Step 1: take stock of what you have

List every source of commercial data and look at it with fresh eyes:

  • Where is it? Spreadsheets, the old CRM, the ERP's customer list, personal address books, email signatures.
  • What does it contain? Organisations, people, open deals, closed deals, notes, activities, files, products.
  • How good is it? Duplicates, missing emails, inconsistent company names, deals open for years with no activity.
  • Who uses it, and for what? Some columns are vital for one person and invisible to everyone else.

This inventory usually shows that a good part of the data is not worth migrating as it is.

Step 2: decide what to bring along

Not everything deserves a place in the new CRM. Typical decisions:

  • Organisations and people: yes, after de-duplication and with a consistent naming rule.
  • Open deals: yes, mapped to the new pipeline and stages, each with an owner and a next activity.
  • Closed deals: often only for a limited period, or summarised, so that reporting starts from a meaningful history without dragging along every old record.
  • Notes and emails: selectively; important context yes, years of forwarded messages no.
  • Contacts with no legal basis for processing: not at all. Data protection rules apply to the old data too, as described in our notes on nLPD and GDPR.

Step 3: design the target first

Configure Pipedrive before importing anything: pipelines and stages, custom fields, drop-down values, users and visibility. The setup principles are in our article on setting up Pipedrive for B2B sales. Importing into an unfinished configuration means cleaning the data twice.

Step 4: clean and map

With the target in place, prepare the data:

  • De-duplicate organisations and people, choosing which record survives and merging the useful information.
  • Standardise country names, phone formats, industries and sources, so that they match the drop-down values in Pipedrive.
  • Map every column of the old data to a Pipedrive field, or decide explicitly to drop it. Keep the mapping in a document; it will answer many questions later.
  • Map old stages to new stages, especially when the old process had more or different steps.
  • Keep a reference to the old system, such as the old record ID in a custom field, so that every imported record can be traced back.

Step 5: test, then import

Pipedrive's built-in import handles spreadsheets with organisations, people, deals and activities, linking them together when the mapping is right. For migrations from another CRM, or when history, files and relations are complex, an import through the API gives more control.

Either way, run a test import on a sample first, or on a separate test account, and have two or three salespeople check their own deals. They will spot in minutes what a data specialist would miss: the wrong owner, a stage that does not make sense, a customer split in two.

Step 6: cutover

Choose a cutover date and communicate it. From that day:

  • the old system or spreadsheet becomes read-only;
  • the final import brings over the changes since the test;
  • integrations, such as email sync and website forms, are switched to Pipedrive, as described in our guide to integrating Pipedrive;
  • every salesperson checks their open deals in the first days and fixes what is wrong.

Keep an export of the old data, stored securely, for a defined period, then delete it according to your retention rules.

After go-live: the first weeks decide everything

The weeks after the switch are when habits form. Hold the weekly pipeline review in Pipedrive from the very first week, answer questions quickly, and collect small configuration changes in a list to apply together rather than changing the setup every day. After a month, review data quality: deals without a next activity, contacts without an organisation, empty required fields. These numbers tell you whether the migration has really landed.

Where to start

Make the inventory of your current data and decide what deserves to be migrated, before choosing how. As a Pipedrive Authorized Partner, our CRM and office automation service plans and carries out the migration together with the configuration, so that the team starts on clean data from day one.