Migration Checklist: Moving to Freshsales

Phase 0

Decide & Plan

Lock scope, success criteria, and the cutover window before any export starts.

• Document the full list of Freshsales modules in scope. Freshsales has Contacts, Leads (Suite only), Accounts, Deals, Products, Sales Activities, plus optional Custom Modules. Confirm which are in scope and which are deliberately out of scope.

  Risk if skipped: Discovering at cutover that Custom Modules or the Leads/Contacts split were assumed but never planned forces re-scoping mid-migration.

• Decide whether you are targeting Freshsales (Sales-only) or Freshsales Suite. Suite reintroduces a separate Leads module on top of Contacts and bundles Freshmarketer features. The schema and field-mapping decisions differ between the two products.

  Risk if skipped: Mapping all source leads into Contacts on Suite collapses the Leads pipeline and breaks lead-conversion reporting.

• Confirm the target plan tier and its custom-field ceiling. Custom-field caps per entity are 0 (Sprout/Free), 10 (Blossom/Growth), 150 (Garden/Pro), 305 (Estate), and 450 (Forest/Enterprise). Custom Modules add a separate cap on Forest.

  Risk if skipped: Buying Growth and discovering you need 200 custom fields on Contacts blocks the migration until billing is escalated.

• Confirm Sandbox availability on the chosen plan. Sandbox is restricted to Forest / Enterprise. Only Org Admins can create one, and only one Sandbox can exist at a time. Trial accounts cannot use Sandbox.

  Risk if skipped: Planning a sandbox test on a plan below Forest forces you to dry-run on production or upgrade mid-project.

• Define historical-data scope by object. Decide how many years of closed deals, completed sales activities, notes, calls, and email threads you will move. Decide whether attachments are in scope.

  Risk if skipped: Pulling all history by default can multiply the dataset 5–10x and blow through the cutover window.

• Identify GDPR data-residency and retention requirements. Freshworks processes Personal Data across US, UK, and EEA regions and operates under the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Frameworks. Confirm which region your tenant uses satisfies any contractual residency commitment.

  Risk if skipped: Discovering after cutover that your tenant is in the wrong region forces a second migration or a contractual exception.

• Confirm SOC 2 and ISO 27001 evidence needs. If your auditors require evidence packs at cutover, request the latest Freshworks certification reports before the freeze date.
• Assign a single accountable migration owner (DRI). One named person owns scope decisions, cutover go/no-go, and post-migration sign-off. Document their backup.
• Document explicit out-of-scope items. List the source-system features that will NOT be rebuilt in Freshsales — chat transcripts, marketing automation flows, third-party telephony recordings, etc. Get sponsor sign-off in writing.

  Risk if skipped: Unwritten out-of-scope items resurface as urgent during cutover and derail the schedule.

• Set the target cutover date and source-system freeze window. Pick a low-activity window (often a Friday evening through Sunday). Communicate the freeze date and time to all source-system users at least two weeks in advance.
• Define written success criteria for the migration. Examples: 100% of open deals migrated with correct stage; aggregate pipeline value within 0.5% of source; all owners assigned correctly; sales activities linked to the right Contact, Account, or Deal.

  Risk if skipped: Without falsifiable criteria, the migration is never formally complete and tail issues drag on for months.

Phase 1

Pre-Migration Prep

Cleanse the source, build the destination schema, and align the team.

Phase 2

Source Export

Pull complete, timestamped exports of every in-scope module.

• Export Contacts to CSV/XLSX with all standard and custom fields. Confirm the file is under 5 MB before passing to the Freshsales UI importer; split into multiple files if necessary.

  Risk if skipped: Files over 5 MB are rejected by the UI importer with no per-row diagnostic.

