The hidden gap in migrating your CRM data

With more companies migrating between CRM providers, there is a gap many miss. A migration is the perfect time to use the move to improve your data quality, and almost nobody does. We are going to look at the missing step in any migration when it comes to data.

Company and contact data goes out of date fast. How fast is harder to pin down than it looks, because almost every number you will read on it was published by a company that sells contact data. They do not agree with each other either: the figures in circulation run from around 12% of a database going stale in a year to 70%, which is a spread of more than five times for what is supposed to be the same measurement.

The most careful of them is Lusha's, and it carries more weight than the rest because it argues against its own interest. They counted employment changes across whole cohorts rather than samples, the largest close to 148,000 contacts, and found 12.25% of senior US sales contacts changed role inside twelve months and 25.67% inside twenty four. Their conclusion is that the 30% figure everybody repeats is roughly right, but it is a two year number being quoted as a one year one. Even on the most cautious of these numbers, a quarter of your senior contacts are somewhere else within two years.

So how does that affect migrations? Short answer, it doesn't. But it does provide a great opportunity to solve the problem.

When companies migrate between CRMs the focus is typically between their current provider and their new provider, making sure the processes and features they want and rely on in their current system will work in their new system. Data is the biggest if not the number one point of a CRM. Managing, processing and relaying that data across the right places. The priority is that the data from the current provider gets to the new provider's system without any loss in between. Almost like a copy and paste on a huge scale.

In the middle of that there is an opportunity to improve the data's quality and make what lands in your new CRM more accurate and up to date for the people who have to work with it. So why don't more companies take advantage of it? There's a few reasons.

1. 01Enrichment normally happens somewhere else. Data enhancement or enrichment usually either happens at the point of importing the data into the CRM, or through tools inside the CRM itself once the data is already there. HubSpot's Breeze Intelligence, the old Clearbit, is the clearest example of the second kind. Both patterns assume the data has already arrived, which is exactly why the middle of a migration gets skipped.
2. 02Nobody wants to touch the data on the way across. The risk of migrating CRMs and losing data is already high, so adding more risk on top by starting to change that data might be too much for some companies.
3. 03The cost. Enriching data has a cost attached to it, and at volume that can run to a number too dear for some companies. Enrichment is almost always priced per record or per credit, so the bill scales with the size of the database rather than the size of the job, which is what makes it the first thing cut from a migration budget.

Before we break down the types of enrichment, it's worth listing the main types of data that live in a CRM.

• Outbound lead lists. These are lists the sales department go outbound to, whether they are warm lists provided by marketing with intent signal or cold outbound lists in different verticals. These typically have company name, personas and their contact details such as phone numbers and emails, and any other relevant information along with notes on the progress.
• Inbound lists. These are lists of data that have come from website queries or ads, of companies or prospects expressing an interest in your business (most of the time). These depend on the forms used to capture the details of the enquiry, but usually include company name, email address, reason for enquiry and the person's contact details and title.
• Current deals in progress. These are opportunities which are further along the sales process and actively engaging, whether they are at early stage or contract signed stage. These are usually rich data sources with multiple stakeholders aligned in the CRM, documents attached to the deal and next steps.
• Current customers or clients. These are lists of users, companies and their engagements, contract renewals and buying history. A very rich source of data which is prioritizing retention and upsells.
• Mailing lists. While these can live in a separate system, some are run off CRMs: large lists of signups to newsletters or other forms of lead capture, and cold outbound mass lists.
• Suppression and do not contact lists. The people who asked not to be contacted, the competitors, the current customers who should never see an outbound sequence. This is the one type where getting the migration wrong is worse than losing the data, because a suppression list that does not arrive intact means contacting somebody who told you not to.
• Churned customers and lapsed accounts. Keep them, and label them, because a rep working a list has to know the difference between a company that never bought and one that left.

So with all this data flowing around a CRM, with different use cases and departments using it, it's easy to see why enrichment is low if not off the priority list entirely during a migration.

The work splits into two categories. One costs you time and the other costs you money.

Cleanup

Cleaning up a CRM is the first step. It is everything you can do with what you already have. Cleaning data: what it means, and who ends up doing it is the wider version of this same job, run on a schedule rather than because a migration forced it.

• Removing duplicate accounts that may have got in.
• Old leads. Yes, time to throw away that five year old inbound lead that never contacted you back.
• Mailing lists with incorrect email addresses. You have a list of emails you send to, and through engagement and tracking it's easy to tell which ones are accurate and actually work. Remove the dead ones.
• Incorrect customer or client information. That person listed on the account as the key contact left their role 18 months ago. A great way to fix this is to let your customers or clients know you are migrating to a new CRM and updating their details, and could they let you know the current ones.
• For ongoing deals, it provides an opportunity to check in on stalled opportunities and a reason to contact them. Updated pipeline figures keep everyone happy.

