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How to Import Data Into CRM Databases

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This video shows how to import external data from Excel files, SalesForce, QuoteWerks and Outlook into the Proposal Pack Wizard's CRM database.

Proposal Pack HelpWatch this related video: How to Switch to the 3rd-Party Integration Enabled Wizard

In this video we're going to show how to import external contact data into the Wizard's reusable CRM databases. You'll need to be running the copy of the Wizard that includes the third–party integrations. There's two copies of the Wizard that are included.

The Run Proposal Pack Wizard is the non–integrated copy of the Wizard that's the default. You'll have to set up the icon for the Run Proposal Pack Wizard with Integrations. The only difference is which one of the two copies of the Wizard document get opened and run.

We have the integration version opened here and you can also click this About button and you'll see it says third party integrations are available. If you get a different message here with a button that tells you how to set up the integration version just follow those instructions to run the integration enabled version. You'll do the importing of the contact data in the Preferences of the Wizard.

Click the Preferences and whichever integrations you have enabled you can import data into. Just go to the Integrations tab and there are three different integrations available – QuoteWerks, Salesforce and Outlook. Each one of these is turned off initially so you'll have to set these up before you can use them.

For QuoteWerks you see we're connected to QuoteWerks. We have an actual running instance of QuoteWerks installed and connected. You'll just have to have the QuoteWerks software from QuoteWerks installed on your computer to be able to enable this integration.

For SalesForce you will have to have your login information and your token. Your user id and password, this will be for your SalesForce account and the token is given to you by SalesForce for use with third–party connections. You may also have to custom set the server url.

Your server url will be given to you by SalesForce. Once you have this information from your SalesForce account you can put this in here. Enable SalesForce and connect to it.

So you can see here we're connected to our SalesForce account. The other integration is Outlook. This is a simple connection, you just click this Enable box and it will connect your Outlook account since Outlook already has a direct connection into Microsoft Office.

We've enabled all three of our integrations here. To do the importing of the data from those systems into the Wizard just go to the Data and Display tab. Click the Edit Company and Client Database button.

Now you'll see two sections here Company Data and Client Data. So Company Data, this is really only imported usually as a single record. It's going to be whatever the main account information from those systems you're logged into is.

Client database information is going to be your lists of contacts in those other systems. So most of the time you're not going to use the Company Data import since you're going to have your name and address already set up in the company database. If you wanted to you just click this and you have buttons to import from all three systems plus you can import data from an external file.

This may be more useful if you have a number of company contacts you want to set up for a larger system. For example, we can show the load from file and we have an example Excel file here. We'll open this up and show you what it looks like.

Whe Wizard can open multiple file formats such as Excel, text, XML and CSV. When you import from an external file you just have to have a header row with our field names that you want imported. This is the list of our field names and then for each row just fill in the contact information.

You can you can either manually create these Excel files or if you have a third–party system where you can create an export file and then if you have to manually massage it or whatever it takes to get this file created. We will import this external file and as the Wizard's importing the data it's going to create a report and it'll tell you what rows were skipped how many duplicates it may have found, if there are any errors or warnings and so on. You can see now all four of those company records are now in our database.

Now this Populate From, that's going to be the record you want to select if you want a specific record to pre–populate every one of your future projects you create. You can leave this blank if you want and it'll use the Wizard's default company information. To actually manage all those records just click the manage button and now we can click through and see all the data that was imported from the Excel file.

We can load our current contact from our SalesForce account. You can see this is the record just imported from SalesForce and so on. We'll show the importing of the client information which is going to be more commonly used.

Just like before we have the same four buttons. We can import from a file, QuoteWerks, SalesForce, Outlook. For Outlook it's going to scan through your current contacts in your Outlook and we can select these and import them.

Same with SalesForce, it's going to scan through all of our leads, contacts and contracts. Now you can see how much data we have to select from in SalesForce. Just import a few of these.

From QuoteWerks, now QuoteWerks is a little special in that the API for QuoteWerks only allows us to import a single contact record at a time. So this is a little more labor intensive if you have a lot of contacts you want to import from QuoteWerks. You can see we have our running instance of QuoteWerks and we have one of our quotes selected and the Wizard automatically loaded the client contact information for that single quote.

Now to import records from multiple QuoteWerks quotes we just have to flip back and forth between the two apps. I'll go and select a different quote then I switch back to the Wizard, click this again. One at a time we can build up our list of records and then import those.

From a file we have another Excel spreadsheet sample here and it's just like the other one except the tags in the header are going to be different. You can see CustFirst, CustLast and so on. These are the tags you need to put in the first row.

You don't have to use colors or anything, the colors or formatting will get ignored. You can see we've got five records to import. Now here's all the records we've imported from all the different systems into our Wizard's CRM database.

Now to make use of these records we'll go and add a project into the database. Now to populate the Company Data into the project we can select from any of the records in the CRM database. For the Company Data and we can also import directly from the project screen a single record.

For Client Data same thing. We now have access to all of the client records that we've added and also from the project screen we can do a direct import of a record. That is all there is to importing third party data external data into the Wizards reusable company and client CRM database.

Proposal KitPublished by Proposal Kit, Inc.