Migrate from Zoho CRM to Thawly

Move your lost deals from Zoho CRM to Thawly in 10 minutes. Zoho's deal export is straightforward once you've filtered to the right stage — this guide uses a saved custom view, which keeps the flow tidy if you want to re-export periodically.

What you need#

• A Zoho CRM user with Module Permissions → Export for the Deals module. Standard, Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate editions all support export; only the very oldest Free editions disable it for non-admins.
• A modern browser. No Zoho API token, no Deluge script.
• About 10 minutes.

If your admin has restricted export, ask them to enable Export Records for your role on the Deals module. It's a one-toggle change.

Step-by-step extraction#

1. Log in to Zoho CRM at crm.zoho.com (or your regional URL — crm.zoho.eu for the EU data centre, crm.zoho.in for India, etc.). Match the data centre your account lives in.
2. From the top nav, click Deals. [Screenshot: Zoho CRM top nav with Deals tab]
3. In the Views dropdown (top left of the deals list), click + Create View. Build a custom view with these criteria:
   • Stage → is → Closed Lost (or your custom lost-stage names — Zoho lets admins customise these per pipeline).
   • Pipeline → is → your sales pipeline (skip the renewals/partner pipelines if you have several).
   • Optionally Closing Date → last → 3 years.
4. Add the columns you need to the view. Click Add Columns and select at minimum: Deal Name, Account Name, Amount, Closing Date, Stage, Lost Reason (or your custom field), Description, and any custom fields for Competitor or notes.
5. Save the view as something like Lost deals for Thawly. [Screenshot: Zoho CRM custom view editor with criteria and columns]
6. With the filtered list showing, click the More Actions (⋮) menu top-right of the deals list and choose Export Deals.
7. In the export dialogue, pick Selected View: Lost deals for Thawly (or use Custom Export and tick the same fields). Choose CSV as the format.
8. Click Export. Zoho generates the file and emails you a link, usually within a minute. For larger lists, downloads land in Setup → Data Administration → Export History.

Field mapping#

Thawly's importer auto-maps any reasonable header. For reference:

• Account Name → name (used for Companies House matching)
• Amount → deal_value (GBP — see currency note below if you're on multi-currency)
• Closing Date → lost_date
• Lost Reason (or custom equivalent) → lost_reason
• Custom Competitor field → lost_to
• Description + custom long-text note fields → notes

If you don't use Account Name consistently and your team puts the company straight into Deal Name (e.g. Ashbourne Holdings Ltd — Q3 expansion), Thawly will use Deal Name and run Companies House matching on it.

What to do with the Notes column#

Don't pre-clean. Paste the raw Description, plus any Notes content from the deal's right-hand panel. Thawly's AI is built to summarise messy activity logs — it extracts the structured bits (objection type, decision-maker title, competitor name, budget threshold) automatically. Editing by hand before upload is wasted effort.

If you want to bring across Notes (a separate object in Zoho, attached via the related list on the deal), the cleanest workflow is to add a custom long-text field on the Deal called Latest note and use a Zoho workflow to copy the most recent note into it. For most teams, the Description field on the deal record is enough on its own.

Common gotchas#

• Duplicate companies. Multiple lost deals against the same account are common (Linton Manufacturing Ltd lost three years running). Thawly de-duplicates on lower-cased name on import, so duplicates in the CSV are safe.
• Currency mismatches. Zoho's multi-currency module shows each deal in the deal's local currency in the Amount field. The Exchange Rate field lets you reconstruct base-currency values, but the easier route is to filter the view to Currency = GBP before exporting.
• Multi-pipeline issues. Zoho's pipelines are layered — a deal lives in a single pipeline, and lost-stage names can be customised per pipeline. Make sure your filter targets the right pipeline; pulling renewals or partner-deal "lost" rows skews the data.
• Stale "won" or "open" deals. Zoho lets admins set up custom stage names like Closed Lost (recoverable) or Lost — competitor pricing. Use a stage filter that lists every "lost" stage explicitly rather than Stage contains lost, to avoid catching Lost cause investigated or similar workflow stages.
• Lost Reason as a separate object. In some Zoho orgs, Lost Reason is a separate child record (Zoho's LostReason linking module) rather than a picklist on the deal. If your export's Lost Reason column is empty, ask your admin to add the linked-field column so it surfaces in the export.

What happens next#

Drop the CSV at thawly.co.uk/upload. Thawly auto-maps the columns, runs Companies House lookup on every Account name and shows a per-row preview where you can fix bad matches before importing.

After import, monitoring runs on the next signal-source pass. Your first digest only arrives when something genuinely re-engageable happens — read Reading your digest for what to expect.

Coming from a different CRM?#

• Migrate from Bigin (Zoho's small-business CRM) — if your team is on Bigin rather than full Zoho CRM.
• Migrate from HubSpot — similar list-view export pattern.
• Migrate from a spreadsheet — if you'd rather drop the data straight from Excel.

For the philosophy, read Dead deal recovery and Buying signals in B2B sales.