First import, importing business contact along with organization record.

Chris Rainwater · July 2017

Our mail house gave us the mailing list for our direct surrounding business community that we are trying to target this year.

I believe I have the import set up correctly for the organizations/their addresses but they also provided a primary contact name for most of them.

I'm trying to make sure that I can import this individual relationship at the same time and see how I would do so.

As far as I've been able to tell none of these contacts currently have individual records.

I'm going through the 282 page import guide but I'm just very cautious being my first import.

Thanks for any guidance you may be able to provide!

JoAnn Strommen · July 2017

LOL - yes the guide can be daunting but quite helpful. Import can be challenging. Two quick things:

If you want addressee/salutations for the contacts, be sure to include them in the import. You cannot globally add add/sal to contacts (unless it was a hidden addition to recent version). Add/sal are another challenge.
When you're ready to do your import. Save a copy of file with a new name and delete all but 2-3 records. Use those to import as tests. Validate and then import them, go to records, check that all is correct. And recent back-up is always a good idea should things go amok.

Chris Rainwater · July 2017

Thanks!

These will be really helpful to keep in mind during the import.

My confusion is in even how to import these names, who will not have individual records, as individual relationships to the organization. Ideally setting them up for these contact names to print with the mailings to the organizations with the import.

I'm not quite finding this bit of instruction in the import guide and really don't want to mess up my first import.

JoAnn Strommen · July 2017

Chris,

You can import the relationships as a separate import or all in one. With one it will be lots of fields - the list of fields you can include starts on page 150 of the guide. Have to say if this is your first I might advise doing it as 2 imports. It makes it a bit more manageable. Just be sure to assign your business' their import ID and keep that field with the contact info so you can map each to the correct record.

After a very slow week, I now was given 3 projects to work on today so don't have a lot of time to 'play' on forums. Sorry, maybe some others will have time to advise.

Joanne Felci 2 · July 2017

I've never done organization/individual relationship imports but I would think as long as you import the relationship under the contact type you use to pull contacts for mailings it should work (i.e. if you pull primary contact for mailings or whatever special type you might use)

Chris Rainwater · July 2017

@JoAnn Stommen

Page 150 is what I was sorting through, some of the available fields just didn't seem to fit the situation, or were confusing how some of them would apply.

I totally understand sudden projects. Thank you so much for taking the time to help as much as you did.

@Joanne Felci

That field seems to be one of the essential ones to look at for it to work.

Thank you

JoAnn Strommen · July 2017

So agree on trying to figure out which fields you need. Will pass on advice given to me: Go to a record you currently have in RE. Look at the fields on the record. What ones do you want/need? What ones can just be ignored? It helped me sort out what fields I needed in my import.

Jen Claudy · July 2017

Definitely take JoAnn's advise to test with just 2-3 records. And also to assign the Import IDs yourself, so that if you need to do additional imports, you don't have to spend the time matching up records. Plus, you can include a tag in the Import ID that indicates where the data came from (i.e. "BusinessCommunity001", "BusinessCommunity002", etc.). That will also help if you forget to pull your test import records out of the main file (or you can delete the test records from RE after the test). If the Import ID already exists, an exception will be created.

Be sure you have a backup of RE done before you do the big import, and you might consider running the main import after hours when everyone else is out of the database. And, from experience, I try to avoid doing big projects like this when I'm tired or distracted. That can spell disaster! And test as many times as you need to, because it'll help you feel more comfortable with importing.

Jill Freidmutter · July 2017

When I did my first few imports, I contacted customer support who walked me through the imports step by step. We did screen shares and were on exactly the same page. There were lots of steps they helped me understand, like which were required fields, how to handle exceptions, etc. I learned a ton. I highly recommend this for anyone who has a complex import, especially if it is your first one.

First import, importing business contact along with organization record.

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