The Scenario
A new enterprise customer success manager joined three weeks ago. Their first project: migrate 50 enterprise accounts from the old CRM into Productlane before the portal goes live next Friday. The data is already in an Excel workbook — company names, contact emails, contact names, one row per contact.
The problem is that Productlane needs companies created first, then contacts linked to those companies. And the workbook has contacts from the same company spread across multiple rows.
The bad version:
- Open Productlane and manually add each unique company one by one — deduplicate in your head as you go.
- Go back to the workbook, look up which contacts belong to each company, and add them one by one through the Productlane contact form.
- Realize halfway through that two rows share an email address from a contact who moved between companies, and now you have a duplicate to untangle.
The portal migration deadline is Friday. You have 50 accounts and someone is waiting on you to finish before they can configure the feedback widget.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook, identifies unique companies, and walks through the Productlane API to create both company and contact records, writing the returned IDs back into your workbook as confirmation.
Create Productlane contacts for every row in this Excel workbook using email from column A, name from column B, and company name from column C — write each contact ID into column D
What You Get
- Column D populated with the Productlane contact ID for each successfully created contact
- Any row that fails (duplicate email, missing name) gets an error message in column D instead of an ID
- You can filter column D for errors and fix just the problem rows without touching the successful ones
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The workbook has duplicate email addresses across rows
Before importing, scan column A for duplicate email addresses and write "duplicate" into column E for any row that shares an email with another row — then create Productlane contacts only for rows where column E is blank
Company names have inconsistent spacing or casing
Normalize all company names in column C to title case before creating Productlane records — write the normalized name into column F and use column F as the company name for each API call
Some contacts are missing a name
Create Productlane contacts for all rows where column B has a value — for rows where column B is blank, write "skipped: no name" into column D and skip the API call
Full dedup, cleanup, and import combined
Deduplicate column A for repeated emails, normalize company names in column C to title case, create one Productlane company per unique company name and write the company ID into column E, then create contacts for all rows with a valid email linking each to its company ID — write the contact ID or error into column F
Combining cleanup and import into one prompt means the workbook is confirmed and clean when the task completes.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the CRM export workbook you are using for the migration, then ask it to create Productlane companies and contacts from your rows. You can follow up by logging customer upvotes from the workbook or exporting the workspace member list to verify access is set correctly.