Pushing to your CRM

Instead of downloading a CSV and importing it into your CRM by hand, CRM push writes your formatted records straight into it. Available on Starter, Pro, and Agency plans for HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive. Connection is via OAuth so your CRM password is never stored in Operelio.

A push is not a blind upload. Your rows are matched against the records you already have, and before anything is written you get a report telling you exactly what is about to happen.

In the app, open Settings, then Integrations, and choose Open connections. Pick your CRM there and press Connect. Operelio uses OAuth, so your CRM password is never stored. You will be redirected to your CRM's login page to authorize the connection.

Salesforce has one extra step the other CRMs don't: before anyone in your company can connect, a Salesforce admin installs the free Operelio package in your org. The install happens once and takes about a minute. The Salesforce card on the connections page has a Copy install link button to send your admin, and the Connect Salesforce to Operelio guide walks them through it. HubSpot and Pipedrive connect without any install.

Operelio requests read and write access to the objects a push can write: contacts and companies on HubSpot, contacts, leads and accounts on Salesforce, people and organizations on Pipedrive. It also reads your user list, so you can assign an owner, and writes a note on records the push creates when you map a notes column. It doesn't read deals, opportunities, or any other object.

Once connected, the CRM push option appears at the export step of the CRM Formatter.

Pick a destination and Operelio checks your file against the CRM account you connected. You get four numbers, and every row in the file is in exactly one of them: contacts to create, existing contacts to update, rows skipped, and rows your CRM will refuse. They add up to your row count, so nothing is left unexplained.

Skipped and blocked are kept apart on purpose. Skipped means Operelio chose not to send the row, and each reason is named: no email to match on, the same address already used by an earlier row, create or update switched off, or nothing left to fill when you are only filling blanks. Blocked means your CRM will not accept the row, so it is never counted as a contact you are going to get.

The report also catches what a CRM would normally only tell you after the fact: a value that isn't on a restricted picklist, text longer than the field allows, a required value missing, an address that was never going to be deliverable. Each one comes with the number of rows affected and an example value. Fields your account doesn't have, and fields your user can't write to, are listed separately, because the fix differs: one needs a new field, the other needs access.

Rows that look like an existing contact by name and company, where the email didn't match, are surfaced for you to look at. Operelio never merges on a resemblance.

Nothing reaches your CRM until you confirm.

A file of people is matched on email; a file of companies is matched on website, then company name. An address already in your CRM updates that record, a new address creates one, and you can switch either half off if you only want one of them. On HubSpot the match also covers a contact's additional email addresses, the ones left behind when two contacts were merged, so a row addressed to the old one updates the surviving contact instead of making a second.

Updating fills blank fields only by default. A value already in your CRM is left alone unless you choose to overwrite it with your file. On Pipedrive, where a person can hold several labelled email addresses and phone numbers, the ones already on the record keep their labels and stay where they are, and your file's value goes in as the primary.

Three columns can do more than fill a field. An owner column sets who owns each record, or you can assign everyone in the push to one rep; a row whose owner can't be found still goes in, without an owner, and the result says so. A notes column becomes a note attached to the record in HubSpot and Pipedrive, on records the push creates; a record it matches keeps the notes it has. A company column finds or creates the Pipedrive organization, or the Salesforce account, and links the contact to it. That last one matters on Salesforce, where a Contact has no company field of its own.

If your Do Not Contact list is switched on, suppressed people are held back before the push and written to their own file.

One push carries up to 50,000 rows. That ceiling belongs to the push, not the job: Pro and Agency plans format larger files than that, so a bigger file goes to your CRM in more than one push.

Operelio splits the work into batches and carries on across them by itself. While it runs, the screen shows how many records have landed, so a long push reads as progress rather than a button that stopped working. If your CRM rate-limits Operelio partway through, it waits and picks up where it left off.

When the push finishes you get counts for created, updated and skipped, the record ID your CRM gave each row, and any warnings raised along the way. Rows the report had already called blocked come back as blocked, so a push that went exactly as forecast doesn't look like a push that went wrong.

If some rows fail and others don't, the ones that worked stay put. Each failure is listed with its row number and the message your CRM sent back, so you can fix those rows and push them again on their own.

A file of people is matched to existing records by email address. A file of companies (HubSpot Companies, Salesforce Accounts, Pipedrive Organizations) is matched by website or domain, then by company name. When a contacts push carries a company column, Salesforce accounts and Pipedrive organizations are also found or created and linked to the contact.

Once the settings are right for the files you get every week, a trail can run them for you. A trail watches a folder and runs your cleanup steps and the mapping you saved on every file that lands there, then pushes the result into HubSpot, Salesforce or Pipedrive, with the seven safety checks and approval built in. Set it up once and the cleanup, the verification, the lead routing and the CRM import are automated from then on.

Trails run on Starter and above.