What this covers
- Adoption fails for one reason
- What to map, and what to abandon
- Get the stages right before importing anything
- Run parallel for two weeks, not two months
Adoption fails for one reason
Migrations are usually treated as a data problem. They are a vocabulary problem. If the new system calls your policys "deals" and your policyholders "contacts", every interaction carries a small translation cost — and fifty of those a day is why people stop updating it.
Underwriting is where policies die. Giving it a stage makes the drop-off visible instead of mysterious.
What to map, and what to abandon
Map ruthlessly. Bring across policyholders, accounts, open policys, and enough closed history to calculate stage conversion — usually 12 to 24 months. Leave behind dead records, unmaintained custom fields and anything nobody has opened in a year.
- Bring: active policyholders and accounts with owner and source
- Bring: open policys with current stage and value
- Bring: closed-won and closed-lost history for conversion maths
- Leave: stale records, orphaned fields, duplicate accounts
Duplicates deserve attention before import rather than after. Cleaning 2,000 records on the way in is an afternoon; cleaning them once they are live and referenced by open policys is a project.
Get the stages right before importing anything
Configure the pipeline first — Enquiry → Quotation → Underwriting → Policy Bound → Renewal — then import. Importing into generic stages and fixing it afterwards means every historical policy is misfiled, and your conversion rates are calculated from the wrong categories.
The Quotarider Insurance pack applies this in one click, which removes the most common source of migration drift.
Run parallel for two weeks, not two months
A short overlap catches gaps. A long one guarantees the team keeps using the old system. Two weeks is usually enough to surface missing fields and broken reports, and short enough that nobody settles back into old habits.
Set a hard cutover date and make the new system the only place the forecast comes from. Reporting is the lever that drives adoption — if the number that gets discussed comes from the new CRM, people update the new CRM.