Migrating your sales pipeline to a new CRM: A 6-step plan for keeping your deal history
Every closed deal comes with a detailed history that includes pipeline stage changes, meeting notes, follow-ups, and more. It includes data you’ll want to reference across the customer life cycle. So, making sure that deal history moves over unscathed when you migrate your data from one CRM to another is vital.
This Nutshell guide outlines an effective methodology for moving a sales pipeline between CRM systems. It runs through how to plan, test, and verify the migration process, ensuring the deal-related information that’s important to you remains clean and intact.
Key takeaways
- Determine which deal history elements must be moved over to the new system, then export contact records, activities, notes, and files separately.
- Keep reports accurate by mapping stages and fields from the old CRM to the new CRM, maintaining the correct dates and owners.
- Run a test migration with a small sample first, comparing systems side by side to ensure everything matches, then set an official cutover date with exit criteria after the full import.
What does a CRM migration plan look like?
A CRM migration plan is a strategy for moving your CRM data from one CRM system to another, with checks and decision points at critical intervals to ensure all essential data is moved and retained.
One of the most crucial data types sales teams want to preserve during the move is deal history. There are six steps to successfully transfer deal history during migration, which should be completed in sequence.
Teams that take the time to clean their data before migrating it typically see the best results. In fact, Salesforce’s 2025 survey of 4,050 sales professionals found that 79% of the high performers who use AI as part of the sales process prioritize data hygiene to improve outcomes.
However, a 2024 Validity study revealed that 31% of CRM admins claim that poor data quality results in at least a 20% loss in annual revenue. The good news is that a CRM migration is the ideal opportunity to conduct a thorough data clean.
1. Decide what deal history data should stay
Deal history is the comprehensive record of how a lead moved through the sales pipeline, from first contact to close. This incorporates everything from changes in pipeline stage and ownership to meeting notes, call recordings, emails, documents, and more.
Not all of this data is useful to teams in the long term, so it’s a good idea to establish what the team actually needs and uses. For example, a sales rep may want to save deal notes as a reference for future negotiations, while a sales manager may want to keep a record of deal stage timelines for cycle-length reporting and analysis.
Deciding how far back you want to go is also an important part of this step. Open deals and recent wins are a priority, but closed deals beyond a certain date could always be included in an archived export. Once you know your cutoff date, divide your data points into three buckets: must-keep, nice-to-have, and archive.
2. Export the data and keep a safe copy
Data is typically exported from a CRM in either CSV or XLSX format, which can be opened in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. The recommended file format is CSV, because it’s plain text, which means it moves easily between systems.
Determine whether activities, notes, and files will move over with your deals when exporting. If not, it’s wise to run a separate export for each of these data points. You’ll also want to double-check export permissions, since some user roles may not have the ability to run an export.
As soon as an exported file is ready, download it and save a copy as a backup in a shared folder. Avoid making any changes to the file before you’ve saved your backup copy. Edits can be made in a working copy of the file, but make sure the original downloads remain untouched.
3. Map stages and fields to carry context over
Mapping is the process of matching CRM stages and fields in your previous system to those in the system you’re moving to. It’s best to start with stages and to have a reference point for what a stage is called in one system and its name in the other. You’ll need to make a few decisions at this point in the process, like where you’d like your closed-won and closed-lost deals to end up.
After that, match standard fields across systems and determine what should happen to your custom fields. Keeping a record of the date a deal was created, the date it closed, and its owner is essential to ensure any reports you run after migration reflect your actual sales cycle.
One key CRM migration tip is to write down all the mapping information before you start your data import. Other helpful tips include keeping consistent currency formats, displaying dates in ISO 8601 format (to avoid confusion), saving files as UTF-8 (preserving accented names), and keeping loss reasons and lead sources (for reporting).
4. Do a sample import before the complete move
Setting up a small sample of your data for import before you commit to a full data move is advisable. This way, you can check your mapping behavior and adjust accordingly before the official migration. Your sample data should include deals that are a true representation of your sales pipeline, like won, lost, and stalled deals, as well as one with lengthy notes and another that includes attachments.
Then, run your sample import and compare each deal in your new system with the original. If the mapping is working correctly, you should see matching stages, owners, notes, dates, etc. It’s also wise to compare the number and total value of your deals across the platforms to ensure they’re the same. You’ll carry out the same checks after your full import, too.
If any mapping issues surface, take the time to adjust the mapping rules rather than trying to fix individual records manually. Then, try your import again. If the information and values for all deal types populate correctly, your team is ready for the full data import.
5. Run both systems side by side
After you’ve executed the complete CRM data migration, set a limited period of time to run both systems simultaneously. To avoid inconsistencies and hiccups, make your new system the single source of truth for all new deals and configure the old CRM to “read-only,” so it’s only available as a point of reference.
While the two CRMs run side by side, conduct a weekly check to ensure everything still matches. If the numbers across the systems don’t match, it’s likely that data has been entered in the wrong place or that it simply isn’t syncing properly. Your regular checks will help you pick up inconsistencies early.
Putting a solid plan in place for your team is just as important as the data import itself. In 2023, a Prosci study revealed that 88% of the participants who had sound change management met or exceeded their goals. At a minimum, ensure there’s a CRM migration owner as your team’s point of contact, and a fixed cutover date for the old system with clear exit criteria to manage expectations.
6. Cut over and keep the old data in reserve
On your cutover date, your team will officially switch to working solely from the new CRM. Ideally, this should be planned for a day that’s typically quiet to reduce the impact of any potential downtime. Before you officially move over, carry out a final import to update anything that may have changed since you did the complete import, and run it through the usual checks.
Once you’re working from the new system only, examine your dashboards and generate your core reports to make sure the numbers appear as they should. Your old system now serves as a reference-only archive in case anyone on the team has questions regarding old deals.
What makes a new CRM easy to migrate to?
A CRM that’s easy to migrate to streamlines the mapping and checking process in steps 2 and 4 above. There are a few things you can look for in a new CRM to ensure it’s easy to migrate to. They include an import tool that facilitates field mapping, easy-to-configure sales pipelines so you can match your stages, documentation stipulating what an import brings over, and a support team that’s available to assist during the move.
Your pipeline’s history is your head start
Switching CRM systems doesn’t mean you have to start over. Your deal history is the asset that moves over with you. It’s important to ensure the migration process runs smoothly and all the necessary deal data is successfully transferred.
Following the six migration steps in this guide will translate into an effective migration with cleaner data and a team that trusts the numbers.
This story was produced by Nutshell and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
