Import your data from LinkedIn

To easily and quickly start working with RealtimeCRM, you can import your data from CSV files. LinkedIn allows you to export your existing connections as such.

We will see here how to do it.

Retrieve your connections from Linkedin

The first thing to do is to generate the CSV document containing the list of all your connections on LinkedIn. To do so, follow the details below or see this help article.

From the LinkedIn dashboard, click Me at the top, then Settings & Privacy in the dropdown menu.

Once there, in the Privacy section, under How LinkedIn uses your data, click Download your data. In the expanded section, click Pick and choose, then tick the Connections box and click Request archive. You might be prompted to sign in at this stage. LinkedIn will then compute your file and send it to you by email within 10 minutes.

Import LinkedIn connections into RealtimeCRM

The file you will receive from LinkedIn contains the list of all your contacts with their respective companies. Because of the hierarchical structure between Companies and Contacts in RealtimeCRM, we advise you to import Companies first, then Contacts.

Before actually importing data into RealtimeCRM, we advise you to format the CSV file you have to ensure the data will match RealtimeCRM’s structure as closely as possible. Obviously, it is better to do so on a copy of the CSV file you received from LinkedIn.

We will give an example on how to do it using Google Sheets.

1. To have consistent display for first name and last name, add one column after “First Name” and call it “First Name Formatted”. Assuming “First Name” is the A column and “First Name Formatted” is the B column, enter the following formula in B2: =PROPER(A2). Apply the formula to all the column by clicking the lower-right corner and dragging it. All your name should now be capitalised. Do the same thing with “Last Name” by creating a “Last Name Formatted” column.
2. The “Websites” column provided by LinkedIn can contains multiple URL separated by commas like this: “COMPANY:https://www.url1.com, BLOG:https://blogurl.com”. When importing a company into RealtimeCRM, only a single website address can be provided. To clean up the data, select the”Websites” column, then do a “Search and Replace” (Ctrl + H). In the Find text box, enter[A-Z]*:([^,]*),?.*, then in the Replace with enter $1. Tick the Match case and Search using regular expressions boxes, then press Done. The column should now only contain a single url for each record.

Once this is done, download the Google Sheets document as CSV.

You should now have a file correctly formatted and ready to be imported. In RealtimeCRM, go to Settings then Import Data (you can find more information on how to import data here). Select Companies as record type, then select the formatted CSV file. The mapping of fields should be something like this:

You can now run the import. This can take some time depending on the number of companies you have.

Once finished, it is possible that you will have duplicate records for your companies, especially if you have multiple contacts working at the same place. Fortunately, RealtimeCRM will have tagged those duplicates for you. Before we continue, let’s delete those duplicates.

Go to the Companies page and filter by Tag: Duplicate (more details on how to do it here). Then at the top left of the list, click the tickbox to select all those records. Go to the top right of the list, click Manage selected then Delete selected records and OK. There you are! A fresh and clean copy of your companies from Linkedin.

Now that your companies have been imported, we can focus on importing the contacts. Using the same CSV file, follow the import procedure selecting Contacts and mapping should look like this:

Start the import, which again could take some time. Once done, you will have a full list of contacts with their corresponding companies, all set up for you to work more easily!

Note: Because of the way the address field is formatted in LinkedIn, it is very difficult to extract its components. Thus we have to store the whole field into the single “Address” field in RealtimeCRM, without being able to split it into “County”, “Country”, “Postcode”, etc.