The CRM import that ate 3 days of my life in Cedar Rapids

Switched CRMs last Tuesday and figured the contact import would be a quick copy-paste job. Turns out 1,400 duplicate records with mismatched owner fields took me 3 full days to clean, and that's before I even touched the deal stages. Anyone else burn a whole workweek on data migration that sales promised would be 'plug and play'?

2 comments

2 Comments

gavin_kim321d ago

Man, I've been there too and it's brutal. Next time, export everything to a spreadsheet first and run a quick duplicate check on email addresses before you even start the import. Honestly, spending half a day cleaning up the data first would've saved you the other two and a half.

evan_stone20d ago

The real trap is assuming the data in the source system is even correct in the first place. People scrub for duplicates but forget that a lot of CRM exports are full of stale records, bad formatting, and old roles that don't match who actually needs the info now. That duplicate check catches exact matches, but fuzzy duplicates like "Bob Smith" vs "Robert Smith" at the same company still slip through and create the same mess two weeks later. Better to clean by company domain and job title first, because that catches the real-world overlap that simple email matching misses. Also, if the import tool has a dry run mode, use it twice with different filters before committing to anything. Half the cleanup time is just figuring out what the source data actually means, not the obvious stuff.