You've hit Pipedrive's ceiling. Deals are hitting 50+ concurrent, custom field logic is cracking, forecast accuracy is drifting, and your team is manually syncing data to spreadsheets because the mobile app doesn't show pipeline health the way you need it. Salesforce or Orin start looking inevitable. But before you commit to a migration project, you need to know what walks out the door with you—and what you're rebuilding from scratch. Most CRM migrations fail not because the new tool is worse, but because teams underestimate the data tax: hours spent re-entering lost context, forecasts rebuilt from dirty historical records, and email threads orphaned where no one can find them. The real cost is not the tool switch itself. It's the gap between what you assume will transfer cleanly and what actually does. What moves cleanly: the safe tier Start here with the obvious wins. These transfer with minimal friction: Contacts and company records : Name, email, phone, address, basic custom fields. Pipedrive's native export handles this reliably. You get 95%+ accuracy as long as your data is clean (no duplicate emails, no malformed phone numbers). Deals and opportunity records : Deal name, amount, close date, stage, owner. The skeleton moves. What doesn't: custom stage logic, probability weightings, or deal splits across team members. Salesforce and Orin both import this flat structure easily. Basic activity logs : Call logs, task completion marks. These come through but lose context—timestamps survive; your notes about why a call went sideways may not, depending on field length and formatting. Products and price lists : If you've defined SKUs and pricing in Pipedrive, these export via CSV and reimport without drama. Format matters, but the data itself is portable. Realistically, 70–80% of your contact and deal records move without manual remediation. That's the floor, not the ceiling. The other 20–30% require a cleanup pass: merged duplicate records, orphaned deals with no owner, contacts missing critical fields. The partial losses: custom fields, history, and email threads This is where most teams get blindsided. Pipedrive stores rich data in custom fields—but the way it stores them doesn't always map to your new platform. Custom fields: structure vs. storage Pipedrive lets you add custom fields with light validation (text, number, dropdown, date). When you export, you get the field values , but not always the field structure . A dropdown in Pipedrive might come out as plain text in your CSV. Salesforce will accept the raw values, but you'll have to manually recreate the picklist logic and re-link field mappings. Orin's CRM pipeline and contact system handles this better—custom field types import more intelligently—but you're still responsible for validating that every dropdown option transferred. The tax: 2–4 hours per custom field to verify and remap. If you have 20 custom fields across contacts and deals, you're looking at a 40–80 hour remediation project. Activity history: breadth vs. depth Pipedrive logs activities (calls, emails, tasks) with timestamps and sometimes notes. Here's the problem: Salesforce's activity model is more rigid (Activities, Tasks, Events live in different objects). Orin stores activity more fluidly but still has structural assumptions. When you export from Pipedrive, you're exporting a flat log. When you import to Salesforce, you're forcing that log into a relational schema. Activities with no owner get orphaned. Logged calls with no linked contact name get duplicated. Email threads tied to deals might lose their deal linkage if the import doesn't map on a field you didn't export. The real cost is not the data itself—it's that 90 days of call history, if it imports at all, arrives as orphaned records with no searchability. Your team can't pull up "all calls with Company X in Q2." They have to dig into historical CSVs. Email threads: the silent killer Pipedrive captures email if you use the integration or BCC a Pipedrive address. But those emails—the full thread, the attachments, the metadata—live in Pipedrive's database, not in your email system. When you export, you get a CSV with email summaries, not the actual messages. Salesforce has native Salesforce Email-to-Salesforce integration that can re-capture future emails, but your historical threads are gone. Orin's unified messaging system consolidates WhatsApp, SMS, and email into a single inbox, but it doesn't backfill historical Pipedrive email logs. You can search them in Pipedrive's archive, but they won't live in your new CRM unless you manually export and re-import them as attachments—a messy, time-consuming process. Translation: you lose searchability on your email history. Q4 deal negotiation thread from last year? You'll have to ask the salesperson who owned it to dig it up. Forecasts, pipelines, and reporting: rebuilt, not transferred Pipedrive's forecast feature weights deals by stage and close date, then rolls them up by owne