What a CRM migration actually costs an advisory firm
The licence is the smallest number in a migration. Here is where the rest of the cost sits, and how to tell whether you need one at all.
A CRM migration is the largest operational project a firm of this size can undertake, and the number quoted in the sales process is almost never the number that lands.
That is not because vendors are dishonest. It is because most of the cost is not theirs, does not appear on any invoice, and is paid by your staff over the following six months.
Where the cost actually sits
- Parallel running, where two systems are live and staff are keeping both current because nobody trusts the new one yet
- Data that does not map, which is every custom field, every note convention, and every workaround somebody invented in 2021
- Relearning, because your team already knew how to do the job and now does not
- Integration rebuild, since whatever was connected to the old system is not connected to the new one
- The process debt that moves across untouched, because an undocumented process does not become documented by changing systems
A migration moves the mess. If the process was undocumented before, it is undocumented afterwards, in a system fewer people know.
The question to answer before you scope one
Take the complaint that started the conversation and locate it precisely. Is the problem something the current platform genuinely cannot do, or is it something the platform can do and nobody configured?
In most firms we look at, the second is more common, and the reason is straightforward: the CRM was configured once at purchase, against how the firm worked at the time, and nobody has revisited it since the firm changed. That is a configuration project, not a migration, and it costs a fraction as much. We wrote about the general version of this in why another platform will not fix your operations.
If you genuinely do need to move
Sometimes the platform really is the constraint, and when that is true the migration is worth doing. The thing that separates the ones that go well from the ones that do not is what happened before the move:
- Document the current process first, so you are moving a known thing rather than a habit. How to write ones that get used
- Decide which system owns which record before anything is mapped, not during
- Rebuild the integrations as part of the project rather than afterwards, or you will run manually for a quarter
- Train against written procedures, so the second hire learns what the first one did
That order is deliberate. A migration performed on top of an undocumented operation reproduces the operation exactly, which is the outcome nobody is paying for.
Also here
What a buyer is actually pricing when they look at your firm
Two advisory firms with the same revenue can be worth different amounts. The difference is how much of the business leaves when the owner does.
Using the fourth quarter to fix what slowed you down this year
Q4 is the only stretch where an advisory firm has both the visibility and the slack to change how it operates. Here is what fits in it.
Next
Start with the assessment.
Tell us what your firm runs on today and we will come back with what an assessment would cover, what it would cost, and how long it would take.