The Scenario
You are an agency owner. The trade show ended on Friday. You have a Google Sheet with 200 new leads, collected via badge scans and a paper sign-up form — name, email, phone, and company, all in columns A through D.
Your HighLevel location has existing contacts from previous events. Some of these 200 might already be in the system from a webinar last quarter. You cannot just blindly push all 200, or you will create duplicates and corrupt the lead scoring your team spent three months calibrating.
The slow version:
- Open HighLevel, search each email one at a time
- Copy-paste the ones that come back empty into the contact creation form
- Fill in name, phone, company for each
- Mark the ones that already exist in a separate column
- Repeat 200 times across a Monday afternoon
- You finish at 6 PM and your nurture sequence started at 9 AM without them.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Google Sheet that reads the lead list, checks each email against HighLevel, creates the new contacts, and writes the result back to the sheet, without you opening HighLevel once.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Create a HighLevel contact for every row in my sheet using the name in column A, email in column B, phone in column C, and company in column D under the location ID in cell F1. Check for duplicates first and skip any email that already exists. Write "CREATED" or "SKIPPED (duplicate)" to column E.
SheetXAI works through all 200 rows, calls HighLevel's contact search endpoint per email, creates the new ones, and writes a status back to column E. You end up with a live audit trail in the sheet.
What You Get
A fully-processed lead sheet with column E populated for every row:
- CREATED — the contact is now in HighLevel under the correct location
- SKIPPED (duplicate) — an existing contact with that email was found; no record touched
You know exactly which 200 became contacts and which 23 were already there. That is the kind of audit trail your ops team needs before they hand the list to whoever is running the nurture campaign.
If you want more granularity, add "and write the existing contact ID to column F when skipping" to the prompt. SheetXAI writes the HighLevel contact ID so you can cross-reference later.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Trade-show lead lists are rarely clean. SheetXAI handles the cleanup and the creation in the same prompt.
When phone numbers have inconsistent formats
Some rows have +1 country codes, some have just 10 digits, some have dashes. HighLevel expects a consistent format.
Normalize all phone numbers in column C to the format +1XXXXXXXXXX. Then create a HighLevel contact for each row using name in column A, email in column B, normalized phone in column C, and company in column D, under the location in cell F1. Write status to column E.
When company names have typos or casing variations
The form was free-text, so "Acme Corp" and "acme corp" and "ACME" all appear.
Clean up the company names in column D: trim whitespace and apply title case. Then deduplicate rows that share the same email after cleanup. Create HighLevel contacts for the remaining rows and write status to column E.
When you only want leads from a specific session or booth
The sheet covers all three booth locations. You only want to import leads from Booth A.
Filter to rows where column F says "Booth A." For those rows, create a HighLevel contact using name in column A, email in column B, phone in column C, and company in column D under the location in cell F1. Write status to column E. Leave all other rows untouched.
When the list has missing emails and you need to decide what to do with them
Thirty rows have no email. You cannot create a HighLevel contact without one, but you do not want to silently skip them.
For rows where column B is empty, write "SKIPPED (no email)" to column E and do not attempt to create a contact. For all other rows, check for duplicates by email in HighLevel and create contacts under the location in cell F1. Write "CREATED" or "SKIPPED (duplicate)" to column E as appropriate.
The pattern: instead of cleaning the sheet first and then running the import, you describe both operations in one instruction. SheetXAI handles the conditional logic row by row.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any lead sheet, then ask it to push the contacts into your HighLevel location with a duplicate check. The HighLevel integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to check for duplicate contacts before import or the HighLevel in Google Sheets overview.