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CRM Migration
Move to a new CRM without losing data, workflows or momentum.
Overview
What we do & why it matters
Migrations fail when data, automation and reporting are treated as an afterthought. We migrate in parallel — data, workflows, integrations and dashboards — then cut over cleanly so your team keeps selling.
What’s included
- Data audit, mapping & cleansing
- Workflow & automation rebuild
- Integration re-connection
- Historical reporting preservation
- Parallel run & clean cutover
- Post-migration support
Part of our CRM engagement · from transparent pricing.
Why migrations hurt
The data is never the hard part.
Exporting records and importing them elsewhere is a solved problem. What breaks a migration is everything attached to those records: duplicate logic, custom fields nobody can explain, automations that fire on fields that no longer exist, and reports the board reads every Monday.
Field archaeology
Most CRMs accumulate fields that are half-used and contradictory. Migrating them as-is imports the mess; deciding what dies is the real work.
Duplicate and merge rules
Two systems define a duplicate differently. Without an explicit rule, the new CRM inherits both definitions and neither works.
Automation parity
Every workflow, assignment rule and notification has to exist on day one or the team quietly returns to spreadsheets.
Reporting continuity
If historical numbers change after the move, trust in the new system is gone regardless of how clean the data is.
The safe pattern is a dry run on a copy, a reconciliation report both sides sign off, and a cutover window with a defined rollback — not a weekend and hope.
How we run it
Migration in stages.
Before the move
The decisions that determine whether this goes well
Most migration pain is created before any data moves, by skipping decisions that feel administrative. Each one below gets settled in writing first, because discovering it mid-migration costs ten times as much.
What actually comes across
Not everything should. Fifteen years of dead leads and duplicate accounts migrate just as readily as good data, and then they are your problem in a new system.
The object model
How companies, contacts, deals and products relate. Carrying over a structure that never worked is the most common way to migrate a problem rather than solve it.
Field-by-field mapping
Including the custom fields nobody can explain and the picklist values that mean different things to different teams. Agreed before export, not during import.
History and attachments
Emails, calls, notes and files. Technically the hardest part and the first thing sales notices missing on day one.
Integration inventory
Everything reading from or writing to the current system, including the spreadsheet somebody built four years ago that finance depends on.
Deal stage definitions
The moment to fix stages that mean nothing. Afterwards, changing them means re-educating a team that just learned a new system.
This phase produces a written migration plan you can disagree with before anything is irreversible, which is the entire point of doing it first.
Running it
How the move itself is executed
The goal is a cutover where sales notices a new interface and nothing else. That means rehearsing rather than planning, and keeping an exit available until the new system has proven itself.
Cleanse before you move
Deduplication, normalisation and deletion in the old system where the context still exists. Dirty data imported is dirty data forever.
A full rehearsal
The entire migration into a sandbox, with the same volume and the same scripts. Surprises belong in the rehearsal, not in the cutover.
Reconciliation by count and sample
Record counts matched per object, plus manual inspection of a random sample. Counts alone hide mangled fields.
Integrations rebuilt and tested
Each one verified in the new system before cutover, not discovered broken on the Monday after.
A real cutover window
A defined freeze, a sequence, named owners for each step, and a documented rollback position.
Support in the first weeks
The period when every gap surfaces. Budgeted for explicitly rather than treated as warranty work nobody scheduled.
Adoption
The part that decides whether the migration was worth it
A technically perfect migration into a system nobody updates produces worse data than the mess you left. Adoption is engineering work, not a training session.
We would rather spend a week removing required fields than a quarter explaining why the pipeline report is wrong.
Afterwards
The first ninety days, which decide whether it held
Migrations are judged on the cutover weekend and won or lost in the quarter after it. Most of the problems that make people regret a migration appear in weeks three to eight, once the novelty has worn off and the workarounds start.
A weekly data quality list
Duplicates, stale deals, missing stages and unowned records surfaced as a short list someone works through, not a dashboard nobody opens.
Friction collected and fixed
Every ‘I just use a spreadsheet for that’ is a design failure. Collected deliberately in the first weeks, while people still mention it.
Adoption measured honestly
Not logins. Whether deals are actually progressing through stages and whether the data supports a forecast anyone trusts.
Required fields reviewed
Anything being filled with nonsense to get past a validation rule should be removed. Taxed data gets faked, reliably.
