Most CRM migrations fail in the same way: someone exports everything, imports everything, and discovers six months later that 40% of the data is junk and the automations were never rebuilt. Here is the checklist we run on every migration.
Before the migration
Decide what to bring. Not every contact, deal or activity is worth migrating. Set a cutoff (e.g. "won/lost in the last 24 months") and audit the rest.
Define the data model. What is a contact, a company, a deal in the new system? Do not assume the old model maps cleanly.
Map the fields. Build a spreadsheet: old field → new field → transformation. This is the single most important artifact in the project.
Identify the automations. List every Zap, workflow and integration. For each one: keep, rebuild, or kill.
During the migration
Run a dry-run. Migrate 5% of records into a sandbox. Spot-check every record type. Fix the mapping. Repeat.
Cut over on a low-traffic day. Friday afternoon UK time has worked well for us. Most reps can absorb a weekend of frozen reporting; nobody can absorb a Tuesday outage.
Freeze writes. During the migration window, the old CRM is read-only. Communicate this loudly.
Have a rollback plan. Even if you never use it.
After the migration
Reconcile. Counts of contacts, companies, deals, activities — old vs new. Differences are usually fine, but they should be explainable.
Run the automations. All of them. Watch them for a week.
Rebuild reporting. Old dashboards rarely port cleanly. Plan a week of dashboard work post-cutover.
Train the team. New CRM means new habits. Plan one structured training session and at least two "office hours" follow-ups.
What we leave behind
A few things we deliberately do not migrate:
- Contacts with no activity in 24+ months
- Deals stuck in "qualifying" for more than 6 months (these are dead)
- Free-text fields that nobody ever queries
- Custom fields used by fewer than 5% of records
- Tags that have not been touched in a year
Pipedrive (or any CRM) gets faster, leaner and more useful when it stops carrying historical baggage.
Migrating soon? Tell us where you are coming from and where you are going — we will sense-check the plan.