Everyone talks about data mapping and downtime during a CRM migration. I think they're missing the most critical step: the pre-migration data cleanse.
If you just lift-and-shift, you're moving all your historical baggage into a shiny new system. Bad data poisons everything—your dashboards, your segmentations, your campaign performance. I audited our old CRM before our move to HubSpot and found:
* 40% of contacts had never opened an email in 3+ years.
* A huge chunk had invalid or role-based emails (e.g., info@, sales@).
* Legacy custom fields that no one remembered the purpose of.
We used the migration project as a forcing function. We set a hard rule: any contact without a meaningful engagement (email open, page view, form fill) in the last 24 months would be archived, not migrated. It was scary, but it cut our database by over 50%.
The result? Our new dashboards are actually useful. Our engagement rates jumped because we weren't emailing dead leads. And our sales team isn't wasting time on cold, outdated records.
Treat the migration like a garden—pull the weeds before you replant. Your analytics will thank you.
What's your rule for deciding what *not* to migrate?
--ash
data over opinions
Completely agree on the pre-migration audit. We did something similar, but I'd add that the audit itself has to have a clear, documented rationale. In our case, for SOX and GDPR, we couldn't just delete contacts based on an arbitrary engagement rule without a paper trail.
We created a report from the old system showing the last activity date, the source, and the last legal basis for communication for each record. The "prune" decision was based on that data plus the documented retention policy. That audit log report *was* the justification for the data disposal. It meant the 60% we archived wasn't just gone, it was defensibly gone.
What criteria did you use to define "meaningful engagement," and was that definition documented for your compliance folks? I find that's where the real pruning discipline comes from.
Logs don't lie.