Moving New York-area firms off legacy CRMs, practice databases and partner spreadsheets, and settling every duplicate before a record reaches Salesforce.
Migrations for New York companies often combine sources: a legacy CRM, a marketing tool, contact lists kept by individual partners and sometimes an acquired firm's system. The work starts with an inventory of each source and a decision about which history is worth keeping. We then map fields, merge duplicates, especially people who appear in several lists under different titles or emails, run trial loads into a sandbox, reconcile counts and schedule a cutover that avoids month-end and busy client periods.
Consulting, legal and accounting firms often arrive with a practice database, a marketing list tool and contact files that belong to individual partners. The hard part of the migration is merging those into one person record per contact without losing who owns which relationship. We match on email and company, flag conflicts for review by the partner concerned, and bring over key meetings and referrals so relationship history survives the move.
Startups in the city's technology sector, one of NYCEDC's innovation industries, frequently begin on a lightweight CRM and move to Salesforce once they add enterprise sales, partnerships or more product lines. Migration for them is mostly about reconciling deal stages that meant different things to different reps, carrying over product and subscription data correctly, and preserving the marketing attribution that growth teams use when planning spend. We also re-point signup forms and product-usage feeds at Salesforce during cutover.
NYCEDC also names the green economy as an innovation industry. Energy-efficiency and clean-energy service companies often track sites, projects, incentives and installers in spreadsheets that grew as fast as the business did. Migrating them means turning those sheets into proper objects, such as properties, projects and program applications, and de-duplicating building and customer records so that each property appears once, with its full project history attached. Incentive deadlines are carried over as tasks so none are missed.
Pick a date after which nobody edits the legacy system, and tell every team what that means for open deals and cases. A short, announced freeze followed by a final delta load is far safer than letting people update both systems during a transition week.
When the same contact sits in several partners' lists, a merge needs someone to decide ownership and the correct details. Assign those decisions before trial loads begin, so migration is not held up by review queues that nobody feels responsible for clearing.
Not all history is worth loading, but regulated firms may still need to produce it later. Export what stays behind to a searchable archive with a documented location, so records that do not move into Salesforce can still be retrieved when an auditor or client asks.
How our salesforce migration works →
Client names are anonymized, and these projects are not specific to New York.
Start by choosing the target data model, not the target system. Then map both sources into it, agree matching rules for shared clients, and decide which firm's pipeline stages and account ownership rules win. We usually run trial loads from both sources together in a sandbox, because combined duplicates only show up when both data sets sit side by side.
Selectively. Many hold relationships that exist nowhere else, which makes them valuable, but they also carry outdated titles, personal notes and contacts who have moved firms. We collect them, standardize and match them against the main data, and let each owner confirm or discard their records before loading. Anything unconfirmed stays in an archive rather than cluttering the new system.
We schedule the final load for a quiet period, typically a weekend outside quarter-end, and complete trial runs beforehand so the timing is known. Users get short training before the switch, a list of what changed and a named contact for the first days. The legacy system stays readable for a period so people can check history they expected to find.
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