The reason teams stay on a CRM they dislike is rarely the CRM. It is the suspicion that migrating will lose something — a note from 2023, an invoice trail, the one custom field the whole process depends on. That fear is reasonable and entirely manageable.
Export first, decide later
Before you evaluate anything, export four files and put them somewhere safe:
- Contacts and companies, with every field, including the ones you think are empty.
- Deals or opportunities, with stage, value, owner, and close date.
- Activity history — notes, calls, emails logged against records.
- Invoices and payments, if your CRM holds them.
You now own your history regardless of what happens next. Most migration anxiety evaporates at this point.
Bring less than you think
The instinct is to migrate everything. Resist it. A migration is the only free opportunity you will ever get to leave rot behind.
Bring: active customers, open deals, anything with a live invoice, and contacts touched in the last 24 months.
Archive, do not migrate: deals lost more than a year ago, contacts with no activity ever, and duplicate records you have been meaning to merge. Keep the export file. You will not open it.
The test: if a record moved across and never got looked at, it did not need to move across.
Map fields against how you work now
Do not recreate your old field structure. List the fields you acted on in the last quarter — the ones that changed a decision. That list is shorter than your schema, and it is your new schema.
Anything genuinely specific to your business (a matter number, a treatment plan, a retainer end date) should become a proper custom field or object rather than a note someone has to read.
Run both for one week
Import into the new system, then keep the old one open but read-only for a week. New work happens in the new system; the old one is a reference you consult and gradually stop opening. A hard cutover with no reference is what makes teams panic and revert.
By the end of the week you will know exactly which three things did not come across, and you will have the export files to fix them.
What good looks like on the other side
The migration is not finished when the data lands. It is finished when the data stops degrading — when new records arrive validated, duplicates merge without anyone noticing, and nobody schedules another cleanup. Otherwise you have simply moved the same problem into nicer software.