Migrating CRMs Without Losing a Single Deal

Leg 01Start with an inventory, not an export

Before anyone touches an export button, write down what actually lives in your current system and where else data hides. In most shops it is not just the CRM. There are statements in email threads, offer comparisons in spreadsheets, commission notes in a manager's notebook and call recordings in a separate dialer account.

List each source, what it holds and who relies on it. This list becomes your scope. Anything not on it will not move, and you want that to be a decision rather than a surprise.

• Merchant and contact records, including secondary owners
• Deals with their current stage, broker, amounts and dates
• Notes, call logs and recordings tied to each deal
• Bank statements, applications and signed documents
• Lender submissions, replies and offers received
• Funded deal details, payoffs and commission splits

Leg 02Map fields and stages before you move anything

Field mapping is tedious and it is where most damage happens. Sit with one manager and one senior broker and go through every field you plan to bring across. For each, decide where it lands in the new system, whether its format changes, and what happens to blanks.

Stages deserve their own session. Say your old system has a stage called Submitted that some brokers use for a file sent to one lender and others use for a file sent to five. If you carry that ambiguity forward, your pipeline reports will be wrong from the first day. Define each new stage by the action that moves a deal into it, then map old stages to new ones deal by deal where they do not line up cleanly.

Write the mapping down in a shared document and get sign-off. When someone asks in week three why a field looks odd, you want an answer that is not somebody's memory.

Leg 03Clean the data you are bringing with you

A migration is the cheapest moment you will ever have to clean house. Merge duplicate merchants so each business has one history. Close out deals that have been sitting in an early stage for months with no activity, or move them into a clearly labelled aged bucket that a reactivation campaign can work later.

Check that every funded deal has its funded amount, date and lender recorded, because those records feed renewals and commissions. Fix phone numbers stored in five different formats. Remove test records. Every hour spent here saves several hours of confused brokers later.

Do not migrate a mess. A new system with old duplicates is just the old system with a nicer screen.

Leg 04Pick the cutover date from your funding calendar

Most shops have a rhythm. Contracts cluster at certain points in the week, month-end brings a rush of funding activity, and some lenders have their own cut-off times. Look at the last few months and identify your quietest stretch, then schedule cutover there.

In the days before cutover, make a list of every deal past the submission stage: files out to lenders, offers pending, contracts out, deals awaiting funding. These are your in-flight deals, and each one gets a named owner who confirms it arrived intact in the new system, with documents, notes and lender replies attached.

Decide in advance what happens to the old system. A common approach is to make it read-only on cutover day so nobody can keep working there out of habit, while keeping it accessible for reference for an agreed period.

Leg 05Run a pilot team first

Pick a small group, ideally one experienced broker, one newer broker and a manager, and move them across a week or two before everyone else. They work real deals in the new system while the rest of the floor stays put.

The pilot will find problems the mapping session missed: a field nobody realised mattered, a document type that did not import, a stage that confuses people. Fix those before the full cutover, not during it. A practice environment helps too, so newer brokers can rehearse calls and submissions without touching a real merchant.

1. Move the pilot group's open deals first and have each broker verify every file.
2. Collect issues daily in one shared list with an owner for each.
3. Re-run the import for anything that came across wrong, then re-check.
4. Hold a short review at the end of the pilot and adjust the full cutover plan.
5. Have pilot members sit with their colleagues on cutover day as floor support.

Leg 06The first two weeks after cutover

Expect friction. Brokers will look for buttons in the wrong place and some will quietly keep notes on paper. A short daily check during the first fortnight catches problems early: every in-flight deal still moving, every call being logged, every new document landing on the right file.

Watch for deals that have not changed stage in several days. In the first weeks after a migration, a stalled deal is more likely to be a lost deal than a slow one. When FundPilot is the destination, every call made through the built-in dialer is logged to the deal automatically, which makes gaps in activity easier to spot than when brokers log calls by hand.