Migrate from ContactDB to Twenty CRM

ContactDB contact records map directly to Twenty CRM People. We extract first name, last name, email, phone, job title, and any free-text fields from the export and map them to the corresponding Twenty People fields. Email address serves as the primary dedupe key; records with duplicate emails are flagged for customer review before final import. The original ContactDB record identifier is preserved in a custom field for audit traceability.

ContactDB exposes firmographic attributes per contact: company name, industry, company size, SICCODE, and credit rating. We run a company dedupe pass using normalized company name and domain extraction before import, then load the resulting unique Company records into Twenty CRM. Each Person record is linked to their parent Company via the Twenty relation field at import time.

ContactDB segments contacts by industry, profession, title, country, and software-usage criteria, but these segment labels are not exported as standalone tag objects. We reconstruct segment membership as a custom text field on People in Twenty CRM, encoding the original segment category as a pipe-delimited string (e.g., 'industry:Technology | country:US | software:Salesforce'). The customer confirms during scoping which segment categories are meaningful for post-migration reporting.

ContactDB does not implement a pipeline model, so there are no pipeline stages to migrate. We configure Twenty CRM with a standard Opportunities object and a default deal stage set (Prospecting, Qualification, Proposal, Negotiation, Closed Won, Closed Lost) during the workspace setup phase of migration. If the customer has deal-related data encoded in custom ContactDB fields, we map those to Opportunity fields in Twenty.

ContactDB is a data product without internal user accounts. No owner assignments exist in the source data. During migration, we assign all imported People and Companies to a designated admin User in Twenty CRM, or we configure a migration-owner placeholder that the customer's admin updates post-import when team Members are provisioned in Twenty.

ContactDB segments lists by industry, profession, title, country, and software usage, but these segment labels are not exported as standalone tag objects. We do not migrate Tags because none exist as discrete exportable records. Instead, we reconstruct segment membership as described in the segment mapping above. If the ContactDB export includes a tags or segments column with pipe-delimited values, we parse and write those to a custom multi-select field on People.

ContactDB does not document a custom fields schema. Any extended attributes stored against contacts in ContactDB are proprietary to the platform and not exposed in export packages. We document any unnamed or undocumented columns in the source CSV as part of the discovery audit and ask the customer to confirm their meaning before mapping. If columns represent meaningful data, we create equivalent custom fields in Twenty CRM under Settings → Data Model before import.

ContactDB does not store engagement history, email opens, call logs, or meeting records. No activity data is available to migrate. This is a fundamental limitation of moving from a purchased list database to a live CRM: the contact history in the target system will be blank until the team begins using Twenty CRM's native engagement tools post-migration.

ContactDB exports contacts as flat records, meaning the same company can appear multiple times with slight name variations (e.g., 'Acme Corp', 'Acme Corporation', 'ACME'). We run a normalization step that strips legal suffixes (Inc, LLC, Ltd, Corp), standardizes capitalization, and flags records with matching domains for dedupe review. Unique Company records are loaded first; the Person-Company relation is resolved at import time using company name and domain matching.

ContactDB offers a Data Integrity Guarantee, but recency of data updates depends on the customer's subscription tier. We capture any metadata columns in the export that indicate data source tier, refresh date, or verification status and write these to a custom text field on People in Twenty CRM. This gives the sales team a signal for prioritizing outreach to contacts with more recent verification timestamps.