Migrate from SugarCRM to Thawly

Move your closed-lost opportunities from SugarCRM to Thawly in 10 minutes. SugarCRM ships in three flavours — Sugar Sell, Sugar Serve and Sugar Enterprise (formerly Professional/Ultimate) — and the export workflow is the same across all three: a saved Opportunities list filter plus the Export action under the Actions menu.

What you need#

• A SugarCRM user with Export permission on the Opportunities module. Default Admin and Sales Manager roles include it; sales-rep roles often have it too. If you can see the Export option under the Actions menu on the Opportunities list, you're set.
• A modern browser. No SugarCRM API token, no SugarCloud Studio customisations.
• About 10 minutes.

If your admin has restricted export, ask them to enable Export on the Opportunities module under Admin → Role Management. Some Sugar deployments turn off export for compliance — it's a one-toggle change to flip it back on for a specific user.

Step-by-step extraction#

1. Log in to SugarCRM through your tenant URL — usually https://<your-instance>.sugarondemand.com or your on-premise installation URL.
2. From the top nav, click Opportunities. [Screenshot: SugarCRM top nav with Opportunities module selected]
3. In the search-bar at the top of the list, build a filter:
   • Sales Stage → Closed Lost (plus any custom lost stages — Disqualified, Lost — Competitor, No Decision).
   • Pipeline (if you have a custom field for it) → your sales pipeline.
   • Optionally Expected Close Date → Last 3 years.
4. Save the filter as Lost deals for Thawly so you can re-run it.
5. Add the columns you want from the column-picker (top-right of the list, looks like a slider). Tick at minimum: Opportunity Name, Account Name, Likely (the Likely amount field), Date Closed, Sales Stage, Lost Reason, Description, plus any custom fields. [Screenshot: SugarCRM Opportunities list with column picker open]
6. With the filtered list visible, tick the checkbox at the top of the list to Select all rows in this filter (not just the visible page).
7. Click the Actions menu top-right of the list and choose Export.
8. In the export dialogue, choose CSV as the format and All visible columns. Confirm the export.
9. SugarCRM downloads the CSV directly to your browser. For larger exports, the file lands under Admin → System → Export Queue.
10. Open the CSV in Excel or Google Sheets to sanity-check the row count before uploading.

Field mapping#

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

• Account Name → name (best column for Companies House matching)
• Likely → deal_value (GBP — Sugar's "Likely" amount is the canonical deal value field)
• Date Closed → lost_date
• Lost Reason → lost_reason
• Custom Competitor field → lost_to
• Description + custom long-text note fields → notes

If your Sugar tenant uses Best, Worst or Likely as separate amount fields (Sugar's three-point estimate model), use Likely as the canonical deal value. Thawly's prioritisation uses deal value as a weighting input, and Likely is the most representative figure.

What to do with the Notes column#

Don't pre-clean. SugarCRM stores notes against opportunities in the Description field plus a related Notes module. Paste the raw Description straight in. Thawly's AI summarises long activity logs and extracts structured signals (objection type, decision-maker title, competitor name, budget threshold) on its own.

If you want to bring across the related Notes module entries (separate from the Description field), the cleanest workflow is to use SugarBPM to populate a calculated long-text field on the opportunity with concatenated note bodies. For most teams, the Description field alone is enough — the Notes module is usually duplicative.

Common gotchas#

• Duplicate companies. SugarCRM's Account-Opportunity relationship naturally produces multiple lost opportunities against the same Account (Tewkesbury Group Ltd lost three times in 2024-2025). Thawly de-duplicates on lower-cased company name on import, so duplicates in the CSV are safe.
• Currency mismatches. SugarCRM supports per-opportunity currency. The Likely column shows the deal's local currency; Likely (Base) converts to your tenant's base currency. Filter to Currency = GBP before exporting, or post-process the CSV.
• Multi-pipeline issues. Sugar doesn't have a built-in Pipeline field on Opportunities — most teams add it as a custom field. Filter on your custom pipeline field rather than relying on stage names. Stage names are reused across pipelines, so a stage filter alone leaks cross-pipeline rows.
• Stale "won" or "open" deals. Sugar's Sales Stage picklist is heavily customised in most deployments. Don't assume Closed Lost is the only lost-equivalent value — ask your admin which stages map to a "lost" outcome. Common custom names include Disqualified, No Decision, Lost — Competitor, Lost — Budget. List them all in the filter explicitly.
• Studio-customised field names. SugarCRM's Studio module lets admins rename or replace standard fields with custom equivalents. Your tenant might have c_lost_reason instead of Lost Reason, or amount_gbp instead of Likely. Sanity-check the CSV column headers before uploading — Thawly's auto-mapper handles most variations, but custom prefixes occasionally need manual mapping on the preview screen.

What happens next#

Drop the CSV at thawly.co.uk/upload. We auto-map the columns, run a Companies House lookup on every Account name and show you a per-row preview before importing.

After import, monitoring runs on the next signal-source pass. Your first digest only lands when there's a real signal — see Reading your digest.

Coming from a different CRM?#

• Migrate from Salesforce — similar enterprise CRM with a comparable filter-and-export workflow.
• Migrate from Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales — another enterprise alternative for teams who outgrow Sugar.
• Migrate from a spreadsheet — if you've already cleaned the data in Excel.

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