The honest inventory, from people who have actually run one
Contacts move easily. Deals need mapping. Email history does not transfer at all. Here is the honest inventory before you commit.
Every migration pitch you read is written by somebody selling the destination platform. So the answer is always that it's simple, everything comes across, and you'll be running by Friday.
Here is the version from people who have actually done it, including the parts that cost money and the one thing that genuinely does not transfer.
Contacts, companies, and custom fields.
This is the bulk of your record count and it is the easy part. Export from one, import to the other, and the records land where you expect. Custom fields need mapping, but it's mechanical work rather than judgment.
If your migration quote is mostly about contact volume, you're being quoted for the easy part. Eighteen thousand contacts is barely harder than eight hundred. The number of records is close to irrelevant to the difficulty.
What is relevant is everything below.
Deals and opportunities. Their values, their owners, and their stage history.
This is where migrations quietly lose data, and it happens because every platform stores ownership differently. If nobody maps it deliberately, you arrive in the new system with a pipeline full of deals that belong to nobody. The records are all there. The accountability is gone.
Deal values are their own problem. Depending on the tools involved, the value field often does not come across with the opportunity and has to be applied in a second pass. That's a known step, not a surprise, but only if somebody planned for it.
Pipelines get rebuilt by hand every time. An imported deal has to land somewhere, and that somewhere has to exist before the import runs. So the pipeline structure is a decision you make first, not something that carries over.
The CRM Growth Sprint rebuilds or migrates your CRM in 30 days. We design the revenue system first, then build the platform to run it. Starts at $7,500.
Explore the CRM SprintEmail history.
This is the one nobody tells you before you sign. Email history does not import into a new CRM as threaded conversation history. It can be exported, and it should be, but what you get is a searchable archive rather than something living on contact records in the new system.
To give you a sense of scale, one export we ran recently produced just over forty thousand rows of email records. Pulling it took most of a day. The result sits in the client's own storage where their team can search it when they need to. It does not appear when you open a contact in the new platform.
Plan for the archive, not the transfer. And be suspicious of anyone who implies otherwise, because it means they have not done one.
Automations, workflows, and platform-specific reporting.
None of it transfers. All of it gets rebuilt in the new system. That sounds like a cost, and it is, but it is usually the point rather than a defect.
Those automations were built for the process you are replacing. Carrying them across would just reinstall the old problem somewhere more expensive to fix. The migration is the one moment where you get to ask whether each automation should exist at all, and the honest answer for a good number of them is no.
Same with reporting. Most CRM dashboards get built during setup and then never opened again, because they answer questions nobody was asking. Rebuild the three or four that would actually change a decision and leave the rest behind.
Dirty data that gets migrated is just dirty data somewhere new, and it is far cheaper to fix in a spreadsheet than inside a live system.
The usual suspects: phone numbers in six different formats, dates that will not parse, email addresses with obvious typos, names in all caps, and duplicate records that have been quietly multiplying for years.
Clean all of it before the import. Then test with ten records rather than eighteen thousand. Check that ownership landed correctly, values are attached, and the deal is sitting in the right stage. Fix what is wrong, then run the full load.
Skipping the sample test is the single most expensive shortcut in a migration. Finding a mapping error after eighteen thousand records have landed means undoing eighteen thousand records.
Thirty days is realistic for most companies, provided the scope is fixed before the work starts.
What drives the timeline is not data volume. It is decisions. What should your pipeline stages be? Who owns each one? Which of the last five years of records is worth keeping? Those are conversations, and they take as long as they take.
The things that reliably add time: deals with values and ownership history, the number of pipelines to rebuild, whether email history needs archiving, how many automations need rebuilding, and how many separate systems hold your customer data.
That last one catches people out most. Plenty of companies run a CRM alongside Constant Contact, Mailchimp, or Kit, and each one is another system to move. It is routinely the piece nobody prices for.
Sometimes no, and it's worth asking before you spend the weeks.
Three questions settle it. Is the platform genuinely missing something you need, or are you just not using what you already have? Is the bill badly out of proportion to the value? And does your team avoid the system because of the tool, or because nobody ever defined the process it runs?
If the answer to the third one is the process, migrating will not help. You will rebuild the same problem in a new interface and lose a month doing it.
Good reasons to move: you're paying enterprise prices for a fraction of the features, the platform cannot do something your process actually requires, or you're consolidating several systems into one.
Bad reasons to move: the current system feels messy, somebody recommended a cheaper tool, or you're hoping a new platform will create discipline that does not exist yet. It will not. Define the process first. Then decide whether your current platform can run it. Often it can.
Step one. Count what you actually have. Contacts, companies, open deals, closed deals, active pipelines, live automations, and every separate system holding customer data. That inventory is what a real quote is built from.
Step two. Decide what is worth moving. Five years of dead contacts is not an asset. Pick a cutoff date and stick to it.
Step three. Export a sample of a hundred records and look at it in a spreadsheet. You will find formatting problems, duplicates, and typos you did not know about. Better now than after they are live.
Step four. Write down your pipeline stages and who owns each one before you build anything in the new platform. Imported deals need somewhere to land.
Step five. Migrate ten records first. Check ownership, values, and stage. Only run the full load once the sample is right.
Most of it moves. Contacts, companies and custom fields transfer reliably. Deals and owners need mapping. Email history does not transfer.
No. Email history exports to a searchable archive, but it does not import into a new CRM as threaded history.
Automations, workflows and platform reporting all get rebuilt. Deal ownership is where migrations quietly lose data.
Thirty days is realistic if scope is fixed first. Deciding your stages and owners takes longer than moving the data.
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