Move from Close to Attio without the mess

A Close account used for a couple of years carries custom fields, sequences and smart views that made sense once and no longer do. Move all of it into Attio and you have recreated the same mess in a new tool. Do this on a whiteboard before you touch Close; the result almost always cuts the field count by at least 40%.

• Which objects do you actually need? People and Companies certainly, Deals in most cases. Then: which custom objects carry real business logic, and which are dead weight?
• Which fields matter? For each object, which feed a view, report, automation or daily work?
• Which relationships matter? How do records connect, and which connections have to come across?

Close has an unusual shape. A Lead in Close is company-like: it holds Contacts underneath it and carries Opportunities. That is different from most CRMs, where Contact and Company are separate peers — and it is the single most common thing teams get wrong on this migration.

The clean mapping flattens the Close structure and removes the lead/contact confusion that catches teams as they scale.

Close exports CSV from the app for Leads, Contacts, Opportunities and smart-view search results; the REST API is better when you want control over filtering, pagination and related objects in one pass. Keep the Close IDs in every export. Calls and SMS history are usually left as an archive in Close rather than migrated — there is rarely a clean way to import historical call recordings into a new CRM, and most teams do not need to.

• Remove duplicates. Close exports often include merged or near-duplicate leads and contacts.
• Standardise enumerated fields: one spelling per status, source, industry and owner, and normalise phone numbers and dates.
• Split Lead-level fields deliberately: some belong on the Company, some move to a Person.
• Recreate Close opportunity statuses as Attio deal statuses, same order and same names, so reporting continuity holds.
• Import Companies first, then People linked to Companies, then Deals linked to both. Activities, notes and custom objects last.
• Map the Close ID to an external identifier during import, and spot-check 10 to 20 records per file.

This is the Close-specific part, and skipping it is what kills these migrations. Attio is not a dialer. Calling, SMS and email sequences will live in tools that connect to it.

Decide this before go-live. A team that lands in Attio without a calling tool in place usually reverts to Close within a week.

• Calling and SMS through Aircall, OpenPhone or Dialpad, connected to Attio.
• Email sequences through an engagement tool such as lemlist, Instantly or Smartlead, with activity synced back to Attio.
• Inbound email logged through Attio's native email sync.

Close workflows and sequences do not translate one to one. Rebuild the core set — lead assignment by owner or territory, stage-change triggers that create tasks or post messages, deal-won notifications, activity creation from calendar and email sync — which takes an hour or two in Attio's builder. Close reports and smart views do not migrate either; recreate the ones somebody actually opens.

Then run both systems in parallel for a week: the team works in Attio and the new calling tool, Close stays read-only. Archive it after that and keep read access for 30 to 60 days before cancelling.

For a typical team under 30 users with a few custom objects, budget one to three weeks end to end. The data movement takes a few days; the rest is the model rebuild, the communications stack, and the automation rework. Heavy customisation and external integrations push it to four to six weeks.

• Treating a Close Lead like a Person. Close Leads are company-like — map them to Companies.
• Cutting over without a calling tool in place. Reps revert to Close within a week.
• Migrating every field, or porting every sequence instead of rebuilding in a tool actually built for sequences.
• Skipping the data model step.
• Losing the Close IDs in the export.