CRM Migration That Does Not Break Your Reporting

Almost nobody loses records in a migration any more. The tooling is good enough that contacts, companies and deals arrive on the other side. What goes wrong is subtler and more expensive: the data arrives intact and stops meaning what it meant.

• Stage definitions drift. "Qualified" in the old system was set by a routing rule. In the new one a rep sets it by hand. Same label, different bar, and every historical conversion rate you report is now comparing two different things.
• Timestamps get rewritten. Created dates become the migration date. Six years of cohort and velocity analysis flattens into one afternoon.
• Owner history disappears. Records carry a current owner but lose who held them when. Territory and comp disputes follow about a quarter later.
• Dead fields come along for the ride. Custom fields nobody has used since 2021 migrate faithfully, and the new instance is cluttered from day one.
• Automations fire on import. Workflows treat migrated records as new, and your customers get a welcome sequence they already received two years ago.

This is why two quotes for an apparently identical migration can differ threefold. One firm is pricing a data transfer. The other has looked inside your instance and is pricing the reconciliation.

We wrote up the failure modes in detail in what survives a Salesforce to HubSpot move and what stops meaning what it meant.

Six to ten weeks for most growth-stage instances. Longer if the source system carries years of accumulated automation, shorter if you are moving a clean startup CRM.

1. Audit, week 1. We open your instance and inventory what is actually there: objects, custom fields, automations, integrations, and which of them anybody still uses. You get the inventory whether or not you continue with us.
2. Mapping and decisions, weeks 2 to 3. Field-by-field mapping, and the harder conversation about which definitions change. This is where stage criteria, lifecycle logic and reporting definitions get agreed in writing, before anything moves.
3. Build and dry run, weeks 3 to 6. The new instance gets built and we migrate into a sandbox first. You reconcile record counts and spot-check your own accounts. Nothing goes live on trust.
4. Cutover, week 6 to 8. Automations paused, final delta migrated, integrations reconnected, validation run. Scheduled so your team loses a weekend, not a quarter.
5. Stabilise, weeks 8 to 10. We stay on while the first real pipeline reviews and forecasts run through the new system, because that is when the gaps surface.

Published 2026 market benchmarks put CRM migration at 10,000 to 75,000 dollars or more, and CRM implementation at 8,000 to 75,000. A focused audit on its own runs 2,500 to 10,000.

The spread is not vendors guessing. It tracks the state of the source instance. Eight years of custom objects, dead automations and duplicate records is an excavation, and no one can price it honestly without looking first. Treat any quote produced without someone opening your CRM as a number that will change later.

Ranges as published in MergeYourData's 2026 RevOps pricing benchmarks. Market-wide figures, not our rate card. For a number specific to your instance, the audit is the fastest route to one. More detail in our guide to what RevOps consulting costs.

Worth asking any migration partner, and worth being suspicious of a vague answer. Ours:

• The field mapping and transformation logic, documented, in your possession.
• A written record of every definition that changed, so future reporting discrepancies have an explanation rather than a mystery.
• Admin ownership of your own instance. We work inside your CRM, not a wrapper around it.
• The audit inventory, which stays useful long after the migration.

No proprietary middleware you have to keep paying for, and no dependency engineered in as a retention strategy. If the handover is clean, we would rather you come back for the next project because it went well.