Most SMEs switch CRM because the old one became messy, slow or expensive. The temptation is to export everything, import everything and clean up "later". In practice, later rarely comes: the team starts working in the new CRM, the old mistakes come along, and within a few months the new system feels just like the old one. Pomio CRM recommends treating the migration as the one moment where cleaning up costs the least.
Why cleaning up first is cheaper
Before the move, you have one export file per object that you can sort, filter and correct in a spreadsheet. After the move, the same mistakes are spread over records, timelines, tasks and reports, and every correction has to be made by hand in the new system. Duplicates are the clearest example: merging two companies in a spreadsheet takes a minute, while merging them after import means deciding which deals, contacts and notes belong where. The article on checking every CRM import for duplicates first explains the matching rules.
Decide what moves and what stays behind
Open deals and active customers move, with their owner, amount, stage and expected close date.
Closed deals move only if you use them for reporting, commission or customer history. Otherwise, a read-only export of the old system is enough.
Old leads that never bought deserve a deliberate decision rather than a blanket import; see how long a CRM should keep leads that never became customers.
Contacts who left a customer are archived or moved before the export, not after. Write down what you decided, so the team knows where old information can still be found.
Fix ownership and structure before the import
Give every company and every open deal one current owner who still works for you. Records owned by former colleagues are the most common reason why deals go quiet after a migration; the article on reassigning open deals when an owner leaves covers how to do this. Link every contact to a company, agree on one spelling for company names and reduce free-text tags to a short list of labels. These are small fixes in a spreadsheet and large ones later.
Map old stages to new ones
The old pipeline often has more stages than the new one, or stages with different meanings. Make a simple mapping table: old stage, new stage, and what the deal must have to belong there. Use the new exit criteria as the test. Deals that do not meet the criteria of any open stage are not moved to the earliest stage by default; they are closed as lost with a reason or reviewed by their owner first.
Test with a small import first
Import one team or a few dozen records first. Check that owners, amounts, stages, dates and company links arrive correctly, that special characters in names survive, and that nothing was duplicated. Only then run the full import, preferably on a quiet day, and freeze changes in the old CRM from that moment so the two systems do not drift apart.
How Pomio CRM helps
Pomio CRM imports leads, deals and companies via CSV and exports them again, so you can run a test import, check the result and start over if needed. Deals have an owner, amount, stage, source and links to companies and contacts; records are archived and restored instead of deleted, labels are filterable, and the audit trail shows who changed what after go-live. Roles and the scope own, team or organisation decide who sees which records from day one. See the features page for an overview.
A practical checklist
Export each object from the old CRM separately; decide per object what moves and what stays in a read-only archive; merge duplicates; give every company and open deal a current owner; link contacts to companies; reduce tags to a fixed list of labels; map old stages to new ones using exit criteria; run a small test import and check it; freeze the old CRM and run the full import.