Migrate from Merlin to Freshsales

Manual export guidance and document corpus scoping

We guide the customer through the Merlin manual export process: navigating to account settings, exporting conversation history as JSON or CSV, and downloading the full document corpus from the Merlin dashboard. We also capture Merlin user account metadata (email, plan tier, usage quota) for Freshsales User provisioning. This step requires the customer to have active Merlin access and is completed before account closure.

Entity extraction from document corpus

We run named-entity recognition on all downloaded Merlin documents (PDF, PPT, Word) to identify person names, company names, email addresses, phone numbers, and job titles. We deduplicate extracted entities by email address, merge duplicates across multiple documents, and produce a structured entity list with source document reference and confidence score. This step typically takes three to five business days depending on document corpus size.

Freshsales schema preparation and entity mapping

We create the Freshsales schema before any data import: provisioning Users matched to Merlin account emails, configuring Contact and Account fields to receive extracted entities, and setting up the pipeline and deal stages per the customer's described sales process. We map extracted Contact records to Freshsales Contacts with source tagged as 'Merlin Extraction' and extracted Account records to Freshsales Accounts with domain inferred from email addresses where available.

Sandbox migration and entity reconciliation

We run a full migration into the Freshsales sandbox environment using production-like data volume. The customer's admin reviews extracted Contacts and Accounts against source documents, flags any entity matches that require disambiguation (same name, different people), and signs off on the entity list before production migration begins. Any mapping corrections happen in sandbox, not in production.

Production migration: entities, conversations, documents

We run production migration in two phases. Phase one inserts Freshsales Users, then Contacts and Accounts from the reconciled entity list with parent Account resolved for each Contact. Phase two attaches Merlin conversation Notes and document ContentDocument records to the migrated Contacts and Accounts. We resolve entity-to-record lookups by email match and deliver a row-count reconciliation report after each phase.

Cutover, deal creation handoff, and pipeline documentation

We freeze Merlin access during cutover to prevent new data creation. We deliver a written pipeline design template, a document-intelligence workflow guide (how to use Freshsales to continue the document-review workflow that existed in Merlin), and an entity review checklist for the customer's admin to complete post-migration. We do not create Freshsales Deals as part of the migration scope; those are created by the sales team using the pipeline template. We support a three-day hypercare window for reconciliation issues raised during initial Freshsales use.