Salesforce Data Migration Best Practices: Moving from Legacy CRM to Salesforce
The VP of Sales opened his laptop Monday morning to find their new Salesforce instance contained 47,000 duplicate contacts, customer addresses from 2015, and opportunity data that made zero sense. Their “weekend migration” had become a month-long nightmare.
Data migration sounds straightforward until you actually attempt it.
Why Data Migration Fails So Often
Most migration failures stem from treating data movement as a technical task rather than a strategic business process.
The Critical Mistakes
**Migrating Garbage Data** – Your legacy CRM contains years of duplicates, outdated records, incomplete information, and entries that should have been deleted long ago. Migrating everything means importing problems directly into your clean Salesforce environment.
**Skipping Data Mapping** – Legacy systems structure data differently than Salesforce. Assuming direct field-to-field mapping works creates misaligned information that confuses users and breaks reporting.
**Ignoring Dependencies** – CRM data has complex relationships. Contacts belong to accounts, opportunities link to contacts, activities connect to opportunities. Migrating entities out of sequence breaks these critical relationships.
**No Validation Strategy** – Moving data without verification means discovering problems after go-live when users start complaining about missing information or incorrect records.
The Right Migration Approach
Successful migrations follow disciplined processes that treat data as a critical business asset.
Phase 1: Data Assessment and Cleaning
Before migrating anything, analyze what you actually have. Run reports identifying duplicates, incomplete records, outdated information, and data quality issues. This assessment often reveals that only 60-70% of legacy data deserves migration.
**Establish Data Quality Rules** – Define minimum standards for migration. Contacts need valid email addresses. Accounts require complete billing information. Opportunities must have close dates and stages. Records failing these criteria get flagged for manual review or exclusion.
**Deduplicate Aggressively** – Use matching algorithms based on email addresses, phone numbers, and company names to identify duplicate records. Merge or eliminate duplicates before migration, not after.
Phase 2: Mapping and Transformation
Create detailed mapping documents showing how legacy fields translate to Salesforce objects and fields. This isn’t one-to-one translation—it’s business logic transformation.
**Handle Custom Fields Thoughtfully** – Legacy systems accumulate custom fields over years. Don’t automatically recreate every custom field in Salesforce. Question whether each field provides ongoing value or represents outdated process requirements.
**Transform Data Formats** – Phone numbers, addresses, and dates often need reformatting to match Salesforce standards. Build transformation rules that standardize formatting during migration.
**Address Missing Required Fields** – Salesforce might require fields your legacy system didn’t capture. Develop strategies for handling these gaps—default values, manual data entry, or excluding incomplete records.
Phase 3: Phased Migration Execution
Never attempt complete migration in one massive batch. Phase migration reduces risk and allows for corrections.
**Start with Master Data** – Migrate accounts first, then contacts, then opportunities. This sequence maintains relationship integrity and allows validation at each stage.
**Test with Sample Data** – Run pilot migrations with small data subsets. Validate results thoroughly before proceeding to complete migration. Test imports reveal mapping errors and data quality issues before they affect your entire database.
**Plan for Rollback** – Maintain legacy system access during transition periods. If migration issues emerge, users need continued access to accurate historical data while problems get resolved.
Phase 4: Post-Migration Validation
Migration completion isn’t go-live—it’s the beginning of validation.
**Quantitative Verification** – Compare record counts between legacy and Salesforce systems. Verify that expected numbers of accounts, contacts, and opportunities migrated successfully.
**Qualitative Testing** – Have power users review migrated data for accuracy. Check that relationships maintained integrity, historical activities appear correctly, and critical information survived migration.
**User Acceptance Testing** – Let actual users work with migrated data before official launch. They’ll identify issues that technical teams might miss.
The difference between migration success and disaster isn’t technical capability—it’s disciplined process, realistic expectations, and treating data migration as the critical business initiative it actually is.