Salesforce Data Migration Best Practices

 Companies take different ways when migrating customer data from a legacy CRM system to Salesforce, having different impacts on their user experience when they go live. Two basic goals of companies for migration of data to Salesforce are:

• Speed-to-market
• Smooth and speedy user adoption

Why is it Important to Pre-plan the Migration?

Majority of data integration or migration projects experience delays and holdups that can be escaped through some prior preparation. Providing more resourceful, streamlined processes and better customer insight while integrating the data into Salesforce can result in cost-control and boost in sales; which even validates the onset investment.

Options for Data Migration to Salesforce

The following are the different options available for data migration/integration; you can pick the one that fits your preference:

• Salesforce Import Wizard
• Apex Data Loader
• Force.com Excel Connector
• Informatica
• Dataloader io
• Jitterbit Data Loader

After you have selected your preferred tool, it’s essential to start the discussion early with your IT Security and Compliance departments. This will help you save time and get over these hurdles, avoiding delays to your project. Also, assign roles and responsibilities to business reps for data selection, IT reps for development resources and limitations, testing department for smooth functioning, and project manager to plan and manage all the tasks and migration steps.

Quick Steps to Migrate your Data to Salesforce

Be it a lucid feed or a complex, multi-fold migration, follow these comprehensible steps to go about the shift without any disruptions:

One of the first and most important steps in any data processing task is to verify that your data is valid, clean and free of duplicates. We understand that preparing your data can be a source of pain. Cleaning data for migration into the CRM system is not always an easy process and can be quite time-consuming.

Key Considerations: You should ask yourself the following questions when planning for your data migration.

1. What are the sources of data?
2. Who is going to use the data?
3. Who is going to own which records in Salesforce?
4. What data is relevant moving forward?
5. Will any custom fields need to be added?
6. Are there any data transformations needed?
7. Are the field types (text, number, picklist, etc.) aligned between systems?
8. Have all the duplicates been removed?
9. Are naming conventions consistent?
10. Is the data complete?

Solutions: Migration of your data is important and it has to be done correctly. We have tips on how to make it easier:

1. Create a plan with the who, what, when and where of the data migration
2. Save backup copies of data!
3. Identify the key data sets that are important to the ongoing business (Account, Contact, Products, etc.)
4. Clean the data before importing as much as possible
5. Create and Map Only Relevant Data Fields
6. Understand the relationships between the records to ensure the proper associations between Accounts, Contacts and related Activity history
7. Import Legacy IDs as the Legacy ID for each record should be populated into a custom field in all CRM records.
8. Identify any data transformations that are needed (Ex. MN to Minnesota)
9. Normalize old data if possible to limit the number of errors during the create a Cutoff date for old records
10. Perform a test migration on a limited set of records and conduct data quality analysis
11. QA process should include validation of record counts, field level validation and data integrity
12. Include business users in the final validation as they know their data the best!
13. At Go-Live build a detailed project plan with the order of activities and validation steps. This is important as all Accounts need to be loaded before contacts and opportunities.