Reporting reconciled
The first month-end in the new system compared against the old one, with every discrepancy explained rather than averaged over.
Old system archived on schedule
Read-only for a defined period, then closed. An indefinitely available old system guarantees two sources of truth.
We budget for this period explicitly rather than treating it as warranty work, because it is where the value of the whole project is realised or lost.
Honest limits
When not to migrate
Migration is disruptive and expensive, and it is frequently proposed as a solution to problems it cannot touch.
The process is the problem
If the sales process is undefined, a new CRM will record the same chaos with better styling. Fix the process first; it is cheaper and it may remove the need.
Nobody uses the current one
Low adoption is rarely about the tool. Moving an unused system somewhere new produces a new unused system.
The real issue is reporting
Often what is wanted is attribution and clean reporting, which is a RevOps problem solvable without replacing anything.
Mid-quarter
Migrating during a quarter close is a choice to disrupt the team at the worst possible moment. Timing is a real variable.
No internal owner
Without someone whose job includes the CRM, any system degrades. Identify them before the project, not after.
Driven by a licence renewal
A renewal date is a reason to negotiate, not a reason to migrate. The deadline pressure reliably produces a worse migration.
More CRM
The rest of the CRM stack.
Questions
CRM Migration, answered.
Will we lose data or history?
No — we map and validate every object and preserve historical reporting so you don’t lose continuity.
How long does a migration take?
Typically 4–8 weeks depending on data volume and integration complexity, run in parallel to avoid downtime.
How long does a CRM migration take?
For a straightforward move — clean data, few integrations, standard objects — four to eight weeks end to end, most of it in planning and rehearsal rather than in the move itself. Complex migrations with heavy customisation, many integrations or years of messy history run three to six months. The variable that dominates the estimate is not record count but how many decisions nobody has made yet: what to bring, how objects should relate, what the stages mean. We scope that in the first conversation rather than quoting from a record count.
Will we lose data or history?
Not if the planning is done properly, and the honest caveat is that some things are genuinely harder than others. Records, fields and relationships migrate reliably. Email history, call logs, attachments and audit trails are where the difficulty sits, and the answer depends on what the source system's export actually exposes — some platforms make it straightforward and some make parts of it impossible. We establish exactly what can come across during planning and tell you plainly what cannot, rather than discovering it during the cutover.
Can we keep the old system running in parallel?
Read-only, for a defined period, yes — and we recommend it. Keeping both systems writable is where data integrity dies: two sources of truth diverge within days and nobody can tell which is correct. The usual arrangement is the old system available read-only for a quarter so anyone can check history, then archived. A dual-write arrangement is occasionally justified for a staged migration across business units, and it costs considerably more to run safely.
Should we clean the data before or after moving?
Before, in the old system, while the context still exists. The person who can tell you whether two accounts are duplicates is usually looking at fields and history that may not survive the move. Cleaning afterwards means doing it with less information and with the mess already embedded in the new system. The one exception is deduplication logic that the target platform does better, which we use as a second pass rather than a first.
What happens to our integrations?
They get inventoried, rebuilt and tested before cutover, and the inventory stage usually finds more than anyone expected — including the spreadsheet somebody built years ago that a finance process quietly depends on. Each integration is either rebuilt natively in the new platform, reconnected through a middleware layer, or retired because nobody can name what it is for. The testing happens in the rehearsal environment, so integrations are verified working before the real move rather than after.
Do you work with our existing admin or replace them?
Work with them, and they are usually the most valuable person in the project. They know which custom fields matter, which picklist values are load-bearing and which automations will break. Where there is no internal admin, we will say that finding one is a prerequisite rather than an optional extra — a CRM without an owner degrades within two quarters regardless of how well it was implemented.
What does it cost?
It is scoped against complexity rather than record count: number of objects and custom fields, how many integrations need rebuilding, how much history must come across, and how much process definition is missing. A straightforward move is a defined project; a migration that also fixes an undefined sales process is two projects and we price them separately so you can see which is which. Our pricing page gives the ranges, and the audit produces a fixed figure before you commit.
Can you just advise while our team does the work?
Yes, and for teams with a capable admin that is often the better value. We produce the migration plan, the field mapping, the rehearsal scripts and the reconciliation checks, and review at each gate while your team executes. What we would push back on is advisory-only when there is no internal capacity to execute — a plan nobody has time to follow produces the worst outcome of all, which is a half-finished migration with two live systems.
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