[ Case study ]
Salesforce sat half-adopted: the field team used a shared inbox, the office used the CRM, and nobody trusted either. Migration was forced by contract renewal — but 214 open deals, 9,000 accounts, and a decade of notes had to survive the move.
CLIENT a component manufacturer moving from Salesforce — FOCUS Clean before you move
Representative examplesEvery case study in this library is an illustrative composite of the kind of engagement we deliver — written to show our method and standards, not to name clients.
Precision components for industrial equipment: the manufacturer sells through field reps who visit plants and engineering teams, an office team that processes quotes and orders, and a distributor network that has bought reliably for years. Salesforce has been the official CRM for a decade — customised by a predecessor, half-populated, and paid for annually under a contract with a renewal date now fixed on the calendar. The field team keeps its own kind of records: handwritten notes from site visits, quotes emailed from the van, and a shared inbox the office triages.
Salesforce sat half-adopted: the field team used a shared inbox, the office used the CRM, and nobody trusted either. Migration was forced by contract renewal — but 214 open deals, 9,000 accounts, and a decade of notes had to survive the move.
We treated the migration as two problems: the data, which had to be cleaned before it moved, and the people, who had to want to open the tool. Duplicates merged and dead records archived first, so the CRM arrived lighter than Salesforce rather than carrying a decade of zombies. Pipeline stages and fields were renamed from the field team's own vocabulary, and the mobile experience configured around a rep's actual day — visits, quotes, and notes that survive a dead zone. Both systems ran in parallel to the contractual cutover date, syncing deals bidirectionally for four weeks, so the switch happened between systems that already agreed.
Just as important is what we ruled out, and why:
Duplicates were merged and dead records archived BEFORE migration, because moving 9,000 accounts including 2,000 zombies would just relocate the mess.
Stages and properties were named from the reps' own vocabulary, and the mobile experience was configured for their actual day — the CRM they'd actually open.
Deals synced bidirectionally for four weeks; the cutover date passed with nobody scrambling because both systems had already agreed.
Delivered by the systems pod — engineer + automation specialist over 10 weeks, with working increments reviewed with the client every week.
Obstacle
Mid-clean, the duplicate analysis surfaced far more dead and zombie records than the scoping estimate assumed — the true scale of a decade's neglect only appeared once matching ran for real.
Handled: We widened the cleaning phase by a week and archived rather than migrated the dead records; the cutover date held because cleaning had been scheduled before anything moved.
Obstacle
During the parallel fortnight, the same deal was edited in both systems on the same day, and the sync wrote conflicting next steps that neither team noticed for two days.
Handled: We defined a per-field conflict rule with an audit log, reviewed every logged conflict at a Friday stand-up, and briefed the office team that Salesforce edits during parallel run were the exception, not the habit.
Obstacle
The two most resistant reps raised the same objection late — they work areas with poor signal, and any CRM that assumed connectivity was dead on arrival for them.
Handled: Offline note capture and a stripped-down quick-quote flow went into the mobile build in the final fortnight; both reps became the demonstration pair at cutover, willingly.
The headline: open deals migrated intact, verified by the reps themselves at cutover — 214 → 214, read from Deal-by-deal reconciliation checklist. A second check: weekly active crm users among the field team, one quarter post-migration at 83% → 96%.
The shared inbox quietly retired — reps file their own visits because the mobile flow takes less time than the email did, and the office stopped re-keying other people's handwriting. Monday pipeline meetings run off live numbers the reps themselves entered, which changed the tone of those meetings more than anyone predicted. The cutover date passed as a diary note rather than an event: both systems had agreed for weeks, and the contract renewal simply closed an account nobody needed any more.
The result was read from Deal-by-deal reconciliation checklist against the pre-engagement baseline over the stated window, with a guardrail check on weekly active crm users among the field team, one quarter post-migration. Where platform-reported numbers and business outcomes differ, this record says which layer it is quoting.
What we would do differently
We would have involved the two most resistant reps in design earlier — their two objections (offline notes, quick-quote) became the features that won everyone else.
[ Related service ]
[ Related builds ]
−88%Launch emails sent to existing owners of the promoted product, measured across two launches
−57%8-10am inbound call volume, measured across the first full month
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