How do you migrate from Salesforce or HubSpot without losing data?
You avoid losing data by auditing and mapping everything before the first import, then running the old and new CRM side by side until the numbers reconcile. Data rarely disappears in a migration. It gets mapped to the wrong field, attached to the wrong record, or duplicated, and nobody notices for a quarter.
Our order is fixed. Export every object with its IDs, dedupe and archive dead records, map field by field, then load a test batch and compare record counts against the source. Activity history, owners and deal stages move with their records. Automations get rebuilt around what they were meant to do, not copied line by line, because old workflows carry years of workarounds.
One check you can run today: pull last quarter's closed revenue from your current CRM. That number is the bar. The migration is not done until the new system shows the same figure. We keep the old CRM read-only after cutover so anyone can verify a record, and we connect ERP data if orders live somewhere else.
Sources: HubSpot: Switching from Salesforce to HubSpot, HubSpot Knowledge Base: Import records and activities
Should we build a custom CRM or buy HubSpot or Salesforce?
Most businesses should buy an off-the-shelf CRM and build only the piece that is genuinely theirs. Contacts, companies, deals and pipelines are solved problems. Paying to rebuild them means paying again for every security patch, login screen and report a vendor already maintains.
Custom earns its place when the CRM has to do work the market tools cannot: an unusual quoting or approval flow, a data model that fights standard objects, or seat and add-on costs that keep climbing for features you barely use. Even then, the usual answer is hybrid. Keep a standard CRM as the system of record and build a custom layer for scoring, routing or a customer portal that talks to it through the API.
I'd rather see a team on a plain HubSpot or Pipedrive setup with clean data than on a beautiful custom build nobody can maintain. Look at where your workarounds live. If they are spreadsheets sitting beside the CRM, that is the part worth building. We scope it and quote it as a fixed fee.
How much does it cost to switch CRMs?
The cost of switching CRMs depends on how much data, automation and integration you are moving, so we quote every migration as a fixed fee after a scoping call instead of guessing up front. Record count matters less than people expect. Effort is driven by custom objects, workflows that must be rebuilt, connected systems and how messy the source data is.
Budget for three buckets. The new platform's licenses, paid to the vendor directly. The migration and rebuild work. And the time your team spends deciding what a lead, a stage and closed won actually mean, which is the cost most quotes leave out and the most common cause of delay.
The hidden cost is switching badly: reps who stop logging calls, reports leadership no longer trusts, and ad platforms that lose their conversion signal for weeks. A good scope prices those risks in. Send your current object list and integrations through the contact form and we will tell you what moves, what gets cut and what it costs.
How do I send CRM conversions back to Google Ads, Meta and Microsoft?
You capture the ad click ID and contact details on every lead, store them on the CRM record, and upload each lead's later stages back to the platform as offline conversions. Google matches on the GCLID plus hashed email or phone through enhanced conversions for leads. Microsoft matches on the MSCLKID. Meta takes CRM lead status events into a CRM dataset through its Conversions API.
The plumbing is simple once the fields exist. Hidden form fields catch the click IDs, the CRM keeps them, and a daily job sends stages like qualified lead and closed won with a value. Google now recommends enhanced conversions for leads over legacy offline import, and its help center says these uploads move to the Data Manager API from June 15, 2026, so new builds should start there.
Check your own CRM now: open ten recent paid leads and look for a click ID. If the field is empty, bidding is optimizing toward form fills, not customers. We set this up as part of a conversion tracking audit.
Sources: Google Ads Help: Upgrade offline conversion import to enhanced conversions for leads, Google Ads API: Manage offline conversions, Microsoft Advertising API: ApplyOfflineConversions, Meta for Developers: Conversions API for CRM (Conversion Leads integration)
Will switching CRMs break our ad tracking?
It can, and it usually does if nobody plans for it, because the CRM is often what feeds qualified leads and revenue back to your ad accounts. Swap the CRM and the upload job, the click ID fields and the conversion action names can all change at once. Smart Bidding then sees conversions drop and pulls back on campaigns that were working.
We protect the signal in three moves. Carry the GCLID, MSCLKID and contact fields across as named properties on every migrated record. Rebuild the upload from the new CRM against the same conversion actions, or new ones set to secondary at first, which Google's own checklist suggests for the first two to three weeks. Then compare daily uploaded conversions from the old and new pipes before you retire the old one.
In the accounts I audit, the damage from a CRM switch shows up in bidding a few weeks later, not on cutover day. Treat ad tracking as a launch requirement, not a cleanup task. It is part of our measurement work on every migration.
Sources: Google Ads Help: Enhanced conversions for leads implementation checklist
How do we get the sales team to actually use the new CRM?
Reps use a CRM when it saves them time on day one, so we design the pipeline around how they already sell and cut every field that does not change a decision. Adoption fails when the new system asks for more typing than the old one and gives nothing back.
Practical moves that work: keep required fields to the few that drive routing and reporting, log email and calls automatically, and make the daily view a short list of who to call next. Train with their real deals, not demo data, and give the team a named person for questions in the first weeks after cutover. Managers have to run pipeline reviews from the CRM, or nobody else will.
There is an ad-side reason to care, too. If reps skip stage updates, the qualified and closed won conversions never reach Google Ads or Meta, and bidding learns from the wrong signal. Clean stage hygiene is what lets paid media bring better leads over time.
