Clean CRM Data Before You Migrate

Start with identity. Export or filter likely duplicates (same email domain + similar name, same phone, same company name variants). Pick a winning record rule — for example, newest activity wins for contacts; longest-lived company record wins for accounts — and merge with a named approver. Do not fuzzy-merge blindly across the whole database in one click.

Example: Harborline Studio, a 14-person digital agency, finds three “Acme Holdings” company rows and six contact variants for the same buyer. Ops lead Devon writes: company merge prefers the record with open opportunities; contact merge prefers the email the AE actually uses. They process the open-book duplicates first, not ten years of cold trade-show badges.

Open work without an owner or next step will poison the new CRM’s first Friday review. Filter open opportunities (and any open “next review” objects you use) for blank owner or blank next-step date. Assign owners using a written rule (territory, book, last activity). Require a real next action date — not “TBD.”

Example: Harborline’s pipeline board shows 28 open deals; 11 lack next steps and 4 have blank owners after a departure. Sales lead Maya runs a 60-minute hygiene huddle: assign orphans, set next-step dates, and close or archive deals that are fiction. Only then does migration mapping start.

Define inactive in writing (for example: no activity and no open opportunity within an agreed window). Mark those records do-not-migrate or archive them in the source before export. Keep an export archive if legal/ops need history — but do not load cold rows into the live destination as if they were active customers.

Example: Harborline marks contacts with no activity in their agreed inactive window and no open deal as archive-only. They export that set to a dated file for reference and exclude it from the Migration Planner cutover import. Live retainers and open pipeline stay in the migrate set.

List the day-one required fields you will actually keep accurate — typically owner, stage, next step, and maybe industry or segment if reviews use them. Fill those on the open migrate set. Do not invent a long required list; every required field needs a Responsible updater after go-live.

Example: Harborline requires Owner, Stage, Next step, and Account type on open opportunities. They drop “Lead score” and “Personality notes” from required. Admin Devon rejects any new required-field request that lacks an updater name — same discipline as the Implementation Roles RACI.

When the checklist passes, freeze further messy imports into the source, hand the clean open set to field mapping, and schedule the pilot import. Cleaning is not a one-time festival — keep a short recurring hygiene huddle through cutover week so new duplicates do not reappear.

Example: Harborline’s cleaning checklist goes green on Wednesday; Thursday they finalize the field map; Friday they pilot 20 accounts. Devon keeps a 15-minute daily hygiene standup through cutover so AEs do not recreate sheet duplicates while the freeze approaches.