Data migration is the process of moving data from one system to another, typically during a CRM switch, platform upgrade, or system consolidation. It involves extracting data from the old system, transforming it to match the new system's schema, cleaning it, and loading it into the new environment. Migrations are high-stakes: if you bring dirty data into a new system, you've just paid for a clean start and filled it with the same problems.
Why It Matters
CRM migrations are the single best opportunity to fix years of accumulated data problems. You're moving everything anyway. This is the time to deduplicate, standardize, verify emails, update job titles, and purge records that should have been deleted years ago. Teams that skip this step spend the first 6 months in their new CRM fighting the same data quality issues they had in the old one.
Migration Data Prep Steps
- Audit before you move: Profile your existing data to understand completeness, duplication rates, and decay. Know what you're working with
- Deduplicate first: Merge duplicates before migration. It's much harder to deduplicate after records are in a new system with new IDs
- Standardize fields: Map field names, picklist values, and formats between old and new systems. 'Industry' in system A needs to match 'Sector' in system B
- Verify contact data: Run email verification and phone validation. Don't migrate bounced emails or disconnected numbers
- Test with a sample: Migrate 1,000 records first. Check field mapping, data integrity, and automation triggers before doing the full load
Example
A company migrates from Salesforce to HubSpot. Their Salesforce has 85,000 contacts. Pre-migration cleaning removes 12,000 duplicates, flags 8,000 bounced emails for removal, and standardizes 15,000 inconsistent job titles. They migrate 65,000 clean records. Their HubSpot starts with higher data quality than their Salesforce ever had.
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