Moving the data is the part everyone dreads, and then everyone tries to get it over with in an afternoon. That's what causes the damage. A rushed import fills the new CRM with duplicates and mistakes, and within a week the team has decided the system can't be trusted.
Find out where your data actually is
It's rarely one spreadsheet. There's the sales sheet, the contacts on a few phones, Viber and Telegram, someone's inbox, the invoicing program, maybe an old CRM. List all of it, and decide which source wins for each kind of information.
Clean before you import
Duplicates first. The same client shows up as "SRL Alfa", "Alfa SRL" and plain "Alfa". Match on phone number, email and IDNO rather than on the name.
Then phone numbers. You'll have 079..., +37379... and 0 79 ... side by side. Put them all in one format with the country code, so your phone system and the messengers recognise them.
Last, the junk columns. A "Notes" column holding ten different kinds of information either gets split into proper fields or stays behind in the archive.
Keep fewer fields than you think
Move what people actually use: name, company, IDNO, phone, email, owner, source, stage. Everything else can stay in an archived copy you open when you need it. Nobody fills in a CRM with thirty mandatory fields, and a CRM nobody fills in is worse than the spreadsheet.
History
It's the most valuable part and the hardest to move. Invoices and sales usually come across from the accounting program without much trouble. Messenger conversations almost never move in full, and they don't need to. A short note per client covering what they bought, what went wrong and what they were promised does the job.
A test run, then one switch-over day
- Import part of the data into a test CRM.
- Pick ten or twenty clients at random and compare them with the source.
- Fix the import rules and run it again until the errors stop.
- Set a switch-over date. After it, the old sheet is read-only.
- Run the final import and tell everyone that from now on, work happens in the CRM.
The first two weeks
Questions and small errors will turn up in the first days. Make one person responsible for collecting them and sorting them out quickly. After two weeks, compare the CRM's reports with your accounts. If the numbers agree, the move worked.
We handle migrations, from the clean-up to training the team, as part of our CRM systems service.