The Scenario
It is 8:45 AM on a Tuesday and your first call of the day is with the VP of Sales at 9:30. She wants to know the Q2 Inbound sequence is running. You have 300 new inbound leads sitting in an Excel workbook — columns A through C, name, email, company — and none of them are in Reply yet.
The bad version:
- Open Reply, navigate to Contacts, start a new list. Copy the first chunk of rows from your workbook, paste into the import box. Match the column headers one by one.
- The import finishes. Go back to the workbook, find where you left off, copy the next chunk. Repeat until all 300 are in.
- Enroll the list in the 'Inbound Nurture' sequence manually. Confirm the count looks right. Realize three contacts had the wrong email format and were skipped. Fix them individually.
You have 45 minutes and two things need to happen before that call. The manual import process is not something you can compress into that window.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that sits inside your Excel workbook and talks to Reply on your behalf. You describe what you need — which columns, which list, which sequence — and it handles the API calls.
Take all emails in column B of the Prospects worksheet, create each as a Reply contact with the name from column A and company from column C, add them to the 'Enterprise Outbound' list, and confirm the total count added in cell E1
What You Get
- Each row in the Prospects worksheet processed as a Reply contact creation call.
- Cell E1 updated with the total count of contacts successfully added.
- Any row with a malformed email or a duplicate surfaces as an error note rather than silent failure.
- The contact list 'Enterprise Outbound' exists in Reply and is ready to attach to a sequence.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Names are in one column as "First Last" instead of split across two
Add every row from the Prospects worksheet to the Reply list 'Enterprise Outbound', splitting the name in column A into first and last name on the space, using column B for email and column C for company, and write the result in column D
Some email addresses in column B are missing or blank
Add all rows from the Prospects worksheet to Reply's 'Enterprise Outbound' list where column B is not empty, skip any row with a blank email and write 'skipped – no email' in column D for those rows, and write 'created' or the error in column D for the ones that ran
Company data lives in a second worksheet called "Accounts" and needs to be joined before import
For each row in the Prospects worksheet (columns A=name, B=email), look up the matching company name in the Accounts worksheet using column B as the join key, then create each contact in Reply with the matched company and add them to the 'Enterprise Outbound' list, logging results in column D
The list already exists and you want to deduplicate before adding, then enroll in a sequence
Fetch the existing contacts in the Reply list 'Enterprise Outbound', compare against column B in the Prospects worksheet, add only the emails not already present as new contacts, add them to the list, and write 'new' or 'already in list' in column D for each row
The principle: ask for the cleanup and the action together. You should not have to pre-filter the workbook before running the import — describe the condition and let SheetXAI handle it.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Excel workbook where your inbound leads are sitting. Ask it to create the Reply list, add the contacts, and confirm the total in a cell — all in one prompt. You can also look at how to audit contact campaign membership or the hub overview.