Method:Classic General Q&A

Re: Importing Leads with Activity Type

Method_Greg — Fri, 12 Sep 2014 15:15:45 GMT

Hello Ernestine,
   I took a longer look at this import as I was unsure myself about the fields. To import an activity, you need three fields: AssignedTo, ActivityType and DueDateStart. You can find which fields are required by going to Customize -> Tables/Fields -> Activity. You can scroll through the fields seeing which ones are checked as Required?.   I would recommend three others: DueDateEnd, Contacts and Entity. The Contacts field will be the contact assigned to the activity and the Entity will be the name of the contact's customer name.
   You should have the Leads imported already. When you set the Contacts and Entity field for the activity record, it will set the customer's information in the activity. It gets the information from the Customers table (which holds Leads) and fills in the activity on the import.

   Below is my basic import for an activity. Notice the Contacts field is the RecordID for the contact to be on the activity. The Entity is the contact's company name since the Entity field is the FullName from the Entity table.

Here you can see the Entity FullName for the contact Mary Swanson is Mary Swanson from the Customer Name field. The Contact 'Mary Swanson' has a RecordID of 171 in the Contacts table.

In the end, the process is..

1) Import the Lead company/customer. Check out this blog post here.

2) Import any contacts for the lead company imported.

3) Import your activities linking to the leads.

Greg

Re: Importing Leads with Activity Type

Method_Greg — Thu, 11 Sep 2014 19:43:26 GMT

Hello Ernestine,

Importing to the activity table is the same as importing to the leads table. You sort your activity records under the appropriate columns and then import the file. For the ActivityType column in the Activity table, you can indicate "Marketing Letter" for each activity with that Activity Type. You don't need to import record Ids. If the value matches a value in the joining table, the recordID will be filled in automatically. For example, if you import activity #35 with an ActivityType='Marketing Letter', the ActivityType_RecordID will be filled out automatically for that record and the relationship is created. The link to the Lead (ie. Customer) is through the Entity and Contacts table.

To check values, you can export the ActivityType table to make sure you have the right text value.

Greg

Importing Leads with Activity Type

Ernestine — Thu, 11 Sep 2014 18:59:37 GMT

Hello,

I have a list of about 400 that I will need to import to Method. All 400 would have received a marketing letter (part of an ongoing campaign). I'm watching the videos and I think I can figure out how to import the leads. It doesn't show how I can import an activity.

I have added "Marketing Letter" under Activity Type.

Any tips is greatly appreciated. Thanks