Migrating to Clientify takes five steps, and the order matters: first create in Clientify the custom fields you were using in your current CRM, then export your data as CSV, XLS or XLSX, then import the companies, then the contacts, and only at the end import the deals, linking them by the contact’s email address. After that comes the step almost nobody takes and that decides whether the migration went well: reconciling the counts before you cancel the old account.
It is Friday afternoon. Someone exports six thousand contacts from the CRM they have always used, uploads the files to Clientify, shuts the laptop and goes home relaxed. On Monday they open the pipeline and the deals are there, with their amount and their stage, but floating: not one of them has a contact attached. No warning appeared. They were simply imported before the people they were supposed to hook onto, and now there are six hundred records to reassign by hand.
That migration did not break during the export. It broke during the import, and it is the kind of break you do not see until you have already cancelled the previous tool. This guide is about the opposite, and it holds wherever you are coming from: HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho, monday or a spreadsheet. If your source is a spreadsheet rather than a CRM, the traps are different ones, and we go through them in the guide on moving a sales team off Excel.
What comes over to Clientify and what has to be rebuilt
Clientify’s file import covers three objects: companies, contacts and deals. Their tags travel with them, so do their owner and their custom fields, and in the case of deals the pipeline, the stage, the amount and the status come too. That is rather more than people expect, and it is usually ninety per cent of the value in a sales database.
What does not travel is just as important to know in advance, because it is what you have to decide about before, not after, you cancel the old CRM.
| What | Status | What you need to know |
|---|---|---|
| Companies | Comes over | Imported from the Contacts module, in the Import section. The only mandatory field is the company name. |
| Contacts | Comes over | You map the columns in your file to Clientify fields. During the process you can fix values by hand or drop the rows that carry an error. |
| Deals | Comes over | Mandatory fields: name, amount, pipeline and stage. The importer lives in both the Contacts module and the Sales module. |
| Tags | Comes over | Two ways: several tags in one column separated by commas, or one column per tag. It works the same for contacts and for deals. |
| Owner | Comes over | Use the email address of the user you want the record assigned to. If you use the name instead, it has to match exactly: Clientify is case sensitive and accent sensitive. |
| Custom fields | Partly | You have to create them in Clientify before you import. A column with no destination field is skipped. For dropdown fields, the value in your file has to match the one in Clientify character for character. |
| Contact-to-deal link | Partly | It travels in a column of the deals file, but the contact has to exist in Clientify already. Hence the order: contacts first, deals afterwards. |
| Calls, emails and notes | Not via file import | The file import covers contacts, companies and deals. Activity history is not on that list: decide what you are doing with it before you cancel the old CRM. |
| Automations and templates | Rebuilt | There is no interchange format for automations between CRMs. You rebuild them in the destination, and that is usually the best moment to simplify them. |
| Reports and dashboards | Rebuilt | Same case. Before you cancel, screenshot the three or four your team actually uses: rebuilding them from memory weeks later costs far more. |
The two rows worth reading twice are custom fields and the contact-to-deal link. Both work, but both need something done beforehand: creating the fields in the destination, and importing in the right order. Everything else in this guide follows from those two.
How you export from your current CRM
Clientify publishes step-by-step articles for the two migrations it sees most often, and both were reviewed this year.
Pipedrive. From the Contacts section, in People, you open the three-dot menu and choose the option to export the filter results. You can take the whole database or only the contacts matching a filter, which is handy if you want to migrate one team’s book first and leave the rest for later. Both file formats it offers work with Clientify.
Zoho CRM. From the Contacts module you select the records and use the export contacts option in the top-right menu. Both file types it produces are compatible. Clientify’s article adds one limit worth planning around: if you have more than 200,000 contacts, you have to export in several batches that each stay under that ceiling.
HubSpot. HubSpot documents its export in its own knowledge base, updated on 2 April 2026, and there are three details there that decide whether your file arrives complete. The first is that by default only the properties and associations that are in the current view are included in the file, so if you export from a stripped-down view you get a stripped-down file. The second is the column limit by format: 256 columns for XLS and 16,384 for XLSX, and any column beyond that is simply not included, which is why HubSpot itself recommends CSV for exports with many columns. The third is that the download link expires after 30 days, so an export you leave for later may need to be run again.
