Most people connecting Scalegram have between a few hundred and several thousand open Telegram conversations, sorted by nothing except when somebody last typed. The import turns that into rows you can filter. It is not glamorous and it is the step that decides whether anyone uses the CRM in week two.
What arrives
Connect an account and the people you have chats with become contacts: display name, username, the internal Telegram identifier that survives a username change, and when the conversation was last active. Everyone starts in your first stage with no tags, which is honest. The software does not know who is hot.
Contacts from a bot arrive too, from the moment somebody presses start, along with whatever campaign parameter came in with them. Two doors, one list. If the same person exists behind both, they are one record, because the match is on the person and not on the connection. The trade-off between those two doors is laid out in bot or personal account.
What does not arrive
The conversations. No message bodies, no attachments, no voice notes, no searchable archive of what anyone said. The import copies the fact that a relationship exists and when it was last active, and then stops. Reading a chat means opening it in Telegram through the link on the row, in the real app, where it already lives.
This surprises people who expect a mirror, so it is worth being blunt: the reason is in never storing conversations, and it does not have a setting to turn it off. If your workflow depends on grepping five years of chat history inside a web app, this product will disappoint you.
The first hour after the import
A raw import is a list, not a pipeline. What turns it into one is a couple of hours of sorting that nobody enjoys and everybody benefits from.
Sort by last activity and work downwards. Anyone active in the last month is a live relationship and belongs in a real stage. Anyone silent for a year is not a lead, whatever you tell yourself, and tagging them as cold now saves you from counting them forever. Support requests, suppliers and your cousin are not clients: tag them out of the way rather than deleting them, because a deleted contact comes back on the next sync and a tagged one stays sorted.
Then create two or three saved views before you touch anything else. Active this week. Said yes, never paid. Waiting on verification. The method behind those views is in Telegram lead management, and a workspace with three good saved views gets used every morning while a workspace with a perfect tag taxonomy gets abandoned.
Do not try to reconstruct the funnel from memory in one sitting. Stage the people you spoke to this month, tag the obvious noise, and let the rest sit in the first stage until they message you again. Recency will do most of the sorting for free.
Duplicates, renames and the identifier that survives
Telegram usernames change, and a contact tracked by username is a contact you lose the day somebody rebrands. The record is keyed on the internal identifier instead, so a rename updates the display and keeps the history, the stage and the purchases attached to the same person.
Real duplicates still happen, usually when the same human has two accounts, a personal one and a business one, and there is no signal linking them. Merge those by hand when you notice, and accept that a small residue of duplicates is the honest state of any contact list built from a messenger.
Groups and channels
Members of your groups and channels are not automatically clients, and treating them as such produces a client list of ten thousand names and no meaning. A person becomes a contact when there is a conversation or a bot start behind them. Someone who joined a channel through a tracking link is recorded as that join, tied to the campaign, without pretending a relationship exists that does not.
Keeping it clean afterwards
Imports are not a one-off event. New chats keep appearing, and the same hygiene applies to each of them: a stage, a tag if it is not obvious, and a task if there is a date attached to it. The single highest-value habit is writing the follow-up date onto the contact the moment somebody says "next week", because next week is the day it will otherwise be forgotten.
Purchases arriving from a connected checkout or a broker integration attach themselves to the right contact without anyone typing, which quietly cleans the list as it goes. That mechanism is in purchase sync. Between recency, stages and confirmed purchases, most of a client list ends up maintaining itself. The part that does not is the part where you decide who is worth a follow-up, and that was never software's job.
"Everyone imports their contacts and then stares at four thousand rows. Sort by last activity, tag the noise out, build three saved views, and you have a business instead of a backlog."
— Roman Onta, Executive Director, SINGUARD
Key Takeaways
- The import creates contacts from your existing chats and bot starts with name, username, stable identifier and last activity, and no stage or tag guessed for you.
- Message bodies, attachments and voice notes are never copied in, so reading a chat means opening it in Telegram from the contact row.
- The same person behind a bot and a personal chat is one record, matched on the person rather than the connection.
- Sort by recency, tag the non-clients out of the way rather than deleting them, and build two or three saved views before doing anything else.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does importing move my conversations out of Telegram?
No. Nothing moves. The import records that a contact exists and when the chat was last active. The conversation stays in Telegram and you open it from the contact row.
What happens to a contact I delete if they are still in my Telegram?
They can reappear on a later sync, because the chat still exists. Tagging a contact as noise is more durable than deleting them if you want them to stay out of your working views.
Are my channel and group members imported as clients?
No. A contact is created where there is a real conversation or a bot start. Joins from a tracking link are recorded against the campaign without inventing a relationship.
About the Author
Roman Onta is an Executive Director at SINGUARD. He builds the Prop Firm CRM, the Broker CRM, Scalegram and CopySignals side by side with his brother Alex Onta, and he helped on the design of eTrader, the division Alex built and leads. His ground is worldwide payment processing, AML compliance and the corporate structures brokers are built on, work the two of them carry together, shaped by executive roles in the UAE and international corporates. He lives and works in Dubai for most of the year. Meet the executive duo leading Singuard's five divisions.