The Scenario
You are a sales coordinator. Your team spent last week reading through 300 Instantly replies and tagging each one offline in a Google Sheet: Interested, Not Interested, or Meeting Booked. The decisions are done. The problem is none of those tags are in Instantly yet.
The sequence is paused on each of those 300 leads until someone updates the status. Your head of sales wants it done before the Monday morning standup.
The bad version:
- Open Instantly
- Search each lead by email
- Click into the lead profile
- Update the interest status from the dropdown
- Repeat 300 times
- You finish 80 and send an apologetic Slack message on Sunday night.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads your reviewed sheet and pushes each status back into Instantly so you never touch the Instantly UI for this operation.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each row in this sheet (columns: Lead Email in column A, Interest Status in column B), find the matching Instantly lead and update its interest status with the value in column B. Write 'updated' or the error into column C.
SheetXAI reads every row, calls the Instantly API to find and update each lead, and writes the result into column C. When it finishes, you have a column showing you exactly what was updated and what was not.
What You Get
300 leads updated without opening the Instantly UI once:
- Column C status — "updated" for every lead that was found and changed
- Error flags — leads that could not be found or had an unexpected status value
- Instantly sequences unblocked — each updated lead moves to the right next step in the campaign
- Audit log in the sheet — your ops team can verify every status change
The audit log is what protects you. If a lead claims they never said they were interested, you can show the row in the sheet and the timestamp of the update.
If the status values in column B are not exactly what Instantly expects, tell SheetXAI to normalize them first.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Offline review sheets are never in perfect shape. SheetXAI handles normalization and updates together.
When the status values are inconsistent
Your team used "int", "interested", "Interested", and "yes" interchangeably in column B.
Normalize column B: map "int", "interested", "yes", and "y" to "interested"; "not int", "not interested", "no", and "n" to "not_interested"; "booked", "mtg", and "meeting booked" to "meeting_booked". Then update each Instantly lead with the normalized status and write the result into column C.
When some rows have blanks in the status column
A few leads were reviewed but the coordinator forgot to fill in the tag.
For any row where column B is blank, write "REVIEW NEEDED" into column C and skip the update. For all other rows, update the Instantly lead status with the value in column B and write the result into column C.
When you need to filter to only one status type first
You want to update "Meeting Booked" leads immediately and handle the rest later.
Filter to rows where column B equals "Meeting Booked". Update those Instantly leads to status "meeting_booked" and write "updated" into column C. Leave all other rows unchanged.
When you want to update status and add a note to the lead at the same time
The sales team wants a note on each "Interested" lead describing which rep reviewed it.
For each row in this sheet where column B is "Interested", update the Instantly lead status to "interested" and add a note to the lead profile: "Reviewed by [column C rep name] on [today's date]. Write 'updated + noted' or the error into column D.
The pattern: normalize, filter, update — all in one prompt instead of three separate passes through the data.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any reply-review sheet, then ask it to push the statuses back into Instantly. The Instantly integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to move leads between campaigns or the Instantly in Google Sheets overview.