How to Migrate to a New CRM

TL;DR Summary

Migrating to a new CRM system is like embarking on an exciting adventure! First, you assess your current setup and realize it’s time for an upgrade. Then, you plan your journey, mapping out timelines and gathering your resources. The data migration phase is like packing up all your treasures and ensuring they arrive safely at your new destination. Customizing the new CRM is where the magic happens, tailoring it to fit your unique business needs. Training your team is like teaching them to navigate this new world, ensuring everyone is ready to thrive. Finally, with ongoing support, you’re all set to enjoy the benefits of improved efficiency, better customer relationships, and enhanced business performance.

• Customer Accounts & Contacts
• Leads & Opportunities
• Process, Process, Process
• Order History
• Data Governance

Whether you’re moving on from an old, siloed CRM or shifting your strategy to include a fully-integrated, cloud-based CRM system, the move to a new CRM is always a bit nerve-racking due to the seemingly endless amount of details. We’ve compiled a relatively comprehensive list of key aspects to keep into consideration as you are migrating to your new CRM system. The idea is to save you from a bunch of headaches down the line.

Customer Accounts & Contacts

The lifeblood for any business. Customers and your contacts. As you’ve grown, so have these precious resources. It’s critical, during a migration, that special care is taken to audit and clean up your customer account and contact data. If I may — how regimented is your organization with regards to customer data? Are phone numbers always entered the same? Are names and companies spelled properly? Is everything consistent? A big challenge that tends to come to light when any direct scrutiny is applied to most any system is how clean the data is.

You’ll either be conducting a mass-import from your old CRM system or you’ll be live-syncing your customer data with your ERP. That latter means that we’ll be mapping field values over to your CRM (e.g., the first name displayed in your ERP is also the first name in your CRM). This is why it’s so important to take great care in ensuring your data is clean — once the green light is given, things move fast.

During the customer data audit, it is possible that you’ll see some long-forgotten test accounts, misspelled accounts, improperly entered accounts, duplicated accounts, and accounts that no one knows where they came from. Same goes for contacts, except, sometimes, things like having an AR or AP @ as the primary contact for a customer account is the norm. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that but is that what you want? What if you wish to apply a segmentation to your accounts to send relevant marketing information to? Are those the ideal people to receive such communique? How are people’s names entered when they go by “AJ” or Bob Jr.? How about phone numbers? Do you use parentheses or not? Are phone extensions’ joiners entered as “ext.”, “ext”, “x” or the ideal separation of “;”? All these things might sound kinda trivial, but, I swear, when you try to leverage large amounts of data for automation or bulk editing purposes, things can get dicey real quick.

All this doom and gloom is not without some light. First, you might be part of a rockstar organization who is super strict about your data or has controls in place to protect its integrity. Second, even if you’re not, you will be. Sure, the second requires a bit more work, but you’re going to be. Half because you’ll be disillusioned to how much of a pain in the butt it is to fix this amount of friggin’ data and half because some controls will be established to protect it down the line.

So what does all that preamble have to do with the migration? A lot! You’ll be accessing your contacts and your accounts all the time in your CRM. They create relationships between records. Between deals. Orders. Quotes. Assets. And pretty much any other data point you wanna tie together. Clean data in, clean data out. Bad data in, bad data out. Clean data breeds confidence in the system, thereby improving and encouraging user adoption (ultimately ensuring your CRM succeeds). A side benefit to having accurate information provided to your team is that it won’t be used as an excuse. I know, I know, low blow. But let’s be real. If an excuse can be made about something, it will be. Don’t let your data be one of them. Ensure your people have the best data to work off of so they can provide beyond the ROI that you expect!

Leads & Opportunities

Long story short, the the goal here to merge old with new. Navigating the import of active leads and opportunities your team’s pursuing is a bit easier than the cleanup of crucial business data. It also mostly falls on your sales representatives or assistants to clean up and prepare that data for importing to the new CRM. Most CRM systems provide you with Excel templates that you can export, populate, save, and then suck right back into the CRM you’re moving to.