As you can see, the cleanup operation isn't just about getting rid of dead data. It's an opportunity across departments to update and capture the most up to date details, and the reason to make the call is one nobody minds receiving.

Enrichment

This is where you don't just clean the data, you add to it. It can happen while the cleanup is ongoing, however it's better to get as much of the cleanup done first. This is also where you will likely have to pull in resources outside of your organization.

• Updating reps' contact lists with up to date information. Enrichment provides an opportunity to refresh lists for outbound work by getting more accurate contact details on personas, with the phone numbers and email addresses that currently work.
• It is also the moment to change verticals and add new ones in. With the cleanup done it is clear to see which industries or personas have more buying signals, or by evaluating the current customer portfolio, which personas you typically engage with. When there are masses of unclean data polluting the CRM it's harder to see clearly, no matter how many pretty dashboards are set up.
• Updating company details across all channels. It is a chance to enhance the detail per account: they recently went through a merger, which is a good talking point. The company address has changed, which is worth knowing before anything gets posted to the old one. New CEO brought in, new fundraising round, just changed their telephony system. There's a lot of signal and intent data out there to be used and it can be applied during the enrichment process.

As said earlier, a lot of this enrichment is going to have to be done by external providers. Dun & Bradstreet for company information, and Cognism, ZoomInfo, Lusha or Apollo for contact details on personas. They price per record or per credit, so work out what your real list costs on each before you commit to one.

There's a few ways it can be done, and in different orders.

1. 01The cleanup goes at the midpoint. This is when the data is out of your current CRM and not yet in the new one. It can either be done by a platform like Operelio, or by hand with spreadsheets. This is also where you bring other departments on board, so it isn't just a remove duplicates and spreadsheet exercise but a mass update and removal of dead information company wide. Cleaning data before vs after a CRM import sets out the case for each side.
2. 02The enrichment happens once the cleanup is done. It can take place after the cleaned data has entered the new CRM, or, better, while the data is still held at the midpoint. Enriching a file is easier than enriching a live CRM, because the file is not being edited underneath you.

Yes, this means getting the data from your current CRM to the new one takes slightly longer, and Risks of migrating your CRM is blunt about what a longer window costs you: every hour the old system stays live is more records to catch up on afterwards. The two fit together better than they look. The freeze applies to the old CRM, not to your file. Once the export is out, the old system is read only and nothing new is being created in it, so the cleanup and the enrichment happen on a file that nobody is working in. What grows your catch-up delta is the time before the export, not the time you spend on the data afterwards.

We do the cleanup part, apart from the cross-department work, which is people led and always will be. So what we do is remove the duplicates, verify the emails, check the companies are still active, and give you somewhere to stage the midpoint of your migration rather than doing it in a folder of spreadsheets on somebody's laptop.

Every tool writes a new file rather than changing the one you uploaded, so you can always step back a version if a cleanup went further than you wanted. That much is on every plan. On Pro and Agency the workspace is shared, which is where the rest of it earns its place in a migration: you can bring the other departments in, hand a file to the person who actually knows whether that account is still live, and an admin can see the audit trail of who ran what.

If you want to do the enrichment as well, the data from those providers comes back as a file like any other, and Match & pull columns puts it alongside your cleaned data on the matching company or email. You end up with one file rather than four.

From there the CRM Formatter puts the file into the shape your new CRM expects. It knows eight CRMs, has a generic format for the rest, and takes a custom template if your new system wants something of its own. For HubSpot, Salesforce and Pipedrive you can push straight in over OAuth and skip the new importer entirely, which helps when nobody has got the hang of it yet. For the rest you download an import-ready file and hand it to the native importer, which is a much smaller ask than learning it on your live data.

With a huge amount of data and different types of data, each one can be separated out and funnelled in when it's ready. Trails schedule and automate the imports, so the deals go in on Monday and the mailing lists follow on Wednesday without anybody sitting there doing it.

Health Check, merging, deduplicating and the formatter are on every plan. Full email verification, the company active check, the direct push and trails are paid, and shared workspaces start on Pro. What each plan includes is on the pricing page.

Think of the whole move as a three step process.

After that, as an ongoing process, Operelio lets you run automated imports, so if more enrichment data needs to go into the system later you already have the workflows set up and can keep the cleaned data funnelling in. The CRM import problem is what that looks like as a permanent job rather than a one off.