Notion's database export looks complete until you load it into a real CRM. Then the orphans appear: relationship fields converted to text, custom properties stripped, deal attachments missing, contact history flattened. By day 15, your sales team is asking why they lost deal notes, and you've already re-entered 200 contacts by hand. Notion was never built for CRM scale. It's a database layer with contact tables, but those tables lack the relationship depth, automation triggers, and audit trails that production CRMs need. When you export, Notion gives you what it stored—not what you built on top of it. The fix isn't to accept orphans. It's to map the breaks before they happen, test the import at realistic scale, and rebuild only what survives. Here's the exact sequence. Why Notion CRM exports fail silently Notion stores data in tables. Each table is a view—contacts, companies, deals, whatever you've named them. When you export as CSV, you get rows and columns. No relationship depth. No link history. No audit trail of what changed and when. The core problem: Notion's relational fields (the links between your contact table and your deals table) export as text. A deal linked to a contact becomes a string like "John Smith" in the CSV. When you import that into a real CRM, there's no way to re-link it unless the contact name matches exactly. One typo, one name format difference, and the relationship is orphaned. Custom properties disappear too. If you've added fields like "Last proposal value" or "Preferred contact method" that don't fit Notion's standard column types, they either export as unstructured text or vanish entirely. You'll rediscover this during import when the new CRM rejects them. Deal attachments are the third casualty. Notion lets you attach files to records, but those attachments live in Notion's servers. Your CSV export includes only the attachment URL. When you import that URL into a new CRM, it either fails to resolve or sits as a broken link. Pre-migration audit: Map the breaks at 300, 500, 1000 contacts Do not migrate your full database on day one. Test in stages. Stage 1: 300 contacts (week one). Export your first 300 contacts as CSV. Open the file in a spreadsheet. Count your columns. List every field. Note which ones are relationships (they'll show as text). Make a separate list: which fields are critical to your sales process? Deal IDs, owner assignments, stage, close date, last touch date. Which are nice-to-have? Contact notes, tags, custom scoring. Now import those 300 into your target CRM (if you're using Orin's CRM , import them directly). Run a quick audit: did all 300 land? Are the relationship fields blank or text? Did custom properties import or vanish? Count the orphans. If you're losing more than 5% of records or more than 10% of fields, stop and fix the export before moving forward. Stage 2: 500 contacts (week two). Export your next 500. Repeat the audit. At 500 records, you'll see patterns: do certain contact types export better than others? Are relationship fields failing at a consistent rate? Are dates being reformatted? This is where you catch systemic breaks before they scale. Stage 3: 1000 contacts (week three). Export your largest group. Import into a test environment in your target CRM. Run the full audit. Look for slowness—some CRMs choke on large imports. Look for data corruption—dates reversed, names truncated, numbers formatted as text. If the import succeeds cleanly at 1000, you're safe to migrate the full set. If it fails, something about your export structure is wrong. Map relationship fields before the import breaks them Notion relationship fields are the biggest source of orphans. Here's how to rebuild them: List every relationship in your Notion database. Open each table and note which columns are relationships. A typical Notion CRM has: Contacts linked to Deals, Contacts linked to Companies, Deals linked to Companies, Deals linked to Activities. Write them down. Export each table separately. Don't mix contacts and deals in one CSV. Export contacts as one file, deals as another, companies as a third. This lets you re-link them cleanly in your target CRM without collision. Add a key column before export. In your Notion contacts table, create a new column called "Migration_ID" and populate it with a unique, non-changing identifier (a UUID or incrementing number works). Do the same for deals and companies. These keys are your bridge: when the contact name is ambiguous, the key stays constant. Export with the key column included. When you export to CSV, make sure the Migration_ID column is there. This is what your target CRM will use to re-link contacts to deals, contacts to companies, etc. In your target CRM, map the links using the key. If your target CRM supports bulk re-linking via automation , use it. Orin, for example, lets you upload a CSV of contact-to-deal mappings and run them as a batch automation. This preserves the relationship structure from Notion