Pipedrive's importer is forgiving, which is exactly the problem: it will happily create 400 duplicate organizations, drop phone numbers into the wrong field, and attach people to nobody. Fix the CSV first and the import takes two minutes.
1. One row per person, organization as plain text
Pipedrive links people to organizations by matching the organization name text. Keep one Organization name column, trimmed, with legal suffixes stripped (Acme, Inc. and ACME become Acme). Otherwise you get three Acme organizations.
2. Split full names before upload
Pipedrive maps First name and Last name separately. If you only have Name, split it in Sheets:
=SPLIT(TRIM(A2)," ") Keep the first piece as First name and join the rest as Last name.
3. Lowercase and dedupe emails
=LOWER(TRIM(C2)) Then a running count, =COUNTIF($D$2:D2,D2), and keep only rows where it equals 1. Pipedrive's merge-duplicates tool works after the fact, but it's one pair at a time.
4. Put phones in one consistent format
Strip everything except digits and a leading plus:
=REGEXREPLACE(E2,"[^0-9+]","") Mixed formats like (555) 010-2000 and 555.010.2000 won't match each other for dedupe or click-to-call.
5. Match dropdown values exactly
Custom single-option fields (Lead source, Industry) only accept values that already exist in Pipedrive, spelled the same way. Build the options first, then find-and-replace the CSV to match. A mismatch silently leaves the field blank.
6. Save as UTF-8 CSV
Excel's default CSV can mangle accents (José becomes José). Use "CSV UTF-8" in Excel, or export from Google Sheets, which is UTF-8 by default.
Do a 10-row test import
Upload ten rows, check that people link to the right organizations and custom fields filled, then use Pipedrive's import history to revert if anything looks off. Then run the full file.
Want every pre-import check on one page? The HubSpot/Salesforce Import Checklist ($9) has the same pre-import checks, and most apply to any CRM importer. If the mess is already inside your CRM, the CRM Hygiene Scorecard ($29) grades your export and tells you what to fix first. More at pureservices.store.
