Switching CRMs is frightening for one concrete and legitimate reason: the fear of losing years of contacts, notes and context. The good news is that a migration is a procedure, not a gamble. This guide works for moving to any system, not only ours.
1. Export before you decide anything
The most used systems in the industry (Follow Up Boss, kvCORE, Lofty, GoHighLevel) export CSV natively, so the first step is to pull the file and look at it, even if you have not chosen where you are moving yet. That file tells you two uncomfortable and useful things: how many contacts you actually have, and what state they are in.
Export everything the system allows in a single pass: contacts, notes, tags and, if possible, activity. Then keep that original CSV untouched. Everything that follows happens on a copy.
2. Clean the CSV: half an hour that saves a month
- Keep the columns you will use: first name, last name, phone, email, source, stage, assigned agent, created date and notes. The rest only gets in the way during mapping.
- Normalize phone numbers to one format. It is the column that generates the most false duplicates.
- Sort by email and by phone and hunt for duplicates. The rule that works: the record with the most recent activity wins, not the oldest one.
- Decide what to do with the dead. A contact with no activity in three years and no valid email does not deserve the move: set it aside in another file, do not delete it.
- Review the stage column. If the old system had nine stages and the new one has five, decide the mapping now and in writing, not lead by lead during the import.
3. Import in two passes
Never the whole database at once. First fifty test records, deliberately including the odd ones: the contact with two phone numbers, the one with no email, the one with accents in their name. You check how they landed, accents and dates above all, and only then upload the rest. If something mapped wrong, fixing fifty rows is a minute and fixing five thousand is an afternoon.
4. Verify with numbers, not with a feeling
- Count: how many rows the CSV had and how many contacts exist now. If it does not match, reconcile the difference before moving on.
- Stages: how many sit in each one, compared against the old system.
- Manual sample: open ten files at random and check the notes are complete and readable.
- Assignment: that every lead has the right agent. A lead with no owner is a lost lead, however immaculately imported.
5. The following seven days
This is where a migration is won or lost, and it has nothing to do with data: it has to do with people. There is one rule and it is a hard one: the old system gets closed. If the team can go back, it goes back, and in two weeks you have two half-populated databases and no reliable one.
In that first week, review daily what actually got logged: if an agent is not recording calls, it is not reluctance, it is that they do not yet know where. That is a fifteen-minute problem if you spot it on Tuesday and a three-month problem if you discover it in October.
If you would rather not do it yourself, in our case the CRM’s CSV import is free and self-service, with assisted or white-glove migration if you want us to handle it: the options and prices are on the pricing page. The step-by-step inside the platform is in the agency CRM course.