All That You Need to Know About Migrating to Salesforce CRM

There can be a number of reasons for companies to migrate from one CRM to another. While it indicates that a business is growing and the company has outgrown its CRM, it can also be a sign of a CRM system’s low performance, its lack of integration capabilities with other systems, and data loss.

All being said, companies sometimes also want to migrate to a new CRM system due to high maintenance costs and user-friendliness. Whatever the reason, moving from one CRM system to another is a complex task and oftentimes involves a lot of challenges. But one CRM platform that puts businesses at an absolute advantage and has an edge over others is Salesforce. From prominent companies across the globe to startups, Salesforce remains the first choice.

In this blog post, we will look at what CRM migration is, its challenges, and the basic steps to prepare for Salesforce Data Migration.

What is a CRM Migration?

CRM migration is when a company migrates its processes and data from its old CRM to a new one. This could be from an on-premise CRM to a cloud-based one or vice-versa.

What are the Challenges of CRM Data Migration?

The challenges of CRM data migration stem from the differences between CRM systems and the quality of data. Let’s take a look at the factors which make migration a tough nut to crack:

• Problematic Data Source

  Businesses often function in silos and so does their data. When migrating, these disparate data sources create issues like duplication, missing information, incorrect data, and more. Many organizations assume that the new CRM system will automatically configure it into its infrastructure. However, this remains unfeasible without a clear understanding of source data and requires it to go through a thorough cleansing and sorting process.

• The Difference in CRM Components

  When you are migrating to a new CRM system, you are bound to come across differences in its components. Such differences pose the challenge of understanding which objects you need to move your data as they will not be similar in the new CRM system. For example, your current CRM system has the Customer Object that contains the contact name, company, address, phone number, email, etc. However, your new CRM system may have only two objects such as Account and Contact for this type of information.

• Integration Capabilities

  All CRM systems are designed to work with third-party systems. However, not all integrations that your current CRM system has are applicable to the new CRM system you are migrating to. So, in order to bridge this gap, your migration partner might need to add a custom integration layer to make all of your third-party integrations compatible with the new CRM system. However, this will make your migration project more labor-intensive, time-consuming, and costly.

Types of Migration in Salesforce CRM

The most used CRM platform across industries is Salesforce. In fact, in 2020, it has claimed the highest share of 19.5%^[i] in the global CRM market. As business requirements for companies keep changing, they need to find a CRM platform that best fits their needs or make adjustments to their current CRM. That is why we have three types of migration in Salesforce:

• Migrating From Other CRM Platforms to Salesforce

  Salesforce comes packed with functionalities like Einstein, is user-friendly, scalable, and customizable. Also, Salesforce’s foray into different industries with its specific Clouds is one of the major reasons why companies decide to migrate to it.

• Migrating From Salesforce Classic to Lightning

  Salesforce Lightning offers a new way to engage with customers. It provides an easy interface with less code to help you improve team productivity, speed up application development, and improve ROI. On top of that, Salesforce Lightning Experience (LEX) provides you with reports and dashboards, Einstein capabilities, app-builder and snap-ins, Kanban view, and more that make daily operations easy for your sales team. However, without the right planning, research, testing, and a migration partner, migrating from Classic to Lightning can be tricky. Here’s a look at how we help our customers migrate from Classic to Lightning.

• Migration From One Salesforce Org to Another

  This kind of migration takes place when large, multi-departmental companies operate multiple Salesforce Orgs and need to move data among them, or in the case of mergers and acquisitions when the parent and child companies are both using Salesforce and require data migration between Orgs. Companies also migrate from one Salesforce Org to another when their current Org’s data model has not been designed to be scalable and the business has to rebuild it in a new Salesforce Org.

Preparing for Salesforce Data Migration

Conducting a successful Salesforce data migration is challenging but when you go fully prepared and with the right migration partner, you make the actual transfer seamless. Although all Salesforce data migrations are different depending on data size and accuracy; here are some basic steps to follow for a smooth transition:

• Building Your Data Model

  Migrating your data to a new system gives you a fresh canvas. It represents an opportunity to simplify the model and tidy your data. A well-thought-out data model ensures that your Salesforce Org will remain scalable for long.

• Data Selection

  It is likely that different teams in your organization use different tools. For example, most information related to sales processes is likely to be stored in a CRM. However, customer service teams might be working on a different platform. So, you have different sources of truth for different data categories. Therefore, it is important to select the data from each system and ensure only useful data is selected for migration.

• Data Cleansing

  Clean your data before importing it into your Salesforce environment. Clean data ensures that your Salesforce data integrity is intact and users are able to get valuable information from it.

• Migration

  This is the second phase of the migration process, which involves the actual transfer of data from the source system to your Salesforce Org. The migration method will depend on the type of resources you have, the volume of records, and the complexity of source data.

• Quality Assurance

  After all of your data has been transferred to Salesforce, you need to ensure that it has been done correctly and ensure that the right format and relationships are accurately reflected between different data tables.

• Data Cleansing After Migration:

  This is done to ensure that there is no duplicate data that usually occurs as a result of merging more than one data source. Tidying up data after migration ensures that your users have the best Salesforce experience.

Conclusion

If Salesforce data migration has its complexities, it definitely has its share of business advantages. When you need to be on a scalable CRM platform and access features and functionalities that make life easier for your sales and service teams, think Salesforce.

Planning to Migrate to Salesforce? Let’s Talk!

Statistics Reference:

^[i] iTechArt