A phased plan to inventory, clean, map, migrate, and validate CRM data without disrupting journeys, ownership, or sales follow-up during the change.
Define the outcome and system of record
Before the inventory, the organization agrees on which processes the new CRM must support: capture, assignment, pipeline, scheduling, support, campaigns, or reporting. It also defines which system will be the source for identity, consent, revenue, and activity during each phase. If two platforms can change the same data without a rule, the migration creates divergence even before cutover.
Migrating a CRM is not moving contacts between tables. It means preserving identity, consent, relationships, stage, owner, activity, and upcoming commitments while the platform changes. A safe migration defines what truth must survive, cleans before copying, tests with a cohort, and maintains reconciliation and rollback.
Inventory data, relationships, and automations
Contacts and companies are only part of the picture. There are opportunities, tasks, notes, files, owners, fields, lists, forms, integrations, templates, permissions, and workflows. Each object is classified by use, quality, sensitivity, volume, owner, and destination. Anything not migrated requires a decision: archive with access, summarize, delete according to policy, or retain in the previous system for a defined period.
Clean and map before transforming
Duplicates, free-text fields, historical statuses and ambiguous consent do not improve when copied. The team defines keys, deduplication rules, controlled values, formats, time zones and equivalences. Every transformation has an example and an owner. Records that cannot be mapped enter an exception queue; they are not forced into an incorrect category just to complete the upload.
Migrate a complete cohort and validate the journey
Testing must cover capture, updates, assignment, communication, stage changes, activity, reporting and opt-out, beyond counting rows. Totals, samples and relationships are compared; real users test searches and tasks. The team rehearses rollback and freezes changes during an explicit window. Only then does it expand volume or markets, preserving import and error logs.
Close with adoption, reconciliation, and retirement
During the transition, monitor new records, duplicates, synchronization, deliverability, workflows, and reports. Teams receive training based on their journey and know where to report incidents. The previous system is retired when data, integrations, auditing, and historical access meet the agreed criteria. Wiwo.Talk can bring conversation and CRM together, but the migration must be configured around each organization's actual environment.
Checklist, field map and acceptance
Before moving data, agree on who validates each entity, how duplicates are identified, and which conditions allow the new system to activate.
| Control | Proposed acceptance criterion |
|---|---|
| Integrity | Source and destination counts reconciled by entity |
| Identity | Every original ID retains a match; duplicates resolved |
| Relationships | Contacts, companies and opportunities stay linked |
| Consent | Source, date, and permissions retained; do not activate contacts without a valid basis |
| Operations | The team tests capture, assignment, follow-up, and recovery |
Working template. Error tolerance, test sample, and final authorization are defined before migration begins.
Download migration checklist (CSV) ↓Download field map (CSV) ↓