Stakeholders – Before you start working on the technical aspects of your migration, you should bring together the CRM end-users and decision-makers. Together, you can determine what exactly you expect to achieve with the new CRM system. Discuss what needs to be improved, what data is critical to keep, and what data can be deleted.
System Comparison – Determine what types of data and fields can be used in the target CRM. Then, take a look at your current system and analyze whether all its data and field types can be transferred into the new one. If you have customized fields, see if the new CRM can be customized in the same way to make the migration possible.
Data Analysis – This is the most crucial step. You need to analyze what data your legacy CRM contains, its formats and types, how it is organized, and what CRM data you need to migrate. This is also when you should get rid of any duplicate data. Once you’ve done this, you should create a data map that describes what data goes where.
Data backup – A data backup is a result of copying or archiving files and folders for the purpose of being able to restore them in case of data loss. Data loss can be caused by many things ranging from computer viruses to hardware failures to file corruption to fire, flood, or theft. If you are responsible for business data, a loss may involve critical financial, customer, and company data. If the data is on a personal computer, you could lose financial data and other key files, pictures, music, etc that would be hard to replace.
Customization – Customize the target CRM system to make migrating data from customized field possible. Besides, you can get rid of the fields you are not going to use.
Migration Script and Tool – This is the most technical part of the whole process. It can be a script or a tool that does all the work for you. Unless you have a CRM data migration specialist on your team, we strongly recommend you to turn to the company that provides such services. A single mistake in the code may cost you gravely, so it’s not something you should try to save on.
Migration Test – Conducting a trial is always a welcome move when verifying the authenticity of the CRM migration tool. In short, it is always a good practice to conduct data migration testing. Testing is always important when you create new tools, and CRM migration tools are no exception. You should try transferring one or several pieces of data to see if the tool works the way it should and whether you have prepared your data and its structure properly.