• Export Leads to CSV/XLSX (only if targeting Freshsales Suite). Suite reintroduces a separate Leads module; classic Freshsales does not. Confirm the destination shape before exporting.
• Export Accounts to CSV/XLSX with all standard and custom fields. Include the domain field; Accounts are typically matched on domain at import.
• Export Deals to CSV/XLSX with all standard and custom fields. Include the email of the related Contact in a column you can map to Related Contacts. Multiple contacts per deal are supported via semicolon-separated emails.
• Export Products to CSV/XLSX. Capture SKU, name, currency, base price, and tax for each product. These flow into deal product associations later.
• Export Sales Activities (tasks, meetings, calls) as separate files. Each activity type has a slightly different schema. Include the linked Contact email and Deal name for re-association.
• Export Notes with their parent-record references. Capture the linked Contact, Account, or Deal so notes can be re-attached during transform.
• Export the user list with email, role, and reporting structure. Becomes the input for re-creating users in Admin Settings > Users in Phase 1b.
• Export pipeline and stage definitions from the source CRM. Names, sort order, probability percentages, and any rotting logic. These drive the destination pipeline build.
• Export all attachment binaries and a manifest mapping each file to its parent record. Freshsales caps note attachments at 20 MB and document attachments at 150 MB; storage is 2 GB per user across the account.

  Risk if skipped: Attachments without a parent-record manifest become orphaned files post-load and are nearly impossible to re-link.

• Capture screenshots and exported configs of source automations, reports, and dashboards. These are rebuilt by hand in Freshsales — Workflows, Smartforms, IntelliAssign, Sales Sequences, and dashboards do not transfer automatically.
• Record the exact timestamp of every export. Cutover delta (Phase 5) is calculated against these timestamps.

Phase 3

Transform & Map

Convert source exports into Freshsales-shaped CSV/XLSX files.

Phase 4

Sandbox Test Migration

Run the full pipeline in Sandbox and catch every defect before production.

• Load a 1–5% representative sample of every in-scope module into Sandbox. Use the same import path (UI CSV/XLSX upload) you plan to use in production.

  Risk if skipped: Testing with a different mechanism than production hides path-specific bugs (CSV row caps) until cutover.

• Validate field-by-field on 10 random Sandbox records per module. Open each record in the UI and confirm every standard and custom field carries the expected value.
• Run an edge-case battery: long strings, special characters, NULLs, picklists, and dates across timezones. Include the date-field timezone-shift case explicitly — pick records spanning midnight in non-UTC timezones.

  Risk if skipped: Edge-case bugs unfound in Sandbox become incidents in production with no rollback option.

• Test Contact-to-Account, Deal-to-Contact, and Deal-to-Account associations. Confirm related-contacts on Deals carry semicolon-delimited multiple emails correctly.
• Test Sales Activity association to parent Contacts and Deals. Open a few Deals in the UI and confirm the activity timeline shows the expected tasks, meetings, and calls.
• Test Note attachment to parent records. Confirm notes attach to the correct Contact, Account, or Deal and that any attached files are accessible.
• Test the file-upload path for binaries within the 20 MB note-attachment and 150 MB document caps. Confirm storage consumption against the 2 GB-per-user envelope as you go.

  Risk if skipped: Hitting the storage cap mid-Sandbox-test means the production load will fail at the same point.

• Time each load step and extrapolate to production volume. Confirm the projected total load time fits inside the cutover window. Factor in the 25,000-record instantaneous limit on the CRM Migration importer.

  Risk if skipped: A 12-hour cutover that becomes a 36-hour cutover blows past the freeze window and forces an extended outage.

• Confirm the Sandbox error log shape and capture the diagnostic columns. The Freshsales importer emails an error log per import job. Document its columns so triage during cutover is fast.
• Have a domain expert from sales operations spot-check 25 Sandbox records. An ops user often catches business-logic errors (wrong pipeline stage, wrong territory) that the technical team misses.
• Get written sign-off on the Sandbox test results before scheduling production cutover. Sign-off names the issues found, the fixes applied, and the residual known-risks accepted.

  Risk if skipped: Skipping written sign-off means scope drift between Sandbox and production goes undetected.

Phase 5

Production Cutover

Execute the migration in a tightly sequenced window.

• Confirm the source-system freeze is in effect and verify no writes in the last hour. Inspect the source audit log; reject the cutover if the freeze was not honored.
• Take a final full export of source data as the cutover baseline. The delta from the Phase 2 baseline is what you reconcile in Phase 6.
• Disable Workflows, Smartforms, IntelliAssign, Sales Sequences, and email/calendar sync. Confirm every automation that could fire on a record-create is off.

