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 campaigns "deals" and your contacts "contacts", every interaction carries a small translation cost — and fifty of those a day is why people stop updating it.
Pitching is the cost of doing business. Win rate by brief type tells you which pitches to decline.
What to map, and what to abandon
Map ruthlessly. Bring across contacts, brands, open campaigns, 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 contacts and brands with owner and source
- Bring: open campaigns 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 campaigns is a project.
Get the stages right before importing anything
Configure the pipeline first — Lead → Brief → Pitch → Client Approval → Live — then import. Importing into generic stages and fixing it afterwards means every historical campaign is misfiled, and your conversion rates are calculated from the wrong categories.
The Quotarider Media & Advertising 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.