Companies are the organizations in your CRM: employers, sponsors, partners, member businesses. They are what a person's employer field points at, which makes this a small file with an outsized effect on how connected your directory feels afterwards.
Import This Before People
This is the part that catches everyone out. When the People import sees a Company column, it looks for a company you already have and links the person to it. It never creates one, because a spreadsheet column is not a decision to add fifty organizations to your CRM.
So if you run People first, every employer column comes through as an unmatched warning and the link is simply lost. There is no second pass that picks it up later. Run Companies first and the two files meet automatically.
Spell the names the same way in both files. Matching ignores capitals but not wording, so “Delgado Design Co” and “Delgado Design Company” are two different companies.
Where to Get the File
Most CRMs export organizations as their own list: HubSpot calls them Companies, Salesforce calls them Accounts, Pipedrive calls them Organizations. If yours does not, you can build the list from your people export: copy the employer column into a new sheet, remove the duplicates, and you have a companies file.
Or start from the template at Imports → Templates → Companies.
Running It
- Go to Imports → New Import and pick Companies.
- Upload the file.
- Check the mapping. The Name column is the only one that is required.
- Run it, then run your People file.
The Columns Worth Mapping
- Name is required, and it is also the match key. Everything else is optional.
- Website works with or without the https:// on the front.
- Industry and Size are your own categories. Studio stores whatever you send, so “11-50” and “32” are both fine.
- Address, City, State, Zip are the company's own address. They are not the contact's.
- Contact Name plus Contact Email creates a real person in People and files them against this company, with their job title if you map Contact Title. This is the same record a person's profile page writes when you type an employer on it, so a contact imported here and the same human imported through People end up as one record with one employer.
Re-Running the File
Safe. Matching is on the name, so a second run updates the company you already have. It only fills fields that are currently blank, so anything you edited on the company page survives.
Checking It Worked
- Open Companies and confirm the count matches your file, allowing for rows that were duplicates of each other.
- Run your People file and read the per-row results. Employers that did not match are reported by row number, and the usual cause is a spelling difference between the two files.
- Open one person who should have an employer and confirm the company shows on their profile.
If a Row Had Nothing but a Name
Organizations that arrive with no way to reach them wait on the Needs Info page rather than joining the list as a name and eleven empty columns. Complete them there, or press Keep as-is to send them into the list exactly as they are. Keep as-is is remembered, so re-importing the same file will not ask again.