You've built a pipeline in Notion. Contacts are linked to companies, deals, and notes. Then you export to CSV and realize: every relationship just evaporated. A contact row shows a company name as text, not a reference. Deals list a sales rep's name, not their actual assignment. Deal dates are there, but the thread of conversation that led to them is gone. You now have orphaned data—technically present, functionally useless. This is the hidden cost of Notion CRM at scale. It's not that Notion breaks at 300+ contacts. It's that when you leave, Notion doesn't export what you actually built. Why Notion's CSV export is a data trap Notion databases are relational. A Contact record links to a Company via a relation field. A Deal links to a Contact and a Pipeline Stage via select fields and relations. When you export to CSV, Notion flattens every linked record into plain text. What you lose: Relationship references become text. A company ID becomes "Acme Corp"—a string with no link back to the company record. Any automation or lookup that depends on the relation breaks. Multi-select and relation fields collapse. If a contact is tagged with three deal stages or linked to two opportunities, CSV gives you a comma-separated string. Re-importing to another platform requires manual parsing or a custom script. Deal history and activity logs disappear. Notion doesn't export rich-text blocks, embedded databases, or linked rollup calculations. The timeline of emails, calls, and notes stays in Notion. Formula and rollup results are static. If your pipeline calculated deal value or contact scoring, CSV exports the result at export time—frozen, disconnected from source data. The fatal assumption: "We can just import the CSV into the new platform and re-link everything manually." At 300+ contacts and 100+ deals, that's 20+ hours of matching, verifying, and fixing orphaned records. Most teams do it halfway, then operate with broken data. The field mapping checklist: What gets lost and how to recover it Before you export, audit your Notion schema. Map every field to your target platform (or Orin's CRM pipeline , which preserves linked records natively). Step 1: Inventory your Notion fields Open your Contacts database. Screenshot or export a list of every field: Property name Field type (text, relation, select, rollup, formula, etc.) Required or optional Linked database (if it's a relation or lookup) Example schema for a 300-contact Notion CRM: Name (text) → CRM first name + last name Email (email) → CRM email Company (relation to Companies database) → CRM account Phone (phone) → CRM phone Deal Stage (select: Prospect, Qualified, Proposal, Won, Lost) → CRM deal stage Linked Deals (relation to Deals database) → CRM opportunity (multi-link) Last Contact (date) → CRM last activity date Contact Source (select: Inbound, Referral, Cold) → CRM lead source Pipeline Value (rollup: sum of linked deal amounts) → Recalculate in CRM Notes (rich text or linked database) → CRM notes (may truncate) Step 2: Export with maximum fidelity When Notion exports to CSV, relation and rollup fields export as text. You need to export multiple views: Export the Contacts view to CSV. This gives you the main table. Export the Companies view to CSV separately. You'll use this to re-link companies to contacts. Export the Deals view to CSV separately. Deals list contact and company names; you'll match them back. Before exporting each, add a **unique ID column** to every table (if you don't already have one). Notion databases need an internal ID to re-link after import. Create a simple ID field and populate it with UUIDs or sequential numbers. Export this ID in every CSV. Step 3: Build a re-linking map Create a spreadsheet with columns: Original Notion Contact ID Contact Name Target Platform Contact ID (or leave blank for first import) Company Name (from Notion export) Target Platform Company ID Deal IDs (comma-separated from Notion) Use VLOOKUP or INDEX/MATCH to join the Contacts, Companies, and Deals CSVs. This map becomes your source of truth for re-linking after import. Deal history and relationship recovery: What you must preserve Notion exports deal metadata (amount, stage, close date) but not the conversation thread. Before you leave Notion, extract what won't travel: Activity and email logs If you've embedded an email or activity log in your Notion deal record, Notion won't export it. Manually export any linked database of emails or calls: Open each Deal record that has activity. Export the embedded activity database to CSV (if it's a separate table, export it directly). Map each activity to its source deal using the deal ID or name. Import activities to your new platform's unified messaging inbox or CRM activity log, linked back to the deal. Rich-text notes and context Notion's CSV exports rich-text as plain text, losing formatting and embedded links. For high-value deals: Open each Notion deal with substantial notes. Copy the full text (Notion strips for