What to Export From a CRM Before You Leave

There is a predictable way CRM migrations go wrong, and it is not technical.

Someone exports the contacts. The contacts import cleanly into the new system. Everybody agrees the migration went well. Six weeks later a salesperson opens a record before a call, finds a name and an email address and nothing else, and discovers that four years of context evaporated without anyone noticing.

Contacts are the easy part and the least valuable part.

What a CRM is actually worth

Think about what you could rebuild if the CRM vanished tonight.

Contacts? Recoverable. They are in your inbox, your phone, LinkedIn, old invoices. Tedious to reassemble, not lost.

Deals? Mostly recoverable from invoices and accounts.

Notes? Gone. "Decided against us in March because of the integration — revisit when v3 ships." "Do not call before 10am." "Procurement has to approve anything over £5k, and that is Janet, not Mark."

That is not data. It is institutional memory, and it exists in exactly one place. The CRM is valuable because of the notes, and the notes are the thing people forget to take.

The export list

1. Contacts and organisations, with every custom field. The custom fields are the ones you added because they mattered, and they are frequently omitted from a default export.
2. Deals or opportunities, with stage, value, close date, owner and outcome. Include lost deals - the reasons they were lost are the most useful record you own.
3. Activity history - calls, meetings, logged emails.
4. Notes. Separately and deliberately, because they are often a distinct export rather than a column on the contact.
5. Attachments - proposals, signed documents, specifications. These are rarely in a CSV and frequently the hardest to retrieve in bulk.
6. Email templates and sequences, which are writing you paid someone to do.
7. Reports, especially custom ones.

Then screenshot what no export carries

This is the step that separates a migration from a data dump.

Your pipeline stages and what each one means. Your automation logic - what triggers what, and why. Your required fields and validation rules. Your permission model. Your dashboards.

None of that is in any export from any CRM in this category. It is configuration, and it represents months of argument about how your business actually sells. Rebuilding it from memory means relitigating every one of those decisions with a team that has forgotten why they were made.

Twenty screenshots and a page of notes is an hour's work and saves a quarter.

Do it while you are still paying

The timing is not a detail, because each of the major CRMs closes the window differently:

Three of those four mean that an export planned for "after we cancel" does not happen. The fourth means you may not have enough export attempts left to do it piecemeal.

Verify before you trust it

Two checks, five minutes, and they catch the failure that otherwise surfaces in a year.

Count at both ends. Note the record count in the CRM, open the exported file, count the rows. A truncated export is indistinguishable from a complete one by eye.

Open the file. Not the folder - the file. Check the notes column actually contains notes rather than being empty or clipped at a character limit, which happens more often than you would expect with long text fields in CSV.

Keep it somewhere that is not a CRM

Finally: the point of the export is to have a copy that does not depend on any vendor. Putting it straight into the new CRM and deleting the file recreates exactly the dependency you just escaped.

Keep the raw export. It costs nothing, it is readable in a decade, and it is the only version of your customer history that nobody can lock, freeze or delete on a 90-day timer.

For what each vendor does at the moment you stop paying, see what each CRM does when you stop paying.