Financial Services CRM Migration: Inventory, Pilot & Cutover

List where client identity, history, and opportunity state actually live today: legacy CRM, shared sheets, advisor notebooks, email folders, and any portfolio or planning tools that staff still open for context. Rank each source as system of record, secondary, or archive-only. Decide what will not migrate.

Example: a 9-person wealth team inventories Salesforce Essentials for contacts/deals, a household Google Sheet for family links, and Outlook folders for “active proposal” threads. They keep the CRM and sheet as migration inputs and treat Outlook as reference only — notes get summarized into CRM fields rather than importing ten years of email.

Build a field map: source field → destination field → transform rule → owner of the rule. Explicitly map account/household links, contact roles, open vs closed stages, and required day-one fields (owner, next step). Drop vanity fields that no one updates.

Example: the wealth team maps Sheet “Household ID” to Account external ID, maps “Primary advisor” to Owner, collapses five informal stages into Discovery / Proposal / Commitment / Closed-won / Closed-lost, and requires Next step on every open opportunity before cutover.

Import a bounded sample — one advisor’s book or one region — into a sandbox or clean org. Validate household links, owners, open stages, and a handful of historical notes. Have the advisor and ops walk the records together. Fix the map before scaling.

Example: they pilot 42 households for Advisor Maya. Three households split incorrectly because nicknames lacked external IDs; two open deals lacked next steps. They fix the map, re-import the pilot, and only then schedule firm cutover.

Announce when legacy edits stop, who runs the final export, and when the new CRM becomes the only place for new notes and stages. Keep the freeze short. Validate critical counts (accounts, open deals, users) before declaring success. Keep a rollback or re-import plan written down.

Example: Friday 4pm freeze on the old CRM; ops exports; Saturday morning import and validation; Monday 8am advisors open only the new CRM. A printed runbook lists who to call if household counts diverge by more than a small tolerance.

After cutover, schedule a hygiene week: merge duplicates, fix orphan contacts, require next steps on open deals, and confirm leavers’ seats are gone. Hold a short daily standup until advisors stop reconstructing status from email.

Example: for ten business days the ops lead posts a hygiene board — duplicates remaining, deals missing next step, households without primary contact. By day ten Maya’s team runs Friday pipeline review from the CRM board alone.