The Scenario
You are a BDR manager. Your company sent a team to SaaStr Annual, and they came back with a badge-scan export: 150 contacts, first name, last name, email, company, and title in columns A through E of a Google Sheet. None of them are in Apollo yet. You need all 150 created as Apollo contacts before you can assign them to the post-conference sequence, which goes live Monday.
It is Friday at 4 PM.
The slow version of Friday afternoon:
- You import the sheet as a CSV to Apollo, but the column mapping screen does not auto-detect your headers
- You manually drag and drop five fields to the right columns
- Apollo flags 23 rows as duplicates — some attendees were already in the system
- You export the duplicate report, reconcile it in the sheet, re-import the cleaned version
- The sequence assignment UI wants contact IDs, which are not in your sheet
- Monday arrives. The sequence is not live. Your VP asks why.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your spreadsheet that reads the contact rows, creates each one in Apollo, and writes the resulting contact ID or status back to the sheet so you know exactly what happened.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Create all 150 contacts in Apollo from this sheet — use column A for first name, column B for last name, column C for email, column D for company, and column E for title. Skip rows where email in column C is blank. Write the newly created Apollo contact ID into column F for each row, or write "Duplicate" if Apollo already has a contact with that email.
SheetXAI reads the sheet, sends the create requests to Apollo, and writes either the new contact ID or a duplicate flag back to column F. You know the status of every row before the weekend is over.
What You Get
A fully processed sheet with:
- Columns A–E — original contact data, unchanged
- Column F — Apollo contact ID for each newly created contact, or "Duplicate" for existing records
Row-level status means you have an exact count. You can filter column F on "Duplicate" and decide whether to update those existing records or skip them, all before Monday morning.
The sequence assignment step is now straightforward: the IDs in column F are what you pass to the enrollment prompt.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Conference badge exports are almost never clean. SheetXAI handles data quality and record creation in the same prompt.
When titles are inconsistently formatted
Some titles say "VP, Sales," some say "VP of Sales," some say "VP-Sales." Apollo title fields are free-text, but you want consistency for filtering later.
Normalize the title values in column E to a consistent format: remove commas, replace hyphens with spaces, and standardize "VP of" over "VP," variants. Then create all contacts in Apollo using columns A through E and write contact IDs into column F.
When some rows are missing company name
A handful of attendees did not scan their badge fully and the company field is blank.
Before creating contacts, check column D for any blank company values. For those rows, look up the company from the email domain in column C using Apollo's organization lookup and fill in the company name. Then create all contacts using the completed data and write IDs into column F.
When you want to link contacts to their account domain in Apollo
Each contact should be linked to the right Apollo account record by domain, not just by company name string.
Create all 150 contacts in Apollo using columns A through E. For each contact, link them to the Apollo account whose domain matches the email domain in column C. If no matching account exists, create the account first. Write the contact ID into column F and the account ID into column G.
When the list needs deduplication, normalization, and creation in one pass
The export from the badge scanner has duplicates (some people scanned twice), blank email rows, and mixed-case names that need to be title-cased.
Deduplicate the rows by email address in column C, keeping the first occurrence of each email. Remove rows where column C is blank. Normalize first and last names in columns A and B to title case. Then create all remaining contacts in Apollo using columns A through E and write the Apollo contact ID or "Duplicate" into column F.
The pattern: clean the list in the same prompt that creates the records. You get a complete status report in column F without a second pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any sheet of net-new contacts, then ask it to create them in Apollo. The Apollo integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to bulk-enrich a contact list with Apollo data or the Apollo in Google Sheets overview.