Import leads or contacts from CSV

I need these 1,742 leads from the CSV added to our account records and routed to the right reps. Import the file, map the columns so Company goes to Account Name, JobTitle to Title, Email to Email, Phone to Mobile, Lead Source to Lead Source, and attach the original CSV to each import job. Assign owner based on Territory Code: EMEA to Sofia Marin, NA to Jordan Lee, APAC to Priya Kapoor. Run a de-dup check against existing contacts by email and flag conflicts for manual review. Deliver a summary of how many created, updated, and conflicted by Friday 5pm.

Before I import these leads, make the file easy for our reps and ops to trust. Show the top three metrics up front: count of rows, percent with emails, and percent with company name. Put pricing-related columns and custom fields in a separate sheet. Highlight rows with missing email or invalid phone format, surface duplicates by email, and flag any company names that match closed-lost accounts. Add a brief note explaining how I mapped each CSV column to our CRM fields and what rules will determine owner assignment.

The CSV import just finished and 436 rows matched existing contacts by email — many are variants like bob.smith@ and bsmith@ — I need to avoid creating duplicates and not overwrite account-level fields. Tell me the likely cause of these match patterns, which matching rule to tighten first, and the safest next step to complete the import without losing legitimate updates or creating duplicates. Also say what I should tell Sofia and Jordan about follow-up work.

This keeps happening every quarter: we pull lists from trade shows, import them, then spend a week merging duplicates and fixing ownership. Where am I losing time and trust with reps? Recommend one change to the import checklist and one recurring habit for reps that would stop this cycle and save at least one day of ops time per quarter.