How to Migrate Your Data to Pipedrive CRM System

Matt Pliszka | Pipedrive Partner​,​ CRM Configuration​/​Integration

This guide is a part of the below ultimate guides:
An Ultimate Guide to Integrating Your CRM to Grow Sales and Automate Work

CRM system is all about data. Unless you have a proper data structure in place, your CRM can turn out to be useless. After all, how will you filter through the contacts, organizations, and deals and target specific industries, customer segments or most active deals and target them with personalized communication/actions?

Once you have your data prepared to be uploaded into the CRM system (either from Excel files or other CRM systems) it’s now the time to migrate it to Pipedrive.

How to migrate data properly to Pipedrive CRM?

1. Set up proper custom fields in Pipedrive CRM

To make sure you’re able to assign information/attributes to companies or leads, you’d need to add specific attributes to the different data levels in your Pipedrive CRM which are:

• Organizations
• People
• Deals
  
  

Make sure you add only the relevant fields you’ll actually be using in your business/decision-making/filtering. Too many fields you’re not actually using will create chaos and can distract you from focusing on the most important attributes.

2. Prepare an upload file

Prepare an upload file with the necessary information to be uploaded into your CRM, including companies, contacts and potential deals.

3. Upload the data to Pipedrive

Now, it’s time to upload all the data to Pipedrive, assigning the proper attributes in your upload file to Pipedrive’s attributes/custom fields.

3.1. Upload organizations to Pipedrive CRM

The first step to effective CRM upload is uploading all the organizations’ to your Pipedrive CRM, assigning attributes to the ones created in your CRM.
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3.2. Download your list of organizations with IDs from a CRM

After you’ve uploaded the organizations to your Pipedrive account, you will need to assign contacts to proper organizations in your CRM. To do it properly, download an export file with the list of organizations’ names and their IDs.

3.3. Match contacts with organization IDs in a spreadsheet

Having the contacts for particular organizations, you should now link them to the organization IDs using a =Vlookup function in your spreadsheet. After matching with the organization IDs, export an upload file for your Pipedrive account.
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TIP! Make sure an org ID is the first column in your Pipedrive contacts’ upload file.

3.4. Upload a contacts’ file to Pipedrive CRM

Use the file with the matched IDs to upload contacts to Pipedrive matching them with the right organizations and assigning proper attributes created in Pipedrive.
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3.5. Download contacts’ IDs from Pipedrive CRM

After you upload your contact information, download the list of contacts with their corresponding IDs and organization name/IDs.
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3.6. Assign deals to organizations & contacts in a spreadsheet

After you download all your organizations’ & contact details/IDs from Pipedrive, list all the organization IDs with the corresponding contact IDs in Pipedrive. Then, match the deals you’d like to upload with the corresponding Org/Contact IDs in your upload file. Export the file to prepare for final Pipedrive data upload.
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3.7. Upload deals’ file to Pipedrive.

Once you have the data file with deals ready to be uploaded to Pipedrive and matched with the right organizations/contacts (through IDs), upload the file through Pipedrive data import.

TIP! You can also use “Workflow automation” to create a deal automatically for every new organization uploaded into Pipedrive.

Check on ways to use the uploaded data in practice

Once you have all the data you need, it’s worth to try using it in practice and see how you could use it in every day’s marketing and sales operations.

Use built-in Pipedrive’s filtering function to browse through the data or use data ranges, e.g. displaying the companies/contacts in specific revenue range or industry.
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There are hundreds of ways you can use a built-in filtering function and they will depend on your specific use cases but having the properly organized data is a crucial step to make it work right in your business.