Skip to main content
All CollectionsSalesflare
How to migrate your data from Salesforce to Salesflare
How to migrate your data from Salesforce to Salesflare

To correctly migrate your information from Salesforce to Salesflare, follow the steps below

Bruno Manno Mendonça avatar
Written by Bruno Manno Mendonça
Updated over 10 months ago

Step 1: Export Data from Salesforce

  1. Log in to your Salesforce account

  2. You can find here how to export your data:

    • Click the cogwheel at the top right, then “Setup”, then in the menu select “Data > Data Export”, and click “Export now”

    • Then select “Account”, “Opportunity”, “Contact” and (optionally) “Lead”, click “Start export” and then wait for a while.

  3. Unzip the export .zip file and find the following documents:

    • Account

    • Contacts

    • Opportunity

    • Optional: Lead (if you use this)

    • Optional: User (if you want to assign opportunities to different owners later)


Step 2: Prepare Your Data

  1. Make sure all dates on your export file are in the YYYY-MM-DD format.
    To change on Excel you can click on the column of dates, then, on the Home page you click on the dropdown list under the number section, More Number Formats…, and then select the YYYY-MM-DD format.
    For Google Sheets, after selecting the column of dates, you can click on the “123” button, then Custom date and time, and select the format that corresponds to the YYYY-MM-DD format

  2. Make sure to change Closed Won and Closed Lost stage names to Lost and Won

  3. Go through the file and remove any unwanted records. It’s better to take the opportunity to clean up when you move to a new CRM

  4. Make sure email addresses in email address fields are valid (the system will only accept one email address per field, no phone numbers will be accepted on this field)

  5. Go through other fields to make sure all data is valid and well formatted

  6. If possible, add the websites for each one of the organizations by adding an extra column and naming it Account website, for easy finding

  7. Export the files from the zip folder save as CSV files, in a location accessible for the import


Step 2b: Prepare Account Names

Because the Opportunity and Contact exports do not contain the names of the accounts they are associated with (only their Salesforce IDs), you will need to use the formula VLOOKUP on Excel or Google Sheets to prepare your document with the correct names.

Excel

If you are using Excel, you can right click on the column and select “Insert” to create a new column beside the account id:

Then, you just need to type, in the second cell (not the header cell) of the column added:

  • =VLOOKUP(

  • Then, select the first account id and add a comma

  • You can now open the accounts file and select the columns that contain the account id and the account name and add a comma

  • Select the number of the column that corresponds to the account name in the account file and add another comma

  • Type FALSE and hit enter

You should have a formula that looks like this:

=VLOOKUP(D2,Account.csv!$A:$D,4,FALSE)

(to make the above formula work, make sure that D2 refers to the cell in your Opportunity/Contact file that contains the AccountId, that the Id is the first column in your Account.csv, and that the Name is the fourth column in your Account.csv)

For your later convenience, it’s best to name the new column “Account name”. Don’t forget to name the column, as otherwise your import may fail.

If you are in doubt, check how a VLOOKUP generally works here

Google Sheets

You can do the same thing using Google Sheets. First copy the contents of the Accounts.csv file into a sheet in your Opportunity/Contact spreadsheet by right clicking the name of the file on the bottom of the page, and copying it to an “existing spreadsheet” which will be the opportunities one:

Once the copy is in the Opportunity/Contact spreadsheet, you can follow the same steps for Excel, by typing:

  • =VLOOKUP(

  • Then, select the first account id and add a comma (this is the id that will be searched)

  • You can now open the accounts tab and select the columns that contain the account id and the account name and add a comma (this is where you select the columns that contain both the id and names of the accounts)

  • Select the number of the column that corresponds to the account name in the account tab and add another comma (this is where you select the column that has the information you want to find)

  • Type FALSE and hit enter (this makes sure that only true matches appear)

You should have a formula that looks like this:

=VLOOKUP(D2,'Copy of Account'!A:D,4,false)

For your later convenience, it’s best to name the new column “Account name”. Don’t forget to name the column, as otherwise your import may fail.