Two more HubSpot specifics that only show up on large databases: exports split into several files above 1,000,000 rows for CSV and XLSX, or above 65,535 rows for XLS, and a CSV over 2MB comes down zipped.
Any other CRM. The pattern barely changes. Look for the export option in each module, take one file per object, and check before you upload that the file opens with the columns you expected. If your current tool only lets you export a report rather than the raw records, export the report and rebuild the columns by hand: it is slower, but it is better than migrating half a database.
If you are still deciding whether to move at all, the comparison of the best HubSpot alternatives covers the part this guide does not, which is the decision itself rather than the mechanics.
What order to import in
This is the part that broke the Friday migration, and it is worth being blunt about: the order is not a recommendation, it is a dependency chain. Each step needs the previous one to exist.
- Custom fields. These are not imported, they are created by hand in Clientify’s settings. A column with no destination field is skipped without a warning.
- Companies. The company name is the reference that contacts and deals will hook onto later, so it has to be in Clientify first.
- Contacts. Mapped against the fields you just prepared, with the duplicate detection criteria chosen in the last step.
- Deals. Last, with the contact column filled in. If the contact is not in Clientify yet, the deal still goes in, only orphaned.
The reason for the last one is stated plainly in Clientify’s documentation on linking deals to contacts in bulk: for deals to be associated with contacts, those contacts have to be created already. A deal imported before its contact goes in without complaint; it just goes in orphaned, and nothing tells you.
How to prepare the file so Clientify does not drop rows
Most of the rows lost in a migration are not lost because of the CRM. They are lost because of formatting, and there are nine rules that account for almost all of it.
| Field | How it has to look |
|---|---|
| File format | CSV, XLS or XLSX, with the column headers in the first row. |
| Cell type | Text, always. It does not matter whether the value is a date, a phone number or a tax ID: select the column in Excel and switch it to Text. |
| Dates | The same format you have set under Settings, My Account, Regional data. You pick either DD/MM/YYYY or MM/DD/YYYY, and you never mix the two in one file. |
| Phone numbers | With the country dialling code in front, preceded by a plus sign, as in +34600000000. Without the prefix the number is not imported. |
| Tags | Comma separated inside a single column, or one column per tag. |
| Associated company | The exact name the company is stored under in Clientify. |
| Contact linked to a deal | Preferably the contact’s email address. The name works too, but it has to be identical to the one on record. |
| Amounts | No thousands separator and no currency symbol. Dots and commas are for decimals only. The currency goes in its own field, as a code such as USD or EUR. |
| Deal status | Only the four that exist in Clientify: open, won, expired or lost. |
Two of them deserve a line of their own because they are the most expensive to discover late. Phone numbers need the country dialling code preceded by a plus sign, and Clientify’s documentation is explicit that a number that does not follow that format cannot be imported: on an international database this can silently remove the phone number from thousands of contacts. And dropdown custom fields need the value in your file to match the one in Clientify exactly, character for character, because Clientify is case sensitive and accent sensitive.
A good moment to deal with a related problem: if your source database has accumulated duplicates over the years, cleaning them before you export is far cheaper than cleaning them afterwards. The guide on removing duplicates and unifying contacts covers the criteria to use, and Clientify’s Pipedrive article recommends exactly that as pre-migration work.
The step everyone skips: the test import
Clientify’s documentation recommends it in both migration articles, the Pipedrive one and the Zoho one, and it has the best ratio of effort to disasters avoided: before you upload the whole database, import fifty or a hundred contacts and open them.
What you are checking in those hundred records is specific: that the column mapping is the one you thought it was, that accented characters render properly, that phone numbers kept their prefix, that dates have not flipped around, and that custom fields landed where they were supposed to. If something is off, you have lost ten minutes. If you find out with six thousand records inside, you have lost the afternoon and part of your team’s confidence.
What happens to your history of calls, emails and notes
The honest answer: the file import covers contacts, companies and deals, and activity history is not on that list. That is the point at which every migration has to make a decision, and there are three reasonable ones.
Keep the old CRM read-only for a few months, if the plan allows it, and consult it when someone needs to know what was said in 2024. Export the history to a file and store it outside the CRM, which is enough for legal or audit purposes but not for daily work. Or carry across only what is genuinely useful: the last note on live accounts, brought over as a custom field or entered by hand.
