Our CRM migration failed so hard last Tuesday we lost 3 days of lead data

I mean we spent 8 weeks planning this move from HubSpot to a new platform and it still went sideways. The API mapping kept dropping fields like company size and industry tags without telling us. Ended up having to pull a backup from Monday morning and re-enter 14 deals by hand. Has anyone else had a migration tool just silently skip critical fields like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

sean_barnes2413h ago

Honestly, what you described is almost exactly what happened to me a few years back. We were moving from Zoho to a custom Salesforce setup and the API just ghosted on our custom lead source fields. No error, no notification, just blank cells after the import. The workaround that saved our butts was doing a field-by-field validation on a single test record before the real run. I'd recommend building a quick spreadsheet with all your field names and expected values, then after the test import, just compare what actually landed. It takes an extra 30 minutes but catches 99% of these silent drops.

barbara_jenkins6612h ago

Oh, did you also get the "silent field drop" treatment? That's the worst. We had the exact same thing happen when we migrated from Pipedrive to Salesforce last year. The tool just decided some custom fields we built for "lead source detail" and "industry subcategory" didn't need to come along for the ride. No warning, no error message, just empty columns. We didn't notice until a week later when a sales rep couldn't figure out why all their notes on a big deal were missing. That Monday morning backup saved us too, but we ended up having to re-key about 20 records by hand. What really made me mad was the tool's documentation said it would "flag any mapping issues" but it clearly didn't. Now I'm super paranoid and test with like three fake records before every single move. It's honestly ridiculous that we have to babysit these tools so much.

danielr9915h ago

Three days of lost data? That stinks but honestly it sounds like you caught it pretty fast. Most companies I've heard about in similar situations don't even notice until like a month later when someone goes looking for an old contact. The manual re-entry of 14 deals probably took what, a few hours? Could have been a lot worse. Silent field drops are annoying but pretty common with these tools. The API mapping never tells you what it actually did until you check every single field yourself. Next time just run a test import with like 5 dummy records and verify every field before you flip the switch. Main thing is you had a backup from Monday morning. That alone puts you ahead of half the people who try this stuff.