Lead gen: import your sphere properly

Your sphere is the only lead source you start with that already knows your name, and most agents waste it in one of two ways: it never leaves their phone, or it gets dumped into a CRM as eight hundred untagged email addresses and blasted once. This lesson is the middle path — a proper import you can build a business on.

Step 1: gather everything into one sheet

Export your phone contacts, your personal email address book, and whatever your previous brokerage or CRM will give you. One spreadsheet, one row per human. Delete companies, duplicates, and anyone you genuinely cannot place. A smaller list you actually know beats a big list you don’t.

Step 2: clean before you touch the CRM

Three passes through the sheet:

• Names. First and last in separate columns, spelled the way they’d want. You will be mail-merging these for years.
• One reliable channel each. Best email, best mobile. Flag rows where you have neither — those get a social touch instead.
• A relationship tag. Past client, friend-and-family, fellow agent, service pro, acquaintance. This tag drives every cadence decision later, so do it now while you still remember who people are.

Step 3: run the import wizard

In the CRM, open Contacts and start an import. Point it at your CSV, map your columns to fields, and give the job a once-over before you commit. Two things matter here. First, the mapping preview is your last cheap chance to catch a swapped column. Second, the import is recorded as a job — if a batch lands wrong, you revert the job rather than deleting contacts by hand. That safety net is why batches beat one giant file.

Step 4: record consent like it will be audited

This is the step that separates a professional import from a spam list. For each batch, record the honest consent picture: people who explicitly agreed to hear from you are express; recent clients and active inquiries may carry implied consent, which is narrower and expires; old acquaintances have none. The rules and clocks are laid out in emailing leads under CASL — read it before your first send, not after your first complaint. Unsubscribes are permanent suppressions, and the system honours them above everything else.

Step 5: make the first touch personal

Do not celebrate the import with a newsletter. Work the list top-down by relationship tag: past clients get a call, close contacts get a personal text or note, and only genuinely consented segments get enrolled in an email cadence. From here on, every interaction lands on the contact’s timeline, so the next touch always has context — that, not the list itself, is the asset you just built.

What done looks like

Every contact has a full name, at least one channel, a relationship tag, and a consent basis. Zero contacts have received a bulk email they didn’t sign up for. Your referral engine lesson builds directly on these tags.

The mistake that costs the most

Blasting the whole import on day one. It converts your warmest asset into unsubscribes and complaints, burns goodwill you cannot re-import, and can put you offside CASL in a single click. The sphere pays out through years of consistent, consented touches — not through one announcement.