Moving from a spreadsheet or another CRM? AB Sales imports and exports leads as a CSV file (a plain spreadsheet format that Excel and Google Sheets open directly). Everything lives in one dialog: open your workspace → Leads → Import / Export.
Start from the Template tab. It downloads a CSV with the exact column headers and a sample row. Only Name is required — every other column is optional, and columns are matched by header name, so you can delete the ones you don't use.
What the file contains
| Column | Notes |
|---|---|
| Name required | Company or lead name. |
| ContactName, Email, Phone, Website, Industry, Notes | The lead's own details. |
| Source | Website, Referral, Event, Cold Call, Social Media, Other. Anything else is imported as Other. |
| Status | New, InformationFilled, Contacted, Qualified, Disqualified (default New). Write them exactly as shown — see the warning below. Exports may also show Converted, which is not importable and comes back as New. |
| Labels | Label names separated by |, e.g. Hot|Enterprise. On import, names are matched to your workspace's labels — missing ones are created automatically. |
| AutomationOptOut | true/false — true excludes the lead from Agent automation. Handy for importing a do-not-contact list. |
| CompanyInsight | The AI research summary; round-trips on export/import. |
| Phase, CreatedAt | export only Ignored on import — a lead's funnel stage advances by adding contacts and opportunities, not by typing it in. |
The Status column wants
It fails quietly: a Status the importer doesn't recognise is not an error and doesn't flag the row in the preview. The lead is created anyway, with its status silently set to New. So a file full of
Capitalisation doesn't matter (
InformationFilled, with no space — not the Information filled you see on screen.
The Leads list shows that status as two words because that reads better; the CSV column takes the one-word form. Copying the badge text out of the app into a spreadsheet is the usual way this goes wrong.
It fails quietly: a Status the importer doesn't recognise is not an error and doesn't flag the row in the preview. The lead is created anyway, with its status silently set to New. So a file full of
Information filled imports 100% successfully and arrives with every lead back at the start of the pipeline.
Capitalisation doesn't matter (
informationfilled is fine) — only the space does. If you have already imported a batch this way, filter the Leads list to New and fix them there; the leads themselves are intact.
Importing
- Prepare the file. Fill the template (or export from your old tool and rename the headers to match).
- Upload it. Import / Export → Import tab → choose the CSV (max 5 MB).
- Review the preview. Every row is shown before anything is saved. Rows with problems are flagged — a missing name, a duplicate inside the file, or a lead that already exists in the workspace (matched by email, or by name when there's no email). Untick anything you don't want. Note that an unrecognised Status or Source is not one of these problems; it is corrected silently, as above.
- Click Import. Only the selected, error-free rows are created.
After the import, new leads start in the funnel as plain leads — enrich them with Research with AI or let the Agent fill the gaps automatically.
Exporting
The Export tab downloads every non-archived lead with all columns above — a complete, human-readable backup. Labels export as names (not internal IDs), so the file can be imported into a different workspace and the labels are recreated there.
An export is a faithful backup, but re-importing it is not a faithful restore. Three columns do not survive the round trip, and none of them announces itself:
- Status
Converted— a lead that became a customer exports asConverted, which is not one of the five importable values, so it comes back as New. Converted leads are the rows most likely to be misrepresented by a restore. - Phase and CreatedAt — exported for reading, ignored on import, as the table above says.
So treat the export as a record to read, or as a way to move leads you are still working into another workspace. If you are re-importing a whole file, filter out or re-label the
Converted rows first — those companies are customers, and they belong in Customers rather than back at the top of the lead pipeline. Everything else — the five importable statuses, labels, opt-outs and the AI summary — does round-trip cleanly.Safe for spreadsheets. Exports guard against formula injection (cells starting with
=, +, -, @ are prefixed so Excel/Sheets won't execute them), and the import strips the prefix again — so the text of every cell survives intact.