I had a great conversation with Kendra Corman on CRM implementation and where most companies go wrong in their migration process.
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A quick recap of our conversation:
So, you did it. You finally got budget approval for that new, shiny CRM. Your team is excited. You're ready to leave your old, clunky system (or worse, your network of spreadsheets) behind.
The first, and most tempting, thing to do is to just "lift and shift." You run an export of all your contacts, companies, and deals, and you dump that data directly into the new system.
This is the single biggest mistake you can make. And in the age of AI, it's a critical, costly failure.
You're Migrating 10 Years of Baggage
One of the challenges we see constantly is that companies treat a CRM migration as a simple data-moving project.
It's not. It is your single best opportunity to rethink your entire process.
When you just "lift and shift," you aren't just moving data. You're importing:
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All your old, broken processes.
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All your technical debt.
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A data structure that was designed for your business 10 years ago, not the one you're running today.
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Thousands of duplicate, outdated, and conflicting records.
You're guaranteeing that you will have the exact same headaches you had in your last system, only now you're paying for them in a more expensive tool.
The Goal Isn't a New Tool. It's a Single Source of Truth.
Let's step back. Why are you even buying a CRM?
The point isn't to have a new piece of technology. The point is to get out of the chaos.
For many small and mid-sized companies, customer information is scattered across a dozen different places:
The "ultimate dream" of a CRM is to create a single source of truth for your entire organization. You need one place where anyone, from sales to marketing to customer service, can get a complete 360-degree view of the customer:
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What channel did they come in from?
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What content have they interacted with?
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What products have they purchased?
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What are all the support tickets they've ever filed?
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What are all the conversations they've had with your sales team?
If you don't have this, your people are flying blind. They are spending hours a day just trying to piece the full picture together, or worse, they're making assumptions.
Why Bad Data Hygiene Is Now a Catastrophe
This problem used to be a simple headache. Now, it's a disaster waiting to happen.
The reason? AI.
We are all racing to implement AI-powered features. But AI is 100% dependent on the quality of your data.
If you feed an AI model a decade's worth of messy, conflicting, and inaccurate data, you will get messy, conflicting, and inaccurate outputs.
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Your AI-powered sales agent won't know what product the customer actually owns.
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Your AI-powered service bot will pull the wrong support history.
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Your AI-powered marketing tool will segment your audience based on garbage data.
You can't build a rocket ship on a faulty launchpad. If you just "lift and shift" your mess, you are poisoning your AI strategy before it even begins.
How to Do It Right
Instead of starting with a data export, start with a whiteboard.
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Get marketing and sales in the same room. Seriously. Do not skip this. Spend the money to get them in person if you have to.
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Map your process. Ask the hard questions. What is our ideal flow from the first inquiry all the way to a happy customer? What does success look like in 6 months?
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Identify the breakdowns. Where are things falling apart today?
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Build for the future. Let that conversation—your ideal, future-state process—define the data structure, custom properties, and workflows you build in your new CRM.
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Be ruthless. Be prepared to archive old data. Not everything needs to come with you.
This is your opportunity to fix your process, clean your data, and build a foundation that will actually scale with your business. Don't waste it.
Curious: What's the biggest data hygiene nightmare you've ever inherited in a CRM?