The third is the one most teams end up choosing, and there is a reason. The history everybody swears is essential is consulted, in practice, on a handful of accounts. Bringing across the last note on your two hundred active customers covers what actually gets used and costs an afternoon.
If part of your customer conversation lives on WhatsApp rather than in the CRM, that is a separate question with its own answer, and it is covered in the comparison of the best CRMs with WhatsApp.
How to check that nothing is missing
This is the step that separates a migration that went well from one that seemed to. It takes about an hour and it is the only way to find out while you can still fix it.
- Count before you start. Write down how many companies, contacts, open deals and closed deals you have in the source CRM. Four numbers on a piece of paper. Without that snapshot there is no way to tell afterwards whether anything is missing.
- Count after you import. The same four numbers in Clientify. When they do not match, the gap is always in the rows the importer dropped as duplicates or for an empty mandatory field.
- Cross-check 1: contacts with no company. How many contacts end up with no company in Clientify. Compare that with how many were already loose in the source. If the number grew, the import order went wrong.
- Cross-check 2: pipeline value. Add up the amount of open deals by stage in both systems and compare. This is the check that exposes lost or duplicated deals first, because a difference of one euro is impossible to miss.
- Cross-check 3: phone numbers. Count how many contacts have a phone number in the source and how many have one in Clientify. If the second number is lower, it is almost always the missing country prefix.
- Sample twenty records. Pick twenty contacts by hand, mixing big accounts, old leads and something created last week, and open each one in both systems. Twenty records reviewed properly catch more than any automated report.
The order of those six is deliberate. The counts tell you whether something is missing; the cross-checks tell you where; the twenty records by hand tell you whether what arrived is actually usable. Skipping the last one is the most common mistake, because a database can pass every count and still have every date shifted by a month.
How long it takes and when to do it
For a database of a few thousand records with clean data, the work is a morning: an hour preparing files, half an hour importing, an hour reconciling. What stretches the timeline is never the import. It is the custom fields nobody had documented, the columns that turn out to hold two different things, and the decision about what to do with the history.
On timing, two practical points. Do it at the start of a week, not on a Friday, so that if something needs fixing you have working days ahead of you rather than a weekend of doubt. And do it in a quiet period for the sales team if you have one, because for a few days people will be looking for things where they used to be.
The five mistakes that force a migration to be redone
- Importing deals before contacts. The deals go in orphaned and there is no warning. Fixing it means reassigning by hand or deleting and reimporting.
- Not creating the custom fields first. Columns with no destination field are skipped, and you find out when someone asks where the industry data went.
- Phone numbers without the country prefix. They are not imported. On an international database this can wipe out the phone number of a large part of the file.
- Mixing date formats in the same file. Clientify reads dates in the format set under Regional data. A file mixing DD/MM/YYYY and MM/DD/YYYY produces dates that are wrong without looking wrong.
- Cancelling the old CRM before reconciling. Once the account is closed, whatever did not come over is not coming over. Reconcile first, cancel afterwards.
None of the five is exotic. All five are avoidable with an hour of preparation, and every one of them is the reason somebody has had to redo a migration on a Monday.
Frequently asked questions
What file formats does the Clientify import accept?
Clientify accepts CSV, XLS and XLSX files, for contacts and companies as well as for deals. The documentation recommends that the first row carries the column headers and that every cell is set to Text format, even when the value is a date, a phone number or a tax ID.
How does Clientify avoid duplicating contacts that already exist?
In the last step of the import you choose which fields are used to detect existing contacts: full name, phone number and email address, on their own or combined. On that same screen you decide whether to create new contacts, update the ones already there, or do both at once.
Can deals be imported with their stage and amount?
Yes. The mandatory fields on a deal are the name, the amount, the pipeline and the stage. The status has to be one of the four that exist in Clientify: open, won, expired or lost. Amounts go in with no thousands separator and no currency symbol.
Why were some of my phone numbers not imported?
Almost always the prefix. Clientify needs the country dialling code with a plus sign in front, as in +34600000000, and a number without it is not imported. Check as well that the column in your file is set to Text format rather than to a numeric one.
In what order should data be imported into Clientify?
First you create the custom fields in Clientify, because columns with no destination field are skipped. Companies come next, then contacts, and deals last of all. For a deal to be linked to a contact, that contact has to exist in Clientify already.
Test the import before you move anything
Open an account, upload a hundred contacts and check they arrive intact. Seven days free, no card required.
