Importing into Opportunities

[#1]

With ACT 2010, Opportunities are now entities in their own right. So I would like to be able to do an import into the Opportunity Fields, just like I can with Contacts, Companies and Groups.

[#2]

There would be some issues I can see with this...

1. The import to Companies/Groups doesn't import links to the Contacts. As Ops can be attached to noe, 1 or more Contacts/Companies/Groups -how useful would an import be that didn't link? And to make these multiple links, how would you store that in a CSV that an average ACT! user could create and use?

2. A similar issue with Products (without which, you'd be importing $0 Opportunities.

Products like itImport that do this need to be fairly complex in their operation to accomodate all the scenarios ... and support the large ACT! user-base with functions like this would be quite significant.

[#3]

Mike - I accept your points here. However, I am just looking to import into the fields of Opportunities - and not get really clever to add contacts at the same time, or the products etc.

There are many organisations who have marketing buy in "leads" and import them into an ACT database for sales to follow up on. The data within a "lead" is often just a company name, address etc. If there is an initial contact name / number this could be brought into a Opportunity fields and later, when sales follow-up, the full Contact record would be created and attached to the Opportunity. Same process for Products associated with that "lead". 

[#4]

Oakmerge works well to do this as well.

[#5]

Thanks. I know there are add-ons to import into the other ACT tables - just would be nice to have it in the standard product.

[#6]

Without Products and Contacts, you'd have a bunch of 0$ items, which would be really messy.

Better to add them as Contacts and use Group membership rules to allocate them as you see fit... and only create the Opportunity as you qualify them