Why most CRM migrations fail before they start

Every CRM migration we've inherited from a failed vendor had the same root cause, and it was never the technology. It was that nobody mapped the actual sales process before picking fields and pipelines to migrate.

Teams start with the tool — 'we're moving from X to Y' — instead of the workflow. That ordering guarantees rework, because a pipeline stage that made sense in the old tool's constraints rarely maps cleanly onto the new one.

Start with the exceptions, not the happy path

Ask any sales leader to describe their pipeline and you'll get the clean version: lead, qualified, proposal, closed. Ask what happens when a deal stalls for four months and comes back, or when two reps both claim an account, and you'll find the process that actually determines whether the CRM gets adopted or ignored.

• Audit every field currently in use, not just the ones in the data dictionary
• Interview the reps who've built spreadsheet workarounds — they're telling you what the CRM doesn't do
• Design approval and exception paths before migrating a single record

Reconciliation is not optional

We reconcile every migrated field against the source system before decommissioning it. Not a sample — every field, on every record that matters to revenue or compliance. It's slower up front and it's the difference between a migration your team trusts and one they quietly route around.