Migrate from Saleshandy to Instantly Without Wrecking Your Sending Domains

The moment teams decide to migrate off Saleshandy tends to follow a predictable script: they hit the per-user seat wall, catch a deliverability scare on a domain they’ve spent months building, or discover that the warmup tooling they assumed was included costs extra. I’ve watched this exact sequence play out with three clients in the last six months. The frustrating part isn’t the decision to leave. It’s the two weeks of limbo where sequences are paused, DNS records are half-migrated, and someone watches reply rates fall off a cliff. This guide is a playbook for doing the switch cleanly, so you land in Instantly with your sending domains intact and your pipeline moving.

Before You Migrate: The Prep Checklist

Skipping this section is how teams lose two weeks of sending. Do this work before you cancel Saleshandy or touch a DNS record.

• Export all active contacts. Go to Saleshandy’s Prospects section, filter by campaign, and export each list as a CSV. Include custom field columns or you will rebuild that data from scratch.
• Document your sequences. There is no native export for sequence steps. Open each active sequence and copy the subject lines, body copy, wait days, and step counts into a Google Doc or Notion page. I screenshot every step and drop them into a shared Drive folder. Tedious, but it takes maybe 20 minutes and saves you from guessing later.
• Note your sending limits per mailbox. Saleshandy enforces sending caps differently than Instantly. Document how many emails per day each connected mailbox was sending. You will use this to configure Instantly’s ramp-up settings.
• Identify which domains are actively sending. Any domain sending more than 100 emails per day needs a longer warmup runway in the new tool. Flag those separately.
• Pause (do not delete) active sequences. Pausing preserves your place in each contact’s step history. If a reply comes in during the migration window, you will know where they were in the flow.
• Keep Saleshandy active until Instantly is fully configured. Canceling early is how you end up with a two-week gap in sending.

What Breaks and What Does Not Transfer

This is the section I wish someone had handed me the first time I ran this migration for a client.

CHECKLIST: What transfers safely

Contact data (CSV export)
  - First name, last name, company
  - Email, LinkedIn URL
  - Any custom fields you export
    and remap in Instantly

Sequence copy
  - Subject lines (re-paste manually)
  - Body text (re-paste manually)
  - Step delays and sending windows

Domain health
  - SPF/DKIM/DMARC records persist
    in DNS (just add Instantly selectors)
  - Domain age and history unaffected

Sender reputation (partial)
  - Domain-level reputation carries
  - IP/infrastructure reputation resets
  - Warmup required regardless

The suppression list issue bites people badly, and I’ve seen it firsthand. One team I worked with had 400 Saleshandy unsubscribes that never made it into Instantly. They re-emailed a chunk of them in week one and caught a compliance complaint within 48 hours. Export that list on day zero. Not day two. Day zero.

Verify It Worked

Before you call the migration complete, run through these four checks:

1. MXToolbox or mail-tester.com on each sending domain. Confirm SPF includes Instantly’s sending IP range, DKIM passes with Instantly’s selector, and DMARC is reporting rather than blocking during the transition window.
2. Send a test email from each migrated mailbox to a Gmail and an Outlook address you control. Open the raw headers and confirm the d= field in the DKIM signature matches your domain, not Saleshandy’s.
3. Check Instantly’s warmup dashboard after 48 hours. You should see warmup sends going out and positive engagement signals (opens, replies from the warmup pool) registering. If the warmup counter is stuck at zero, the mailbox connection is broken.
4. Confirm your unsubscribe block list is active. Import your Saleshandy suppression export, go to Instantly’s block list settings, and verify the count matches. Spot-check two or three addresses to confirm they would be blocked from new campaigns.

Which Saleshandy Alternative Is Right for Your Stack

Instantly is the right destination for most Saleshandy migrations. It is not the only answer. Here is how I think about the decision across different team profiles.

Which Saleshandy Alternative Fits Your Team

Choose Instantly if

• You run more than 5 sending mailboxes and want flat-rate pricing per mailbox
• Deliverability and warmup tooling needs to be native, not bolted on via a third-party integration
• You want Unibox (unified inbox) to manage replies across all accounts in one place

From $37/mo Try Instantly →

Choose Smartlead if

• You need AI-assisted personalization and dynamic copy generation at the campaign level
• Your sequences are multi-channel (email plus LinkedIn touch points in the same flow)
• You are already using Clay for enrichment and want tighter API-level integration

From $39/mo Try Smartlead →

Choose Quickmail if

• Your team sends at moderate volume and wants per-seat pricing rather than per-mailbox
• You want built-in inbox rotation without managing multiple accounts manually
• Simplicity over features: you need a tool a non-technical SDR can own independently

From $49/mo Try Quickmail →

Choose Mailshake if

• Your outbound is tightly coupled to a CRM (HubSpot or Salesforce) and you need native two-way sync
• You run a hybrid inbound/outbound motion and need phone and social tasks inside the same sequence
• Your team is already on Mailshake and the migration pain is not worth the cost savings

From $58/seat/mo Try Mailshake →

One thing worth planning for: if you are routing Instantly replies into a CRM deal flow, the Instantly to Pipedrive via n8n auto-create deals workflow is worth building in the same migration sprint. You are already rebuilding sequences, so wiring up the CRM pipeline at the same time costs almost nothing extra in setup time.

One Sprint, Clean Migration

A Saleshandy to Instantly migration is a three-to-four week project. Not a weekend job. Week one is exports, docs, and DNS. Week two is Instantly account setup and warmup activation. Weeks three and four are the warmup runway before you push any cold volume. Compress this into a long weekend and you will lose domain reputation that took months to earn.

Do the prep. Respect the warmup window. Re-verify your suppression lists. You will come out the other side with lower per-mailbox costs, better deliverability tooling, and a sending infrastructure that scales horizontally without seat-based pricing walls.

For teams also evaluating Smartlead as their destination, the warmup and DNS steps are nearly identical. The main difference is sequence rebuild time. Smartlead’s campaign builder has more conditional branching options, which take longer to configure from scratch. And if you are thinking about enrichment to refill your pipeline post-migration, the Cognism vs Apollo vs Lusha comparison for European outbound is worth reading before you reload contact lists.