The broken process moves with you
At some point the frustration is big enough. The reports are wrong, the system is full of duplicates, sales only enters the bare minimum, and then comes the sentence that triggers six-figure projects: we need a new CRM.
Understandable impulse. Usually wrong.
Because what exactly is the new system supposed to do better? The duplicates exist because there are no clean creation rules and nobody dedupes. They move right along, the migration script copies them over faithfully. The workflow ruins, those forty automations nobody can say which still do anything, get rebuilt in the new system, because some of them might be important. And sales’ distrust of the system, grown over years because the data in it was never right, moves along too. New interface, old skepticism. Six months and a project price that could have paid a senior for a year later, you’re sitting in front of the same state with a different logo.
We’ve seen migrations where 180,000 contacts were moved, of which 60,000 were duplicates or dead. Nobody checked beforehand. The moving box wasn’t unpacked and sorted, it was sealed and expensively transported.
The order has to be reversed. First fix the data model: which objects, which fields, which required inputs does the process actually need? Then straighten out the processes: lead creation, stage definitions, routing, handoffs. Then clean up, dedupe, archive what’s dead. All of that works in the existing system. It’s unglamorous, it feels less like a fresh start than a system switch does, and it costs a fraction.
And then, only then, ask the switching question again. Often it answers itself, because a cleaned-up Salesforce or HubSpot with a solid data model can suddenly do a surprising amount of what the new system was supposed to be bought for. The competitor’s feature list was never the problem. The problem was that nobody ever finished configuring the system you have.
Sometimes the switch is still right, sure. When the platform structurally doesn’t fit, when license costs spiral, when a corporate carve-out is coming. But that’s the exception, not the reflex.
Before you book the moving company: has anyone actually checked what’s in the boxes?
