Marketing — Import a prospect list

Importing a list adds companies to your Outreach prospect sandbox by pasting them in, rather than harvesting them with Lead Discovery. Use it when you already have your own list — a conference scan, a CRM export, a list you bought, or anything else you've assembled outside Hydra.

Imported companies become cold prospects, the same kind of record a discovery harvest produces. They live in the Outreach sandbox and stay out of your real CRM until they engage with a campaign (see Engagement tracking and CRM promotion in Marketing: Outreach).

The importer lives at Marketing → Outreach, in the Prospects section. Click Import list to open the import panel.

What the panel contains

The import panel has three controls:

• A paste textarea — drop your list in here, one prospect per line.
• A Default vendor dropdown — applied to any line that doesn't name its own vendor.
• An Import button — parses the paste, writes the new prospects, and shows you a result summary.

The paste format

Put one prospect per line. Each line needs, at minimum, one of:

• A domain — e.g. acme.com
• An email — e.g. jane@acme.com. When you give an email, Hydra derives the domain from it (acme.com).

That's the only hard requirement. A line with neither a domain nor an email can't be parsed and is reported as unparsed.

Beyond the minimum, each line can carry optional extra fields, comma- or tab-separated, in any sensible order: a company name, a contact name, and a current vendor. Hydra reads the fields by shape — an email is detected by its @, a known vendor name is matched against the competitor list, and the remaining text fields fill in company and contact name. A full line looks like:

acme.com, Acme Inc, jane@acme.com, Jane Doe, intercom

A header row is auto-skipped — if your first line looks like column labels (domain, company, email, …), the importer detects it and doesn't try to import it as a prospect.

The Default vendor dropdown

The Default vendor applies to any line that doesn't already name a vendor. A prospect's current vendor matters because it drives which Hydra comparison page a campaign links to (the {{comparison_url}} variable points at /compare/hydra-vs-<vendor>).

The options are the same competitor set used elsewhere in Outreach:

• Zendesk
• Qualified
• Intercom
• HubSpot
• Salesforce
• Drift
• Crisp
• Tidio
• Other
• None / unknown

If a line names its own vendor, that line's vendor wins; the default only fills the blanks. Pick None / unknown as the default if your list is a mix and you'd rather set vendors later than guess.

What happens on import

When you click Import, Hydra parses every line, writes the new prospects, and shows a result summary with three counts:

• Imported — new prospects added.
• Already existing — lines whose domain was already in your prospect list, so they were skipped.
• Unparsed — lines with no usable domain or email.

Deduplication

A domain that's already in your prospect list is skipped. An existing prospect row is never overwritten — so if a domain was discovered earlier and enriched (fit score, contact, personalized opener), re-importing the same domain won't blank any of that out. The dedup is per-domain, so two lines with the same domain but different contacts collapse to the first one seen.

Limit

Up to 1,000 rows per import. If your list is larger, split it and paste it in batches. Each batch dedups against everything already imported, so overlapping batches are safe.

The fit-score gotcha

This is the one behavior most likely to surprise you.

Imported prospects have no fit score. They're added directly — they don't run through the AI ICP scorer that grades discovery-harvested prospects 1–10. In the prospect list they show up under Fit score: Any rather than a number.

That has a direct consequence for campaigns: to include imported prospects as recipients, you must leave a campaign's minimum fit score set to "Any." Any non-zero floor (≥ 7, ≥ 9, etc.) filters out everything without a score, which means every imported prospect gets excluded. If you've curated the list yourself, you've already done the fit filtering by hand, so "Any" is usually the right setting anyway.

If you want imported prospects scored, run them through Lead Discovery instead — that's the path that invokes the scorer.

What's needed before an imported prospect can be a recipient

A prospect with no email can't be a campaign recipient until an email is added. A domain-only import still creates the prospect (useful for tracking the target), but it won't appear in a recipient pool until it has an address to send to.

So a domain-only list is fine for staging targets, but to actually email them you'll need to attach contacts with emails — either by re-importing those rows with emails included, or by enriching them another way.

Frequently asked questions

How is this different from running a Lead Discovery harvest? Discovery finds prospects for you (companies running a competitor's widget, scraped and scored automatically). Import is the opposite direction: you bring the list, Hydra just stores it. Both produce the same kind of cold-prospect record in the same sandbox — the difference is sourcing, and the fact that discovery prospects get a fit score while imported ones don't.

Why doesn't my imported prospect show up as a campaign recipient? Two likely reasons. First, the campaign's minimum fit score is set above "Any" — imported prospects have no score, so any floor excludes them. Set the floor to "Any." Second, the prospect has no email; only prospects with an email on file are eligible recipients.

What happens if I import a domain that's already in my list? It's skipped and counted under "Already existing." The existing row is left untouched — no overwrite — so an enriched or already-emailed prospect is never reset by a re-import.

Can I set the vendor per prospect instead of using the default? Yes. Name the vendor on the line itself (e.g. the last field of acme.com, Acme Inc, …, intercom) and that line's vendor overrides the Default vendor dropdown. The default only fills lines that don't name one.

Does importing a prospect add it to my CRM? No. Imported prospects live in the Outreach sandbox, separate from your Leads, Contacts, and Accounts. They only cross over into the real CRM if they engage with a campaign — a reply or click promotes them, exactly like a discovery prospect. See Engagement tracking and CRM promotion in Marketing: Outreach.

Is there a row limit? 1,000 rows per import. Paste larger lists in batches — overlapping batches are safe because the dedup runs against everything already imported.