Moving From Spreadsheets to a CRM: Migration Checklist

Answer these questions in a short planning session:

1. What must the CRM track? List the objects: companies, contacts, deals and possibly activities. Anything beyond that can wait.
2. What are your pipeline stages? Write them with exit criteria, using words your team already uses.
3. Who owns each record? Decide how you assign owners for existing accounts.
4. What is the unique key? Use company domain for accounts and email address for contacts, so duplicates are found reliably.
5. What history do you keep? Import current deals and active contacts. Archive closed and cold records in a file rather than clutter the CRM.
6. What is the cutover date? Choose a day after which nobody updates the spreadsheet.

Write the answers down. They double as your setup instructions.

Cleaning takes the most time, so start early. Use a copy of the spreadsheet and work through these tasks:

• Remove duplicates by your unique key, and merge the useful details from each duplicate.
• Standardize values: consistent country names, job titles, industries and status labels. Free-text status columns should become a fixed list.
• Split combined fields, such as a single "name" column into first and last name, or a full address into parts.
• Fix formats: phone numbers, dates and currency. Choose one format for each.
• Fill or drop empty required fields. Records missing a company or email may not import, or may create orphaned contacts.
• Flag dead records that haven't been touched in a long time, and decide whether to import them.

For example, if the "stage" column contains "Proposal," "proposal sent," "Proposed" and "Prop," map them all to one stage before import, or your pipeline report will show four stages that mean one thing.

Build a mapping table with three columns: spreadsheet column, CRM field and notes. Create any custom fields you need in the CRM first, choosing the right field type (text, number, date, picklist) since changing it later is painful.

Then test with a small batch:

1. Import 20 to 50 records, including messy ones.
2. Check that companies and contacts link correctly, owners assigned, dates and amounts came through and picklist values matched.
3. Look for duplicates and errors the import tool reports.
4. Fix the mapping or the source file, delete the test records and repeat until the batch is clean.
5. Import in a sensible order: companies first, then contacts, then deals, so links can be created.

Both Pipedrive and Close include import tools that match columns to fields and flag problems, though the exact steps differ by product, so confirm current instructions in their help pages.

Open deals are the delicate part. The average new-business sales cycle is 91 days¹, so at any moment many deals are in progress, and losing their notes hurts. Import open deals first, with a note field holding the latest status and next step.

On cutover day:

• Freeze the spreadsheet by making it read-only, and tell the team that from now on the CRM is the source of truth.
• Verify counts: number of companies, contacts and open deals in the CRM against your cleaned file.
• Check pipeline value against the spreadsheet total.
• Spot-check ten records with the people who own them.

In the first two weeks, hold a short daily check-in for questions, watch for people quietly returning to the spreadsheet and fix field or stage problems quickly. Book a review at the end of the month to remove fields nobody uses. The CRM data hygiene checklist keeps the data healthy afterward.

The usual culprits:

• Importing everything. Old, dead records make reports unreliable and slow people down.
• Designing too many fields. Each extra field is one more thing to fill in. Start with the essentials.
• Skipping training. Even a simple CRM needs a walk-through of logging activities and moving deals.
• No owner. Someone must answer questions and fix problems, or the team drifts back to spreadsheets.
• Keeping both systems. Two sources of truth guarantee disagreement. Set the cutover date and hold to it.

A CRM built for small teams, such as Pipedrive for visual deal pipelines or Close for calling and email in one place, is a reasonable target for a first migration. To choose between them, see Close vs Pipedrive vs HubSpot, and for the operating routine that follows, the RevOps checklist for small companies.