The Great Migration Mistake

Migrating CRMs—whether moving from Salesforce to HubSpot, Pipedrive to Zoho, or any other combination—is a massive undertaking. It involves mapping fields, retraining staff, and integrating new tools. However, the most common mistake organizations make is a "lift and shift" approach to their data.

Organizations often take their entire legacy database, which has accumulated over 5 or 10 years, and dump it directly into the new system. This is a strategic error. B2B data decays at roughly 22-25% per year. If you are migrating a 5-year-old database without cleaning it, effectively half of your contacts are likely dead, invalid, or dangerous.

The Pricing Penalty

Most modern CRMs and Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs) price their services based on the number of contacts in your database. HubSpot, for example, has steep tiers as your contact count grows.

If you migrate 50,000 contacts, but 15,000 of them are hard bounces or duplicates, you are literally paying a monthly premium to host digital trash. By running these contacts through EmailVerifierAPI.com before the import, you can identify the invalid records and leave them behind. This often results in immediate savings that cover the cost of the verification service many times over.

Preserving Reputation on Day One

When you switch CRMs, you are often also switching sending IPs or at least changing the headers of your emails. This is a delicate time for deliverability. ISPs are watching your new infrastructure closely.

If your first campaign from the new CRM hits a 10% bounce rate because you emailed old contacts, you will torpedo your reputation immediately. You risk getting your new CRM account suspended before you have even fully onboarded. "Warming up" a new CRM requires sending to your best, most active data first. You cannot identify that data without verification.

The Migration Workflow

The optimal workflow for a CRM migration involves three steps:

  1. Export & Audit: Export your legacy data to CSV.
  2. Verify & Segment: Run the CSV through EmailVerifierAPI.com's bulk processor (or use a script with our API). Segment the results into "Valid", "Risky", and "Invalid".
  3. Selective Import:
    • Import "Valid": These are safe to market to immediately.
    • Import "Risky": Import these but flag them with a custom property (e.g., `Email_Status = Risky`). Exclude them from automated blasts until manual review.
    • Archive "Invalid": Do not import these. Keep them in a "Do Not Contact" list or delete them entirely.

A CRM migration is the perfect opportunity to declare bankruptcy on bad data. Start fresh with a clean, lean database that costs less and converts better.