Key takeaways
- Export objects separately: people, companies, deals, activities. One giant sheet is how mapping dies.
- Map owners before you import, or every record lands on the admin.
- Do not migrate junk stages and dead duplicates. A new CRM is permission to clean.
- Qivity imports from CSV/Excel; we map fields with you rather than handing you a blank mapper.
How to migrate CRM data
- Inventory objects. List people, companies, deals, activities, products and custom objects. Export each as its own file.
- Freeze a cut-off. Pick a date. New work goes in the old system until the cut-over hour, then only in the new one.
- Map owners first. Match old user IDs to new users. Unmapped owners become the admin and poison reports.
- Clean then import. Deduplicate, drop unused stages, then import companies, people, deals, then activities.
- Pilot for a week. Three reps live in the new CRM only. Fix mapping issues before the rest of the team arrives.
A CRM migration fails in the mapping, not in the marketing site. The vendor can import CSV. Your file has three spellings of the same account and owners who left in 2019. Plan for that and the move is a week. Ignore it and it is a quarter.
What to export
People, companies, deals, activities, products. Separately. A single “everything” export looks complete and cannot be mapped. Dates in ISO. Owners as email addresses, not display names. Stages as they exist today, even the embarrassing ones — you will collapse them on the way in.
Email bodies from a seven-year plugin sync are optional. If nobody has searched them, they are an archive. Put the archive somewhere; do not make it the new timeline.
What to stop copying
Duplicate accounts. Personal stages (“waiting for Ravi”). Fields that were a workaround for a missing module. A new CRM is the moment to stop carrying those. If you need AMC dates, put them in a real contract object, not another custom field called Date2.
Cut-over
Pick an hour. Until then, the old system is source of truth. After, the new one is. Dual-running for a month feels safe and produces two half-true pipelines. A week-long pilot with three reps is safer than a heroic Friday night with everyone.
How to choose the CRM belongs before this article. Do not migrate into a product that will fail adoption. Mailbox and WhatsApp matter more than a perfect seven-year activity import.
With Qivity
Imports are Excel and CSV. We sit on the mapping call. Bring the one report you could never get out of the old system — that is the acceptance test. Book that call.