Data cleaning for CRM imports
Pipedrive
How to clean a CSV before importing into Pipedrive
To clean a CSV for Pipedrive: open it in Sift, approve the suggested fixes, dedupe people by email, normalize phones, pick the built-in Pipedrive template in Match & check to map your columns, and export a clean file for Pipedrive's import. Sift runs entirely in your browser, so the file is never uploaded.
Why Pipedrive imports go wrong
Most failed or messy Pipedrive imports come down to a handful of issues:
- Duplicate people, the same person under two spellings or emails becomes two records.
- Organizations spelled differently, "Acme Inc" and "Acme, Inc." become two organizations.
- Custom fields that don't exist yet, Pipedrive can only map to fields that already exist.
- Format noise, inconsistent phones, casing and whitespace make matching and search worse.
Step by step
- Load the CSV into Sift. It profiles every column in your browser.
- Clean: approve trim, casing, fix-emails and normalize-phones with a before/after diff.
- Merge near-duplicate organization names so each company imports once.
- Dedupe people by email, keeping the most complete record.
- Map columns: pick the built-in Pipedrive · People template in Match & check.
- Export a clean CSV and import it (account menu → Tools and apps → Import data).
Tip: Pipedrive links People to Organizations by name during import, so run Sift's merge on the organization column first; one canonical spelling per company means one organization per company.