CRM migration without losing data

What usually goes missing

Contacts are the easy part. These are the things people find missing a month after they switch.

• Conversation history. The emails, texts and call notes that tell you the story behind every client.
• Consent and do-not-contact records. Lose these and you could end up messaging people who opted out, which is a legal problem and an embarrassing one.
• Deal values and stage dates. Without them, your reporting on the new system starts from zero.
• Custom fields. Anything your team added over the years, usually typed in all sorts of different ways.
• Who owns what. Contact and deal owners, so the right person does the follow-up.
• Links between records. Which contact goes with which company, deal and appointment.
• Automations. Workflows hardly ever export in a way you can use, so they normally have to be rebuilt by hand.

The migration checklist

1. Count everything in the old system. Contacts, companies, deals, pipelines, custom fields, conversations, appointments, forms and workflows. Those counts are what you test against at the end.
2. Decide what not to move. Dead leads from years ago, test records and duplicates. Move rubbish across and the new system is worse on day one.
3. Map every field. Old field to new field, with a rule for every field where the format doesn't match.
4. Clean and remove duplicates. Match on email and phone, merge the duplicates, and keep a record of what got merged.
5. Bring consent across first. Opt-outs and do-not-contact settings move with the contact, before any automation in the new system can run.
6. Import in a way you can repeat. Every record keeps its original ID, so you can run the import again without making duplicates. This matters more than people think, because you will run it more than once.
7. Rebuild forms and automations. Test each one with real submissions.
8. Run both systems side by side. Compare the counts and check records by hand. Then freeze changes in the old system, run one last import, and move your links and webhooks over.
9. Switch off the old system last. Only once every check has passed.

Our own migration

We moved our own CRM out of GoHighLevel into a system we built, and that move is done. We wrote this checklist from doing it ourselves. The import brought across more than 1,600 contacts, 100 deals with their values, and the history behind them. That's over 11,000 emails, over 1,000 text messages, nearly 200 calls and several thousand other activity records.

Three things made the biggest difference.

• The import can be run again safely. Every record keeps its original ID, so running it again updates records and doesn't duplicate them.
• Do-not-contact settings came across with each contact, and every broadcast in the new system checks them first.
• The import only takes data from the right account. An agency login can see a bunch of client accounts, and pulling from the wrong one is an easy mistake to make.

We kept both systems running side by side until the new one had fully taken over, and switched the old one off last. That's the standard we hold client migrations to.

Common migrations

From	Watch out for
Spreadsheets	Mixed formats, duplicates, no history, owners saved as initials
GoHighLevel	Several sub-accounts under one agency login, and workflows you can't export whole
HubSpot, Pipedrive or Salesforce	Custom objects and links between records, and how much activity history the export includes
An old in-house system	Fields nobody wrote down and rules only one person understands

What it costs and how long it takes

Projects start at £4,500. The price comes down to how many records you have, how much history comes across, how messy the data is and how many forms and automations need rebuilding. Setting up the new CRM is often part of the same project, and that's covered on our CRM setup and migration page.

Leave time in your plan for the side-by-side period. It's the cheapest insurance you'll ever buy.

When is a CRM migration not worth it?

Don't move CRM to fix a problem the new one won't fix. If the trouble is messy data, nobody owning each contact or a team that doesn't update records, the new system just inherits all three. Clean up where you are first. It's cheaper, and it makes any move later on easier.

Hold off too if your sales process is about to change. Sort the stages out first, and then move once. Our approach starts with an audit that answers this before any data gets touched. If you want to see a CRM hooked up to the rest of a business, have a look at the MRM Group case study, where a public funnel feeds the CRM and an internal command centre.