A new Lead Importer and a fresh coat of paint

In recent weeks, our Product team rolled out a revamped Lead Importer to help you avoid importing duplicates, and a slew of visual design improvements.

A redesigned Lead Importer that detects duplicates

We’ve redesigned and built a new Lead Importer from the ground up.

In addition to a complete redesign, our CSV and Paste from Excel import tools have been improved to give you more options about how we should handle your data import:

• Easier field mapping. A new vertical layout for assigning fields makes it easier to import large spreadsheets, and the data preview for each field is now smart to exclude blank fields. We now also do more intelligent auto-mapping of spreadsheet to Close fields, saving you time.

• Options for grouping related rows into a single lead. Previously we always grouped spreadsheet rows into a single lead when the company name matched (which helps if you have one contact per row). But now you can disable this option if it doesn’t suit you (e.g. if you want to sell to each contact separately) or change the group by field to something else (e.g. a custom field unique identifier).

• Skip duplicate leads. To avoid importing duplicates, we’ll check the leads in Close and compare them to those in your spreadsheet. Any leads that appear in both can be skipped and not imported.

• A visual progress bar. We’ll still notify you via email when your import is complete, but we’ll give you a real-time progress bar of how things are going.

• Download invalid and skipped rows for easier data cleanup. From our redesigned summary screen, you can now download a separate CSV of just the records that weren’t imported due to validation errors like invalid email addresses. This allows you to correct those invalid records in Excel and do a second import with just those previously failed records. Similarly, you can download a CSV of any rows that were skipped to avoid duplicates.

A fresh coat of paint throughout Close

Over the past few months, our Product team has been hard at work behind the scenes to modernize Close’s UI. These improvements have led to some refreshing design changes throughout the application.

We have updated the design of the active call bar, the top navigation toolbar and search box, and all buttons and dropdowns throughout Close.

These visual changes represent our desire to continually improve the quality of Close and also lead to larger features and functionality we’ll be announcing soon.

Until next month...