If you’re coming from another CRM system and moving to a new one, this is typically simple and rather uneventful affair, mostly because you’ve likely already got the process down pat. With that said, do keep in mind that if you’re moving from a no-CRM or siloed CRM to a cloud-based, integrated CRM — things do have potential to get dicey.

Dice, dice, baby.

• The Carte Blanche Sales Pipeline.
• If your team has carte blanche to manage their pipeline, there are a handful of speed bumps you’ll need to navigate. In your daily operation, you might leave it to your sales people to manage their sales pipeline. Your reasons for doing so are your own, as there are pros and cons to operating that way. The cons in that equation, however, tend to compound over time. What I mean by that is when sales folks are able to manage their leads and opportunities their own way, they’ll make it happen. But they’ll do so, their way. Which is cool for them, but when you go to align everyone to use one system and process — oof, that’s when you learn about all the creative ways your team’s maintained their pipeline.
• Honestly, the biggest challenge with this sales methodology is sustainability. It puts the organization, as a whole, at risk and at the mercy of the reps you have in place. On the flip side as a rep, you won’t have an aligned organization that provides you with dependable service and resources so that you can do your job better. That’s to say nothing of onboarding. The carte blanche sales management method is a short-term solution. The shorter, (likely) the better.
• Inconsistencies Abound.
• Some folks manage their pipeline through the use of Excel or Word (or Apple/Google versions). Some use paper and pen. Some (yikes) trust their own heads and the seat of their pants. Others might live in their calendar. Or, really, any combination of these. And those are just the platforms. This is to say nothing of their internal rules on data they need to capture or the sales process they follow.
• Who’s “Right”.
• You are. Okay, maybe not, but really, all this section is about is to communicate that you’ll have a fair amount of conversations with your team to create the best sales process for the organization. Your mileage may vary, but you’ll likely meet some resistance, particularly at first, mostly due to each person’s thinking that their way of doing things is the right way. Just remind folks that this is not a black and white discussion.
• Now, we’re not saying that you’ll definitely go through tough conversation and even some arguments, but be prepared for it in the event it does. There’s no harm in it (as long as its healthy & respectful) because it’s totally normal during any system migration. It’s just because we all want it to be the best it can be. All that we advise is to keep in mind that not every idea or process can/should be implemented and you have the final word on what stays and what goes. Encourage your teams by reinforcing that this will make their lives easier. Because it will!

Having your team work through their pipeline is to, ultimately, get them organized and prepare for the initial data import to the new CRM system. That way they can hit the ground running the moment they’re able to get in there. A side-benefit here is you get to see exactly what processes have been working for them — which is big help when you hit up this next step.

Process, Process, Process

One of the most important aspects of migrating to a new CRM is developing and implementing your processes. I know it’s not fun, but in the long run, it’s the right choice. It will save you a lot of headaches and ensure your team is set up for success. This is because a well-defined process is easier to navigate for new hires, veterans, and managers alike. The key is to commit to what your process should be.

For example, if you’re used to a carte blanche method where your team manages themselves, this transition might be challenging. This approach can lead to too many cooks in the kitchen, with everyone having their own idea of the perfect sales process. While individual input is valuable, the goal is to establish a sales process that benefits the entire organization. This may involve strategic variables that don’t directly benefit individual sales reps but are advantageous in the long term.

For instance, when a lead comes in, what a sales rep considers necessary might not align with the process you want your company to be known for. The same applies to opportunities. You might prefer specific actions, such as sending an email, making a phone call, visiting in person, quoting in a certain way, or demoing the product. There’s no shortage of check-ins, follow-ups, data points, or other nuances you might deem necessary.

That’s why it’s crucial to nail down your processes. Long-term, you want to consider what’s best for the overall organization. Doing so also opens the door for automation. There may be steps in your processes for leads and opportunities that you can automate, such as system-conducted outreach or follow-ups after a quote is sent. The goal is to make your sales reps’ lives easier while structuring your operation to identify trends and address potential gaps in the sales process that could harm your close ratios.