Step 3: Import Data into Salesflare

  1. Log in to your Salesflare account

  2. Navigate to the import section in Salesflare: Settings > Import data > Contact/Opportunity/Account

  3. Begin the import process by clicking the + button on the bottom right and selecting which type of import you want to create.

  4. Import your files, one at a time in the following order:

    • Accounts → Accounts

    • Contacts → Contacts

    • Opportunities → Opportunities

  5. Map the exported data as follows:

    • Accounts from Salesforce to Accounts in Salesflare

      • *Name → account name

      • Phone → phone

      • Website → account website

      • Description → description

      • BillingStreet (or ShippingStreet) → street

      • BillingCity → city

      • BillingState → state/region

      • BillingPostalCode → zip/postal code

      • BillingCountry → country

      • NumberOfEmployees → size

    • Contacts from Salesforce to Contacts in Salesflare

      • AccountId → follow the VLOOKUP guide above (Step 2b) to get their account name based on the Salesforce ID → Account name

      • *FirstName → first name

      • *LastName → last name

      • MiddleName → middle name

      • Salutation → prefix

      • Suffix → suffix

      • Title → role

      • Phone → phone

      • Email → email

      • Fax → fax phone

    • Opportunities from Salesforce to Opportunities in Salesflare

      • AccountId → follow the VLOOKUP guide above (Step 2b) to get their account name based on the Salesforce ID → Account name*

      • Name → opportunity name

      • Description → you could create a custom field for this type “long text”

      • StageName → Stage name (it must already exist in Salesflare)

      • Amount → value

      • Probability → probability

      • CloseDate → close date (in YYYY–MM-DD format)

      • CreatedDate → start date (in YYYY–MM-DD format)

      • LeadSource → lead source name

      • Loss_Reason → lost reason name

    If you don’t import the pipeline, the opportunities will be imported to your primary pipeline by default.

    Note: if you’re a larger team and want the opportunity owner to be set correctly as well, you’ll have to export the User data as well from Salesforce (because the Opportunity.csv only contains the Salesforce ID of the owner) and use a VLOOKUP to find the user’s name or email (similar to Step 2b).

    • Leads from Salesforce to Accounts, Contacts & Opportunities in Salesflare:

      • Salesflare does not have a separate “lead” concept to avoid confusion. Leads are best represented by an account, contact and related opportunity in the “Lead” stage. This means it’s best to import the same file first as accounts (with the right columns specified below), then as contacts, and then as opportunities.

      • Accounts

        • Company → account name

        • Website → account website

        • Description → description

        • Street → street

        • City → city

        • PostalCode → ZIP/postal code

        • Country → country

        • NumberOfEmployees → size

      • Contacts

        • Company → account name

        • *FirstName → first name

        • *LastName → last name

        • MiddleName → middle name

        • Salutation → prefix

        • Title → role

        • Phone → phone

        • Email → email

      • Opportunities

        • Company → account name

        • CreatedDate → start date (in YYYY–MM-DD format)

        • Note that if you don’t specify the stage during the import, it’ll create an opportunity in the first stage, usually “Lead”. If you want to import leads to another stage, just add a manual “Stage” column and fill the cells with the right stage name

  6. Follow on-screen instructions to complete the import, ensuring proper field mapping.
    If there’s any extra information you want to import to your Salesflare account, you can create a custom field to accommodate it

    • If your import fails you can download the error report file by clicking on “fix import”, and on this new file you’ll find the newly added error column in the rightmost column that describes the error for each one of the entries
      Once you’ve fixed those errors that, you can just try importing this file again
      Once you’ve fixed that, you can try importing again

  7. Review the imported data to verify accuracy. You can always delete your import and start over (by clicking on the menu icon on your import and then “delete data”), if needed



By following these steps, you'll be able to correctly map and import your Salesforce data into your Salesflare account.

You can find extra information about importing new files here, and importing templates here

Did this answer your question?