Excel import: contact persons without personal email

Smart CRM & Sales Hub Tips, Tricks & Best Practices
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Hi everyone,

We are currently setting up our HubSpot CRM with a company-centric approach and want to import large Excel lists.

Our Excel files typically contain:

  • Company data
  • General company email (usually info@…)
  • Contact person data (often without a personal email address and phone number)

Our target structure:

  • Companies should be the primary object
  • Contact persons should be associated with the company
  • The general company email should only be used once
  • Contact persons should be importable even without a personal email
  • No duplicates should be created
  • No multiple uses of info@ addresses across different contacts

Additionally, we have:

  • Disabled automatic company creation

We are currently planning:

  • Importing companies and contacts together
  • Storing the general company email only at the company level
  • Allowing contacts without an email address

My questions:

  1. Is this the recommended structure for a B2B CRM in HubSpot?
  2. How do you handle contact persons without a personal email?
  3. Do you store general info@ addresses as contacts or only at the company level?

Thanks in advance for your help. I look forward to every response!

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Hello @danhighmountain,

I’m happy to help here.

Importing contacts and companies simultaneously is indeed exactly as HubSpot intends. Whether you choose automatic company creation or not is not necessarily in conflict and depends on the situation.

Saving the company email address at the company level is an option, yes, but I wouldn’t actively work against having a contact under that address as well. If the address is used for form submissions, for example, then that’s just how it is, and I would “allow” that conversion and leave the record in the CRM as is.

Contacts without email addresses are also well taken care of if they are correctly assigned to companies (which happens during a multi-object import). The important thing here is that repeated imports without an email address at the contact level will create a duplicate. The email address or the record ID is the standard deduplication key in HubSpot. If no identifier is present, HubSpot will simply create the record again – keep that in mind.

Any duplicates that may arise will show up in the duplicates tool anyway: Datensätze in HubSpot deduplizieren

Ideally, you would have an email address for every contact, but that’s not always possible.

Best regards!

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Vielen Dank für die schnelle Antwort!
Ich möchte nun doch einen anderen Weg gehen, um automatische Zuordnungsfehler (Kontakte zu Unternehmen, unerwünschte Unternehmenserstellung usw.) zu vermeiden. Und zwar nicht über den Import von Unternehmen und Kontakten auf einmal, sondern separat.
Dafür habe ich die Excel-Liste aufgeteilt. Eine Datei beinhaltet jetzt nur die Spalten, die das Unternehmen betreffen (Firmenname, Adresszeile, Plz, Ort, Land, geschäftliche Telefonnummer (Zentrale), geschäftliche E-Mail-Adresse (info@…, contact@..) und die Website URL).
Und die Kontaktinformationen habe ich in eine anderen Excel Datei eingefügt (Anrede, Titel, Vorname, Nachname, Funktion, Tätigkeit) + Firmenname und Website URL für die Zuordnung der Kontakte zum entsprechden Unternehmen, das ich vorher angelegt habe im zweiten Schritt.
- Führt mich diese Herangehensweise auch an mein Ziel?
- Brauche ich in der Unternehmens-Excel-Datei eine separate Spalte für die Unternehmens-Domain oder wird diese aus der Website URL automatisch abgeleitet?
- Sind die Spalten der beiden Dateien (Unternehmen & Kontakte) ausreichend für einen sauberen Import und eine Zuordnung der Kontakte zum Unternehmen?
- Habt ihr weitere Verbesserungsvorschläge oder Tipps für mich?
Ich bin um jede Hilfe sehr dankbar.
Ich wünsche euch allen einen schönen Tag, ich freue mich auf euere Antworten :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hello @danhighmountain,

@danhighmountain wrote:

A file now only includes the columns that pertain to the company (company name, address line, postal code, city, country, business phone number (headquarters), business email address (info@…, contact@..) and the website URL).

If no identifier is included here (company domain, record ID), then each row will create a new company — and thus also duplicates. The import would not be able to match the companies from the file with possibly existing companies in the CRM.

The same applies to the contact import.

@danhighmountain wrote:

for assigning the contacts to the respective company, which I created beforehand in the second step.

What exactly is this second step? How is the association supposed to work in detail? I can’t quite follow that right now.

@danhighmountain wrote:

Do I need a separate column for the company domain in the company Excel file, or is it automatically derived from the website URL?

The behavior here is unreliable. The fields are linked, and the company domain updates from the website URL if unknown — but it’s safer to have the company domain as a column. The website URL is not an identifier, but the company domain is.

@danhighmountain wrote:

Are the columns of the two files (companies & contacts) sufficient for a clean import and for assigning contacts to companies?

If the assignment is to be done via workflow (there is a workflow action to create associations), then yes, that’s sufficient. However, the described approach may still generate duplicates.

Best regards,