This page is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Talk to a qualified professional about your situation.
A CRM holds the commercial history of a company: accounts, contacts, opportunities won and lost, the notes after each call and the reports that tracked it all. All five buyers we cover name CRM data: Mercor lists Salesforce accounts, contacts, opportunities and reports; Mode, Troveo and Nyne name Salesforce and HubSpot; micro1 asks for CRM data and sales playbooks.
What is in it, and what to leave out
CRM records are mostly about other people and other companies, so scoping matters:
- Contact records: names, emails and phone numbers of people at your customers and prospects. Buyers de-identify them, but your privacy policy and any data processing terms decide whether they can be used at all. See privacy and de-identification.
- Customer confidential information: pricing, contract terms and plans a customer shared under an NDA.
- Purchased lead lists, which usually come with their own licence terms.
- Notes about individuals that would be sensitive even without a name attached.
Your sales playbooks, process documentation, pipeline stages and win-loss analysis are your own work and are usually the easiest part to include.
Exporting Salesforce and HubSpot
Salesforce: the Data Export service runs weekly on Enterprise, Performance and Unlimited editions and monthly on the others (except Database.com). The files can be downloaded for 48 hours and are removed when a new export is queued. Step by step: Salesforce data export.
HubSpot: on cancellation, the account is downgraded to HubSpot’s free tools rather than closed. HubSpot’s product terms give Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise customers 30 days to request their data in writing, and export download links expire after 30 days. Export before you downgrade if you rely on paid features. The data retention clock dates these steps.
CRM data and selling the business
The CRM is often what an acquirer is really buying. Licensing it to an AI developer before a sale can conflict with what the acquirer expects, and an exclusive data licence can limit the deal. If a sale is possible, read data as an asset when selling and customer data in a business sale first.
What buyers say about CRM and sales records
| Buyer | What its page names |
|---|---|
| Mercor | Salesforce accounts, contacts, opportunities and reports (source) |
| Mode | CRM and sales; Salesforce and HubSpot among its sources (source) |
| Troveo | Salesforce and HubSpot, under CRM and support (source) |
| Nyne | Customer records in Salesforce and HubSpot (source) |
| micro1 | CRM data and sales playbooks (source) |
Questions people ask
Is a CRM export enough on its own?
It is one of the systems every buyer we cover names, but buyers value records that connect: a deal in the CRM with the email thread, the proposal and the support tickets behind it. Mercor says compensation depends on the tools connected and the depth of data.
We are selling the company. Should we license the CRM first?
Talk to your M&A advisor first. An acquirer usually expects the customer relationships and their records to come with the business, and a data licence signed before the sale has to be disclosed and may limit what the acquirer gets.
Sources
- Mercor: Your enterprise data can advance frontier AI
- Mode: Get paid for your operational business data
- Troveo: License your business data
- Nyne: Sell company data
- micro1: Monetize your company's operational data
- Salesforce Help: Data Export Service FAQ
- HubSpot Knowledge Base: Cancel your HubSpot account
- HubSpot: Product-specific terms
- HubSpot Knowledge Base: Export records
Other kinds of company data
Years of customer, vendor and internal threads. Export before you cancel Google Workspace or Microsoft 365: deleted mailboxes do not come back.
Team chat
Slack and Teams show how decisions were made. Free Slack plans delete history after a year, and only some plans export private channels.
Documents and files
SOPs, proposals, specs and wikis in Drive, SharePoint, Dropbox, Box, Notion or Confluence. Each vendor deletes on its own schedule.
Support tickets
Thousands of real problems and how your team solved them. They are full of customer details, so privacy promises decide what you can include.
Source code
Repositories, commits, pull requests and issues show how software is really built. Third-party code and client work need sorting out first.
Projects and tasks
Jira, Asana and Monday boards record who did what, when and why. Asana's export right after termination lasts only 30 days.
Meeting and call recordings
Recorded calls and transcripts capture decisions as they happen. Only two buyers name them, and consent to recording matters most here.