5 best practices for migrating to a new CRM - ZDNET

Field mapping is where CRM migrations go to die quietly.

Your data leaves the old system looking clean. It lands in the new one scrambled — contact owner in the revenue field, deal stage mapped to a text box no one monitors, custom fields dropped entirely because the new platform didn't have a match. Nobody catches it until a rep is mid-call with a client and the account history is a mess.

ZDNet recently covered five practices that actually reduce the damage during a CRM move. The ones worth paying attention to: audit your existing fields before you touch anything, build a field-by-field mapping document before migration day (not during), and run a test migration on a small data slice so you catch the breaks before they hit your full contact database.

Sensible advice. The problem is it assumes you have the internal bandwidth to execute it cleanly — and most mid-market ops teams are already running at capacity before the migration even starts.

If you've been through a CRM transition that promised a clean cutover and delivered six weeks of data cleanup instead, this is why. The technical steps aren't the hard part. The hard part is having a system that was built close enough to how your business actually works that the field mapping isn't a archaeology project in the first place.

A CRM that fights your data structure on day one will still be fighting it in year two.

#CRM #SalesOps #CRMmigration #DataQuality #MidMarket

Original Source

Field mapping is where CRM migrations quietly fall apart. Data leaves your old system looking fine, lands in the new one in the wrong place, and ...