There is a universal law in software engineering that everyone forgets during a migration: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
You are moving to a new CRM or ERP because the old one is “messy” and “slow.” You bought the new system because the sales rep promised you a clean slate, better reporting, and AI-driven insights.
But if you take your current data—with its duplicates, missing fields, and 10 years of legacy formatting—and dump it directly into the new system, you don’t have a new system.
You just have a new, expensive wrapper around your old problems.
Migrating dirty data is the fastest way to kill the ROI of a new platform. Yet, teams skip the cleanup phase constantly. Why? Because it’s boring, and nobody wants to delay the launch date.
Here is why you need to pause and scrub the data first.
Your New System Will Reject Your Old Habits
Old systems are often permissive. They let you type “TBD” into a phone number field or leave the “State” field blank.
Modern systems are strict. They have validation rules.
- If your new Salesforce instance requires a valid ISO country code, and your old data has “USA,” “U.S.A.,” and “United States,” the import will fail.
- If you have 5,000 contacts without email addresses, your new marketing automation tool will flag them as junk immediately.
If you don’t clean this before the migration, you will spend the first three months of your launch manually fixing records while your users scream about errors.
Profiling is Not Optional
You cannot fix what you cannot see. You might think your data is clean, but have you actually looked at the distribution of values in column AZ?
We built the Data Profiler to give you a reality check.
It is a simple browser-based utility. You drop in your export, and it tells you the ugly truth:
- “20% of your email fields are empty.”
- “You have 50 distinct variations of the word ‘California’.”
- “This ‘Date’ column actually contains text strings.”
Use this tool to scope the work. If the Profiler shows a 40% error rate, you are not ready to migrate. You are ready to clean.
Don’t Let Optimism Ruin Your Timeline
The other major reason migrations fail is unrealistic scheduling.
Stakeholders assume that 100,000 records can be moved in an afternoon. They don’t account for the API rate limits, the validation errors, or the inevitable “retry” loops.
We are building a Timeline Planner to help you manage expectations.
It forces you to input the volume and complexity factors to give stakeholders a real date. “We aren’t launching on Friday. We are launching in three weeks, because we need two weeks to sanitize the data first.”
When Cleaning Requires Code
Tools like Excel or OpenRefine are great for small cleanups. But what if you have 5 million rows? What if you need to merge duplicates based on fuzzy logic?
This is where “manual” fails and “engineering” begins.
At ClonePartner, we treat data cleansing as a code problem. We write scripts to programmatically standardize phone numbers, validate emails, and merge duplicates before they ever touch the new system.
The Bottom Line
A migration is the only chance you will get to fix your data debt. Once it’s in the new system, it’s there forever.
Don’t rush it. Profile the data first. If it looks bad, clean it. If it looks impossible, call us.