Moving CRM without losing your history

Most owners stay on software they dislike for years, and the reason is almost never the software. It is the fear of the move. Ten years of customer history, a phone number on the side of every truck, and a live schedule that cannot stop for a weekend.

That fear is reasonable and the move is smaller than it looks, provided you do it in the right order. Here is the order.

Start the two things that have a clock

Everything else can happen when you are ready. These two cannot, so start them on day one even if you are still deciding.

Email domain verification. Sending from your own domain means adding DNS records and waiting for them to propagate and be verified. That is hours to a day, and it blocks every campaign you want to send. It is also the single biggest deliverability upgrade most businesses can make, so it is worth doing regardless of whether you switch anything.

Business texting registration. If you send text messages from a business number in the United States, that number has to be registered with the carriers. This takes as long as it takes, it is outside anybody’s control, and unregistered messages are silently filtered rather than bounced. Silently is the problem: you will not know they are not arriving.

Both of these run in the background while you do everything else. Neither is reversible in a hurry, which is why they go first.

Then get your data out, before you announce anything

Export everything from the old system while your account is still fully active and unhurried. Contacts, companies, deals or opportunities, invoices, products and price lists, notes, and any custom fields you added.

Two warnings from experience.

Do not wait until you have given notice. Some platforms enforce a deletion window after cancellation, and a fortnight later that export is not there any more. Export first, cancel second, always.

Check what the export actually contains. Nearly every system exports contacts cleanly and something less than cleanly for everything else. Notes and conversation history are the usual casualties. Open the file before you trust it.

Clean it while it is in a spreadsheet

This is the one moment in the life of your business when all of your data is in a single file that you can sort. Take the afternoon.

Deduplicate on email and phone rather than name, because Bob Smith and Robert Smith are one person and two rows. Normalise phone numbers to one format, which matters more than it sounds: a text from a number stored three different ways will not attach to the customer record unless something normalises it. Drop the contacts with no email, no phone and no history, because they are not contacts.

And decide what a lead source means before you import, not after. If your old system has eleven variations of Google, collapse them now. Every report you run for the next three years reads this column.

Import in dependency order

Order matters because records reference each other.

1. Products and price list first. Nothing depends on them and everything references them.
2. Contacts and properties next. If your contact rows carry addresses, a good importer will create the property record from them, which saves an entire pass.
3. Deals and open work last, so they can attach to contacts that already exist.

Import into a preview first if the system offers one. What you are looking for is not whether it worked, it is what it did with the rows it was unsure about. An importer that silently drops a row it could not match is worse than one that refuses the file.

Do not port the phone number yet

Run both systems for a fortnight. The old one keeps the number and stays live; the new one gets all new work. This is the only reliable way to find out what you forgot, and you will always have forgotten something, usually an automation that turned out to be doing something load bearing.

Port the number only once a full ordinary week has gone through the new system without anybody needing the old one.

What you will not bring across, and why that is fine

Be realistic. You will not bring across every email thread from 2019. You will usually not bring across the internal chatter attached to old records. Very few systems export those in a shape another can read.

What actually matters is: who your customers are, where they are, what you have done for them, what equipment is at the address, what they owe you, and what is booked. That set moves cleanly. Everything else is archive, and the old export file sitting in cloud storage is a perfectly good archive.

A realistic timeline

For a business of five to twenty people, the honest shape is:

• Week one. Start the domain and messaging registrations. Export everything. Clean it.
• Week two. Import, configure your services and pricing, build the two or three automations you actually use, invite the office.
• Week three. Run both. New work goes into the new system, the old one is read-only.
• Week four. Port the number. Cancel the old subscription, after checking the export one more time.

It is a month of moderate inconvenience against however many years you have left of paying for two systems that do not talk to each other.

The part that surprises people is that the data was never the hard bit. It is deciding what a lead source means, and finding out which of your automations were load bearing.