Switching CRMs shouldn’t be a headache

As companies evolve, naturally the products and systems they use evolve too. Over the years, we have seen a number of clients switch contact systems to better fit their current needs. Unfortunately, migrating and deploying a new system can often be extremely slow and costly. These migrations can take months (and sometimes years) to complete! While we will focus this discussion on CRMs (Customer Relationship Management) software, it also applies to Marketing Automation, Call Center/Dialer solutions, and Email platforms.

Switching systems is a notoriously slow and painful process because as companies grow and expand, so do the number of services and tools they use to power their business. CRMs are particularly tricky because they are often an end-point or delivery for dozens of integrations as well as the primary storage of customer and prospect data. Down time is often unacceptable for large businesses that operate globally, across time zones, which can make switching a CRM feel like replacing the engine of a running vehicle.

To further complicate matters, companies often collect leads from many places that feed directly into their CRM. This adds additional layers of complexity and frustration to the process of migration. Each integration point must be rebuilt for the new CRM. More importantly there is a coordination issue – at what time do you cut over from the old system to the new system? This complexity grows exponentially with the number of lead sources (integration points). The greater the number of lead sources, the harder it is to coordinate a switch. Many companies receive leads from third party partners (aka lead vendors) who must make the change on their side and may not be able to adhere to your desired schedule.  

For LeadConduit clients this process is quick and painless. When your  various lead sources (lead forms, Facebook Lead Ads, and third-party lead vendors) post to LeadConduit, there is no heavy lifting. LeadConduit can simply redirect all of the leads to the new system of choice in real time. With LeadConduit, switching CRMs involves changing only a single integration, as opposed to every integration. This allows administrators to focus on the migration of existing data and not worry about the new leads that are constantly flowing in, removing much of the complexity from the process.

We’ve assisted many clients with this process. We just need to know the new destination for leads and when to make the switch. We take care of the rest. A few recent examples of migrations between systems we’ve handled for our clients:

• MS Dynamics to Velocify
• Home-grown CRM to Salesforce
• Eloqua to Hubspot
• Siebel to Marketo
• Vici Dialer to Five9

Note: This is not a product endorsement for any of these systems and we are not insinuating that any of these systems is better than the other. These are simply examples of work for individual clients.

If you have an integration that looks like it might be a pain or are interested in LeadConduit as a lead acquisition platform, don’t hesitate to contact us.