Ultimately, it’s up to you to involve the right people in the organization to have these discussions. The trick is balancing necessary actions with those you’d love to see happen. If you go overboard with the data you want to capture during the sales process, your reps might be less likely to embrace the system and reliably complete each data point. Sales reps want to be out in front of customers, talking to them, selling to them, and helping their fellow people. So, balance is an absolute must.

Order History

Being able to actively refer to and analyze customers’ order history can really be a huge help to your entire sales organization. Seeing who purchases what, how frequently they do, and revenue trends can help inform team members on where they could expand the customer’s sales potential in order to better serve them. Importing their order history can be super easy — or rather tedious. It all depends on how your organization tracks sales orders and what exactly you want to be readily available to your team within the new CRM.

For example, if your team has hard copies printed out and archived in a filing cabinet but you want them to be available on the CRM, the process of digitizing the orders will be a monumental task.

If you’re storing orders on a non-cloud-based ERP, the import will be relatively quick, if a bit involved due to the field and data mapping process that’ll be necessary.

For both of those situations, a long-term maintenance plan will need to be established to ensure the order history remains up to date. It will be very likely each will require a manual step to be introduced to do just that, simply due to the siloed business systems we have to work with.

The ideal scenario is using a cloud-based ERP system that seamlessly syncs with your new CRM. Most reputable ERP providers offer detailed CRM implementation guides, outlining the exact steps to effectively connect to a reliable CRM system. This ensures your data, including order history, contacts, and account information, is consistently updated. Ideally, everything you want to see in your CRM should be achievable. However, not all ERP systems are created equal, so results may vary. For instance, Microsoft Dynamics Business Central and Dynamics 365 Sales CRM integrate seamlessly with minimal initial setup. On the other hand, syncing something like Infor’s CSD with any external CRM can be challenging, time-consuming, and unreliable.

None of this is unusual, and not limited to or a slight against infor, as most ERP providers prefer you stick with their suite of systems. Regardless, ERP providers struggle to wall off the versatility and flexibility of the Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 Sales platforms that are able to work with so many non-Microsoft systems. With that said, syncing orders is such a big deal because, more often than not, orders are not simply a black and white scenario. Often, there are stages that an order goes through. Entered, picked, shipped, en route, delivered, paid, etc. If you wish to see live-status of your orders, that requires syncing to take place, regularly, with your ERP system or whatever software you use to track orders for the business. But trust me(!), it is worth any potential struggle to nail this down from the beginning. Having access to this data pays dividends from both a salesperson’s perspective. And that’s to say nothing about how much managers and executives benefit from this sort of reliable data.

Data Governance

Yes! Data governance. It’s exactly like it sounds. You and your team have put a LOT of work into cleaning up your data and preparing it for use in your new CRM. Now, you have two options before you. One is your team goes down the old path it used to, with regards to entering data and information, and then repeating the same process of cleaning up your data. Or two, and far more preferable for everyone involved, keep the data clean. Meaning you have controls and processes in place to maintain your data efficacy as you continue to knock your customers’ socks off. It’s sort of like cycle counting your inventory vs doing an all out inventory check. Except, in this case, your data being out of whack means you lose out deals you could’ve won and your automated processes become far less efficient.

To ensure your ERP and CRM systems run smoothly, it’s important to set clear data standards for consistency, accuracy, and completeness. Establish policies for who can access and edit data, how long to keep it, and make sure you’re following regulations. Regularly check and clean your data to keep it high quality. Protect your data with encryption, access controls, and monitoring for any breaches. Make sure your systems can share data easily and stay consistent. Encourage a culture of good data practices by training your team and assigning data stewards. Finally, use technology to automate tasks and monitor data quality. These steps will help keep your data secure, accurate, and compliant.

The idea behind creating a solid data governance program is to maximize your team’s confidence in the system, foster user adoption, grow revenue, provide your customers with better service, and automate and enhance revenue generating activities. It all starts with data. Being the 21st century, you’ve likely heard “data is king” somewhere before. I’d like to make an amendment to that statement, however. CLEAN data is king.