CRM migration is mostly a data problem wearing a software costume. The new platform will import whatever you give it; the work is deciding what to keep, how to normalise it, and how to prove nothing important disappeared.
The four phases
- Inventory: list every source holding customer data — CRM, spreadsheets, inboxes, support desk, billing
- Mapping: define which source field becomes which target field, including picklist values and owner assignment
- Cleansing: deduplicate, standardise phone and address formats, drop records with no activity and no value
- Cutover: freeze the old system, run the final load, verify counts, then switch
What migration services cost
| Scale | Records | Typical cost |
|---|---|---|
| Small | Under 10,000 | $1,500–$5,000 |
| Mid | 10,000–100,000 | $5,000–$20,000 |
| Large | 100,000+ | $20,000–$75,000 |
Activity history — emails, calls, notes — is what pushes a project into the upper half of each range. Many teams consciously drop it and keep only the last 12 months.
Decisions to make before the build
- Do we migrate closed-lost deals, or only open pipeline plus recent wins?
- Do we keep every activity, or the last 6–12 months?
- Who owns orphaned records with no assigned owner?
- What happens to duplicates that are both “active”?
Cutover without losing a day
Run at least two full test loads into a sandbox and compare record counts, pipeline totals, and a sample of 50 records field by field. Freeze the old system for 24 hours before cutover and route inbound leads to a holding form. The migration itself is usually hours; the verification is days.
Common failures
- Picklist values that do not exist in the target, silently dropped
- Owners mapped to inactive users, leaving records invisible
- Dates imported in the wrong timezone, shifting reporting periods
- Attachments migrated without permissions, exposing files
FAQ
How long does a CRM migration take?
Two to four weeks for a small business, six to twelve for mid-sized with integrations, and a quarter or more at enterprise scale.
Should we clean data before or during migration?
Before. Cleansing after import means fixing the same record twice and losing the audit trail of what changed.
Can we migrate without downtime?
You can migrate with a short freeze of a few hours. Fully live migration is possible only when the old system stays read-only during verification.
What if the old vendor will not export everything?
Request a full data export in writing before renewal. Most contracts allow it; some charge for attachments or activity history.