What is CRM data migration
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So, you’ve finally chosen a customer relationship management (CRM) tool for your company or are in a free trial and wondering how to make the most of the platform. Now it’s time to start using it to drive results for your business—but first, you have to figure out how to set up your CRM and migrate all your data to it.
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Setting up the system and performing a successful CRM data migration is an important process to perform before you open up the CRM to your whole team and integrate it into your day-to-day processes. Migrating some data is even helpful for seeing how the CRM works before you purchase a plan.
But what goes into CRM setup? How do you get started with a CRM? And how does the CRM data migration work?
That’s just the question we’re here to answer. Keep reading to find out more.
CRM data migration is the process of importing customer and lead data into a CRM from another source. Migrating data like contact information, customer communications, leads, and past sales into your CRM is crucial for ensuring your CRM functions as it should, helping your team track potential sales and nourish customer relationships.
The biggest risk in any CRM migration isn’t losing data, it’s losing access to it while your team is trying to work. A little planning up front avoids most of that risk entirely.
Migrating everything at once (sometimes called a “Big Bang” migration) is the fastest option, but it takes your systems offline while it happens. A phased migration moves your data in stages instead, so your team can keep working in the old system while the new one comes online. It takes longer to complete, but nobody’s stuck waiting on it.
Pick a time when your team isn’t relying heavily on the CRM, a weekend, the end of a slow month, rather than the middle of a busy sales push. If something needs troubleshooting, you’ll have room to fix it before it affects real deals.
Before you migrate, decide what you’ll do if something goes wrong, not after. That means keeping your old system accessible and your backed-up data ready to restore, so a bad migration is a delay, not a disaster.
Once your data is in the new CRM, don’t just assume it’s correct. Run your old and new systems side by side for a short period, compare record counts, and check that nothing’s missing or duplicated before you fully retire the old one.
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Once you’ve decided on your migration strategy, here’s the full process from start to finish.
Before you get started, you first need to know how you plan to use your CRM. Ask yourself:
These answers guide every step below.
Discuss with your team what kinds of data you need to import. You may need to bring over:
Also, decide which sources you’re migrating from (spreadsheets, another CRM, or both), and choose your migration strategy. See “How to avoid downtime” above for phased vs. full-cutover.
Clean your data before you import it, not after: if you put faulty data into your CRM, you’ll get poor results, garbage in, garbage out. Assign someone to go through your data and remove:
Use the goals you set in step 1 to decide what’s actually worth migrating. If it’s not related to a customer or a deal, it probably doesn’t belong in your CRM.
Once your source data is clean, back it up to a secure location. Data backups ensure that you still have access to your company’s mission-critical customer information if something goes wrong during the migration process, so you don’t lose time or your customers’ trust over a preventable mistake.
Set up your CRM to match how your team actually works. Things worth customizing include:
Then connect the tools your team already relies on. A few integrations matter more than others:
Simplify your CRM data migration with our professional white glove data import services. We’ll import your data into Nutshell during onboarding—totally free.
Before rolling the CRM out to your whole team, test it with a small batch of real data. Specifically, check:
If everything checks out, you’re ready for the full migration.
With testing and cleanup done, move the rest of your data over. See “Tools that automate CRM migration” below for ways to do this without manual data entry.
Schedule hands-on training with your CRM users to help them become familiar with the system, and provide training materials like your CRM’s support articles that they can refer back to later. Don’t just hand people a login and expect them to figure it out.
Implementing user access controls helps your company protect its customer data. It’s also worth creating a data validation schedule for your team to follow moving forward, so clean data stays a habit, not a one-time project.
Most of the steps above can be automated instead of being done by hand, and the tool you pick here does more to prevent downtime and errors than almost anything else in this guide.
At minimum, look for a CRM that offers automatic data import from your old system, so you’re not manually re-entering thousands of contact records one at a time. Nutshell, for example, transfers your other CRM’s data automatically in just a few clicks, with no setup required.
If your data is messy, spread across multiple sources, or you just don’t have the internal bandwidth to manage the process yourself, look for white-glove migration support instead of hiring a consultancy for it. Most of the agencies that show up when you search “CRM data migration” charge for exactly this kind of hands-on help. Nutshell includes it for free during onboarding: our team handles the cleanup, mapping, and import for you, so the migration doesn’t land entirely on one already-busy person’s plate.
Getting your data into the CRM is only half the job. The other half is getting your team to actually use it, and that takes different preparation than the technical migration itself.
For a full framework on getting buy-in, training your team, and making the switch stick, see 7 Tips for a Smooth CRM Transition.
Setting up a CRM and conducting a seamless CRM data migration shouldn’t be difficult. Really, though, it depends on which CRM you have. Some make it way harder than it needs to be, while others just don’t give you much flexibility. If you want a CRM that avoids both of those issues, Nutshell is the right choice.
Data migration becomes much easier when your CRM provides support for your team. At Nutshell, we created our CRM to give you the sales and marketing features you need to close more deals, and its ease of use is the icing on the cake.
Nutshell also has the support you need to quickly get up and running so you can start realizing value sooner. Our team provides free white-glove imports for companies during the onboarding process and makes sure your data is in top shape. And if you’re interested in other implementation services, we work with you to understand exactly how your company uses your data so we can help future-proof your processes.
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Want to know more about the data migration process and how to use it to integrate your CRM with other business tools? These FAQs may provide the answers you need:
Many CRMs provide tools for importing data into the platform. Depending on the CRM your company uses, it could be relatively easy for your team to handle importing data from a spreadsheet on its own. Your CRM’s customer success team may also offer services for assisting in the migration.
You can use your CRM’s data import automation to help your migration go smoothly. Automation is a great tool for migrating company data, as it simplifies the moving parts of the migration process and can prevent errors.
CRM data migration can be free or cost a few thousand dollars as part of your CRM implementation. The cost depends on which CRM you’re using, the amount of data you need to migrate, and whether your team can accomplish it on their own or needs help.
The four types of data migration are:
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