Risks of migrating your CRM

Migrating from one CRM to another used to be a tedious, risky and expensive task for any organization with any decent amount of data. It meant you were going to have to go through the process of engaging with both your current CRM provider and your new CRM provider to try and make the transition as painless as possible, and it's still the same now. There were and still are expensive consultancy companies who would happily take your money in order to handle the full process for you. Should you automate your lead flow? has the figures on what that kind of engagement runs to. The costs and risks associated with migrating put a lot of companies off and meant the attitude of "it's safer to stick with what we have" ruled, even if that meant sticking with a legacy or not fit for purpose CRM.

So why has it now become a much more common exercise for a company to say "let's migrate"? We are going to explore the reasons why companies migrate and how it can be done much quicker and safer than ever before.

The reasons usually fall into one of these categories when a company decides it's time for a change.

1. 01Cost. The per seat price you sign up at is rarely the price you end up paying. Introductory pricing gets you in, then it moves as you get established in the system. Couple in adding custom bolt-ons, suddenly a package you thought was cheap per user becomes very expensive. This means companies start to hop between providers when the cost suddenly outweighs the system's benefits. With so many providers to choose from now, there's always another provider.
2. 02Legacy processes and systems. A lot of more established companies started with a CRM years or even decades ago. When they established their CRMs, the choice was much less, and the provider was usually decided by what was available compared to what worked for the company. A lot of companies used ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems as CRMs, the SAPs, Oracles, Sages and Dynamics of the world, which worked well for most of the business but is now hindering the sales and marketing teams.
3. 03New management team or ideas. It's very common when a new member or members are brought into a company's management team, that they want to put their own stamp and identity on the business (a great time to contact them if you are selling, as a side point). When this happens, usually the shift is towards what the new management structure has worked with in the past when it comes to CRMs. For example, if someone has used Salesforce their entire career and their new company is using HubSpot, it's highly likely that new company would transition to HubSpot.

1. 01Downtime. Swapping between two CRMs risks outages on service or activity. For example, if your sales team is using the CRM daily and they have to stop using the current CRM while the transition takes place, that's activity going untracked. Same with time to lead response. If your CRM is managing all inbound leads, usually someone can get to the inbound lead in minutes when everything's working properly. Now you have a scenario where the leads are getting routed somewhere else and no one is picking them up as quick as they used to.
2. 02Bad data. While there are essentially two CRMs in operation, data could be being updated in one CRM and not the other one, which means there's inconsistencies in the data. For example, a salesperson updating their call notes in the old CRM while the data has already been funnelled across to the new CRM means that the new CRM has outdated data.
3. 03Training. As much as companies like to think every user will be fully efficient within a week of implementing the new CRM, the reality is it is going to lead to a drop in overall productivity in the short term. Unless the users have used the CRM previously, there is going to be a learning curve where you have disrupted their normal workflows and how they navigate around the new CRM. It will likely take months for normal efficiency to resume, which means there has to be an allowance for the learning curve and heavy training either internally or from the new CRM provider. Yes, that does mean a drop in targets or expected KPIs.
4. 04Misalignments on the new provider versus the old provider. Companies don't migrate lightly, especially larger enterprise companies. However, there are scenarios where the new CRM provider you were sold has different functionality to what you took as standard in the old CRM. It's very easy to get caught up on the shiny new features a new provider can offer you, however when implementation happens, suddenly it's realised that the key feature of your old CRM isn't a part of your new provider and you never thought to ask because it was so standard in your head.
5. 05Bureaucracy. Migrating CRMs is not just a technology risk but a human risk as well. This involves getting multiple departments involved in legal, compliance, HR, IT, operations, marketing and sales. All it takes is one of these departments to present a blocker or have an individual that is not on board with the migration, and things can become less smooth. At smaller companies this is usually less of an issue. At larger companies I have seen migrations stall to a halt because someone in legal has raised some flags on the new CRM server locations, as an example.
6. 06What the migration won't move. A contact export is rows and columns, so rows and columns are what move: contacts, companies, and the attributes on them. Anything that isn't a row in that file doesn't come with it, and no spreadsheet tool changes that. Notes are the exception worth knowing about: if your export has a notes column, that can come across with the record. The rest either gets rebuilt in the new CRM or stays in the old one, and that is a conversation to have before you sign rather than during implementation.

So a company has established they want to migrate CRMs, they have evaluated the risks, and they have a provider they want to migrate to. What do they do next?

