Moving your customer data into Handle CRM

A CRM move is mostly a cleaning job

Moving into a follow-up CRM is about customers and open deals. The hard part is not the import. It is that your customer list is probably messier than you think: duplicates, dead emails, and the same company spelled three ways. Clean first, import second.

Your data, in buckets

Customers and their contacts. Units they own, if you track that today. Open deals and their stages. Follow-up history worth keeping. If you are a John Deere dealer, ask how the DIT data meets your migrated records, so you do not end up with the same customer twice: once from your list, once from the brand feed.

What to ask

• Who does the data mapping, us or you?
• How many test imports do we get before the real one?
• How are duplicates handled during import?
• How does brand data merge with our migrated records?
• What does the first week of use look like for a rep?

Use the checklist

The checklist below is the same one we would use for a Handle move. Check items off, export to CSV, and bring it to your vendor meeting. If you are a John Deere dealer, add one line of your own: how the DIT feed matches your migrated customers.

A worked task: the brand-feed merge

For John Deere dealers, migrated records meet DIT data, and the same customer can arrive from both. Suggested exercise: ask how the system matches your migrated customer to the brand feed's version. Inputs: your customer list and the brand feed. Expected output: one merged record per customer, not two. The exception that creates mess: slightly different names — J. Smith Farms versus Smith Farms LLC. Ask how matches are made and how you fix a wrong one.

Do this week

Export your customer list and sort by phone number. Every number that appears twice is a duplicate to merge before any import.