status to lead status and next contact to follow-up date. You don't need to move every column — only migrate information you'll actually use.

Don't forget old leads

Your spreadsheet probably contains old opportunities that were never properly closed. Instead of deleting them, separate them into active, won, lost and follow-up later. That preserves useful history you can re-quote from.

Importing contractor leads

A CRM with CSV import makes this straightforward. FollowUpDesk supports importing existing lead and customer data, so you can leave spreadsheets behind without retyping every contact.

What happens after migration?

Once your data is in the CRM, set up a simple workflow: new lead → contact → estimate → quote → follow-up → won or lost. The objective isn't merely moving your spreadsheet — it's creating a better process. See spreadsheet vs CRM for contractors.