How To Import Contacts Into Distributed Source From A CSV File

A contact manager lies in the core of any CRM system; it binds information of leads and deals to people, giving you a starting point to visualize business processes, sales pipeline, follow-ups and provides a ready logbook of prior conversations. A contact manager is equivalent to an information bank of email addresses, phone numbers, physical addresses, names, companies and other crucial information of people, who are related to your business in some way or the other.

Distributed Source has a built in contact manager which allows you to add and manage contact information of people, leads and companies at one place. Our contact manager is simple, intuitive and lets you access contact history, past events, tasks and deal information - right from individual contact pages.

Import Contacts from a CSV file

Distributed Source makes it super easy to import contacts from a CSV file. You can export contacts from Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Microsoft Outlook and other sources in CSV format and import the same contacts into your Distributed Source account.

1. Go to my.distributedsource.com and login to your Distributed Source account.

2.  Once you are logged into your Distributed Source account, click "Contacts" on the navigation bar.

3. On the "Contacts" page, click “Import contacts”.

4. This will open a small overlay window, where you need to choose an option for importing contacts

5. Select the "CSV upload" checkbox and you should see a file upload window, where you need to select the CSV file from your computer and click "Open".

Note : The first line of the CSV file should mention the field header names ( like name, phone, email etc., A sample CSV file is available here for your reference. )


This will upload the CSV file in your Distributed Source account and you will be asked to map "Import fields" of the contacts to the corresponding fields of Distributed Source CRM.

How To Map Fields?

Here is how it works.

When you export contacts from a contact manager application, every attribute of a contact is stored under a column header. So if you have 30 contacts, the first name of all the contacts might be stored under "First_name" or "F_name", this depends how the CSV File has been composed.

Distributed Source has been designed to identify headers with common and obvious names. For example, if the First name of a contact is stored under the a header  "Name", our system will identify it and map it with the corresponding field of Distributed Source.

However, on some rare occasions, the column headers in your CSV file may have uncommon names (e.g Fname, Ph.number). Distributed Source might not recognize such uncommon names, which would result in unmapped data.

To ensure that all the data of a contact is mapped with the right Distributed Source fields, you can explicitly map an import field with the corresponding field of Distributed Source in this step.

Here is an example:

Distributed Source supports the following input fields, so your csv backup may contain some or all of the following information about the contact:

• First name
• Last name
• Company name
• Mobile
• Home phone
• Office Phone
• Fax
• Personal Email
• Office Email
• URL

6. Once you have seen the preview of how the attributes of an imported contact is mapped with the CRM field of Distributed Source, click "Import" to import contacts into your Distributed Source account.

7. You will now see a message

8. Click "Ok" to continue to the next step.

9. It should take less than a minute for the import to finish. Check your email inbox for the "Import  successful" confirmation.

10. When you receive the confirmation email, click the embedded link and you will be redirected to the "Contacts" page of your Distributed Source account.

11. All done, you should now see the contact database imported and stored in your Distributed Source account.

Need Help?
Having trouble importing contacts or need help with contact management? Write to us at support@distributedsource.com and we will be happy to help you out.