• Make it clear in writing to your current provider that you don't plan to extend the contract. Always check contract end dates, as CRM providers usually have a 30, 60 or 90 day cancellation period before the contract auto renews.
• Do a risk analysis across the organization and engage the key stakeholders with the risks.
• Establish internal support within the organization. This means having more than just you on board with the migration, no matter how senior you are.
• Engage with your new provider on how they can help migrate you across. Every major CRM publishes a bulk importer and onboarding help, and providers can be extremely helpful in getting you migrated to their system. It is in their best interests to get you set up as soon as possible.
• Create a project plan and clear timeline and, depending on the size of the organization, assign one or multiple people to manage the migration if not yourself.
• Communicate to the wider organization that a planned migration is happening and explain the reasons why.
• Put together a clear training plan to get all required users up to speed as quickly as possible.
• Agree how you will stop the two systems drifting apart. That is the fix for the bad data risk above. The usual answer is not a live sync between them. It is a freeze and a delta: you set the old CRM to read only so nothing new gets created in it, then move across everything that was created or updated during the migration window itself. HubSpot's own migration guidance makes the point well, that even a 48 hour window can generate hundreds of new records in an active sales team. Keep the old system read only until the new one is properly bedded in.

At this point the direction the migration takes can vary depending on the size and scale of the job. A small number of users and not much data can take days or weeks. A large scale amount of data, processes and users can take months.

Whatever the scale, the order is the same, and getting it wrong is one of the quieter ways a migration goes bad. Parent records go before the records that hang off them: users first so that ownership has somewhere to land, then companies, then contacts, then deals, then tickets, then anything custom, and activities and attachments last. Those last two are the ones a contact export can't carry, so those last steps need your new provider's own migration tooling rather than a file. Load a contact before the company it belongs to and you get a record sitting on its own with nothing attached to it.

There is one more thing that happens in this window, and it only happens once. Whatever you carry across is what the new CRM starts life with. If the old one had years of duplicates, dead email addresses and half-finished records in it, and you move them across as they are, you have paid for a migration and bought yourself the same mess in a nicer interface.

Where Operelio comes in

Operelio does the data move, not the migration. You export from the old CRM yourself, because that is a button in its own settings and nobody needs a tool for it. It's what happens between that export and the new CRM that decides what you are actually starting with, which The hidden gap in migrating your CRM data takes on its own.

Run the export through Health Check first and you get a score out of 100 and a breakdown of what is wrong with it, grouped by how badly it matters. That is your baseline. Then the 17 tools do the cleaning: merging the files, fixing the headers, removing the duplicates and checking the email addresses still work. Run Health Check again afterwards and the difference between the two scores is your evidence for whoever signed the migration off. What is lead automation and how to do it better covers why matching on a company name alone never finds all the duplicates.

Then the CRM Formatter maps your columns to the fields in the new CRM. Eight formats are built in, with a generic one and custom templates for anything else, so the destination doesn't have to be a CRM we connect to at all. You download an import-ready file and load it with the new CRM's own importer. For HubSpot, Salesforce and Pipedrive there is a shortcut: push straight in over OAuth, with a report beforehand telling you what the push will do. The CRM import problem goes through what that last step does to your data when nothing is checking it.

If you are moving across in batches rather than all at once, save the mapping after the first run and the next file maps itself. Put that on a trail and the batches clean and format themselves on a schedule while you get on with the rest of the migration. How to migrate your contact data between CRMs has the whole thing as a step by step.

Health Check, merging, header cleanup, deduplicating, the formatter itself and downloading an import-ready file are on every plan, including the free one, although a real migration export is usually bigger than the free tier allows. Full email verification, the direct push, saved mappings and trails are paid, and what each plan includes is on the pricing page.

So why do companies freely migrate more now than ever before, with all the risks still involved? It's a few reasons.

1. 01Choice. With more CRM providers than ever, being stuck with a legacy system that clearly does not work for an organization doesn't make sense anymore. If there is a niche or something you want your CRM to do, chances are a provider somewhere will do it. That choice is no longer only between providers either, which is the argument in Building your own CRM is the easy part.
2. 02The tooling caught up. Not because anything magical happened, but because the boring parts got solved. Providers publish migration paths, mappings can be saved and reused instead of rebuilt each time, and a file can be validated against the target's requirements before a single row is written. The risk didn't disappear. It moved from whether the data would arrive to whether you decided what should arrive, which is a much better problem to have.
3. 03It's more common now, so we understand the risks better. With more and more migrations happening, the level of expertise has gone up in both the CRM providers and a workforce that is now used to migrations. I am sure most people in any corporate role have gone through or managed a migration at least once.
4. 04The continuous strive for improvement. Companies that previously had the attitude of "it's not worth the risk" cannot operate that way anymore. Yes, the risks need to be evaluated, planned and discussed. However, a company which is not willing to improve their systems and efficiency is playing on borrowed time before a competitor takes that leap ahead of them.

Migrating your CRM every few months because a new provider offers a shiny new feature you want isn't sensible. Migrating every few years to get the best provider possible for your needs and business is sensible as the business evolves. Just be prepared and evaluate the risks first.