  Risk if skipped: An active workflow during load can send thousands of unwanted emails or reassign owners en masse.

• Load Users first if any new users were added since Phase 1. Owner mapping fails on missing users; create them before importing the records they own.
• Load Accounts via the CRM Migration importer. Use the chosen unique identifier on every record so re-runs are idempotent.

  Risk if skipped: Skipping unique identifiers causes duplicate Accounts on any retry.

• Load Contacts/Leads next using the matching importer path. Carry the Account email/domain in a column that maps to Sales Account, so the contact-to-account association lands on first write.
• Load Deals with explicit Pipeline + Stage + Related Contacts columns. Include the deal owner email so deals do not all default to the import service user.

  Risk if skipped: Defaulting all deals to the service user breaks pipeline-by-owner dashboards immediately.

• Load Sales Activities, Notes, and attachments last. Activities and notes need their parent Contacts, Accounts, and Deals to exist first; attachments need their notes/records to exist first.
• Capture import job IDs, row counts, and error logs for every load step. Archive the importer's email error log for each UI-driven import.

  Risk if skipped: Without job-level evidence, a failed reconciliation cannot be traced back to a specific load step.

• Cross-check destination row counts against source counts at each step. Stop and diagnose if any module's count diverges by more than the agreed tolerance (typically 0.1%).
• On a failed load step, stop, fix the transform, and re-run idempotently against the same upsert key. Idempotent upserts on the unique identifier avoid duplicate creation on re-runs.
• Re-enable Workflows, Smartforms, IntelliAssign, Sales Sequences, and email/calendar sync only after Phase 6 sign-off. Validating before unpausing automations contains the blast radius of any defect found post-load.

  Risk if skipped: Unpausing before validation means a defect cascades through emails and owner reassignments to external systems.

Phase 6

Validate

Prove the migration was correct before any user logs in.

Phase 7

Post-Migration Cleanup

Cut the cord on the source and operationalize Freshsales as the system of record.

• Communicate go-live to all end users with login URL, SSO instructions, and the help contact. Include a short FAQ covering 'where did my X go' for the five most common source-system features.
• Run role-segmented Freshsales training sessions. SDRs (Leads + Sales Sequences), AEs (Deals + activity logging), sales ops (reports + workflows), CSMs (Accounts).
• Set the source system to read-only and announce the read-only date in writing. Read-only prevents accidental drift; archive the source tenant for the contracted retention window before decommission.

  Risk if skipped: Leaving the source writable creates two systems of record and guarantees data drift within weeks.

• Rebuild dashboards and reports in Freshsales. Reports do not transfer. Reproduce the top 10 source reports first; backfill the long tail over the following month.
• Rebuild Workflows and Smartforms in Admin Settings. Re-create each source automation against the Phase 2 screenshots. Test with a single record before flipping live.
• Rebuild Sales Sequences (email cadences). Re-create each source cadence with its email templates, delays, and exit conditions. Test against a single contact first.

  Risk if skipped: Re-enrolling thousands of contacts into a buggy sequence causes mass-unsubscribes and brand damage.

• Activate IntelliAssign rules and confirm round-robin distribution behaves as expected. Test by creating one new lead and verifying it routes to the expected rep.
• Activate Territories and Lead Score models. Confirm Lead Score values populate against the migrated Contacts/Leads within the first 24 hours.
• Re-establish email and calendar sync for every user. Each user must individually connect their email; sync settings can only be configured once per profile.
• Re-establish integrations to BI tools, marketing automation, and telephony. Confirm all integrations are pointed at the new Freshsales tenant, not the source.
• Schedule the 30-day post-migration retrospective. Capture what worked, what did not, and what the next migration should change. Distribute the notes.
• Document the source-system decommission date. Typically 90 days after cutover, after the contracted retention window closes. Calendar the date with the source vendor.
• Close out the migration project formally with a final status report and lessons-learned doc. Record cutover duration, defect counts, reconciliation deltas, and total cost. Hand off to the operations owner.