How to transition from a martech stack to a unified system — without disrupting your business
Migration guide
The ultimate guide to migrating to an all-in-one CRM platform
Last updated
March 11, 2025
Read time
7 min
Written by
Angela Fornelli
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Introduction
Every growing business hits a tipping point — the moment when the tech stack that once fueled efficiency starts slowing everything down. The tools that helped you grow early on become bottlenecks, creating data silos and limiting growth.
When this happens, it's time for a tech reset — shifting to an all-in-one CRM that doesn’t just consolidate tools but transforms how your business operates. A unified system provides a real-time, 360° view of your customers, allowing for deeper personalization, smarter automation and data-driven decision-making. It removes inefficiencies, aligns teams and lays the foundation for sustainable, scalable growth.
But transitioning from a patchwork of tools to a fully integrated CRM can be complex. Done incorrectly, it can lead to data loss, broken automations and frustrated teams.
This guide will walk you through a step-by-step CRM migration strategy so you can make the switch smoothly and successfully.
Why migrating to a unified CRM is a competitive advantage
Why migrating to a unified CRM is a competitive advantage
Migrating to an all-in-one CRM isn’t just a tech upgrade — it’s a strategic investment in your company’s scalability and efficiency. As your business grows, a disconnected tech stack becomes a liability — slowing you down, limiting visibility and stifling growth.
A unified CRM eliminates these roadblocks, empowering your team to streamline operations, align sales and marketing and deliver a frictionless customer experience.
Signs it’s time to make the switch:
- Your team struggles with inefficiencies. A piecemeal tech stack typically can’t accommodate increasing users, complex workflows and custom permissions.
- Launching new initiatives is a battle. Adapting to market changes feels slow and painful because your systems don’t allow for agility.
- You need advanced automation and AI. Your current tools can’t support AI-driven insights, automation, and personalization.
- You rely on excessive integrations and workarounds. If you’re constantly patching solutions together, it’s a sign you need an all-in-one system.
- Your tools have redundant features. A unified CRM streamlines operations and eliminates unnecessary software costs.
- Your team wastes time switching between tools. Managing multiple systems is costing you efficiency and revenue.
- Marketing relies on developers to execute campaigns. If launching a simple campaign requires IT or developer intervention, you’re slowing down execution and missing revenue opportunities.
- Your customer data is fragmented. Siloed data means incomplete insights and missed opportunities for personalized engagement.
- Sales, marketing and service teams aren’t aligned. Without a single source of truth, collaboration suffers, leading to inefficiencies and poor customer experiences.
A modern all-in-one CRM isn’t just a replacement for your current tools — it’s a transformation in how you run your business. By centralizing data, streamlining operations and improving customer interactions, you’re not just keeping up with competitors — you’re staying ahead.
I was resistant to migrating my business to a new platform, but super glad I did as I’m now doing tons of things that weren't possible in the past.
Phase 1: Planning for a successful migration
Phase 1: Planning for a successful migration
Step 1: Define your objectives
Before making the transition, set clear goals for your CRM migration. Your objectives might include:
- Unifying customer data for better personalization and seamless customer experiences
- Automating processes to save time and scale operations
- Reducing costs by eliminating redundant tools
- Improving analytics for stronger decision-making
- Customizing workflows to match your business needs
Step 2: Audit your existing tech stack
Before making the transition, set clear goals for your CRM migration. Your objectives might include:
- CRM
- Email Marketing and Automation
- Landing Pages and CMS
- Forms and Lead Capture
- Sales and Pipeline Automation
- Ecommerce and Payment Processing
- Business Process Automation
- Membership and Partner Programs
- Calendar
- Analytics and Reporting
This audit will identify gaps, redundancies and must-have features in your next CRM.
Tool Name
Purpose
Feature's you can't live without
Keep / Integrate
Replace w/ new CRM
Example:
Mailchimp Pro
Example:
Email Newsletter
Example:
Merge fields, Autoresponder
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check_box
Example:
Airtable Business
Example:
Customer Portal
Example:
Custom Objects + Relationships
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Repeat rows as needed
Repeat rows as needed
Step 3: Audit and clean your data
It’s tempting to migrate everything, but moving excess data is expensive and unnecessary. Instead, focus on mission-critical data that supports customer relationships and revenue growth.
To understand which data fits into those categories, gain input from all stakeholders about which data they use. For example:
- Customer segments and groups: Which groups are used, and are they still relevant?
- Tags and fields: Which ones are you actively using for segmentation, automations, reporting or other business functions?
- Notes: Are the notes referenced and used to support the customer experience?
- Purchase history: Do you need to know which product was purchased, the date of the purchase, the price of the purchase?
You’ll want to make a similar assessment with your assets. For example:
- Automations: Which campaigns are live?
- Emails: Which emails are currently used?
- Pages: Which pages are live and used as part of campaigns?
- Web forms: Which forms are essential for capturing lead and purchase information?
Completing this audit will allow you to avoid unnecessarily moving legacy data and inactive assets.
Once you have this information, you’ll need to cleanse your data — removing duplicates, outdated information, and formatting errors. This will give you a clean system post-migration.
We also recommend backing up your data in a secure, cloud-based location so it's available if there are issues during the migration process.
Step 4: Set up your new CRM and map your data
Customize your CRM to match your business needs before migrating.
You may want to customize:
- The fields in your contact records
- The names of your sales pipeline stages, onboarding stages or other process stages
- The way you relate and organize deals, bids and companies
- Which metrics you’d like to show on your dashboard
- User roles, permissions and access controls
If your CRM offers custom objects for managing unique business systems and relationships, you’ll want to map your plan for those as well.
Having the foundational structure of your CRM database set up before you migrate helps ensure you can get up and running fast in your new platform.
lightbulb_2Pro tips
Use a visual mapping tool like Miro to track how data flows in your current vs. new system for a smoother transition. Map field names from your current vs new system as well.
Ontraport eliminated my need for 12 other systems and simplified my business in an incredible way.
Phase 2: Executing the migration
Phase 2: Executing the migration
Step 1: Migrate in phases
Rather than a high-risk “Big Bang” migration, most businesses benefit from a phased approach to minimize downtime and reduce errors.
Prioritize the data, templates and campaigns that are most critical to your day-to-day operations. This ensures minimal delays in your customers’ experiences, and it creates a clear stopping point for your old system in terms of capturing new leads and customer activity.
Prioritize these first:
- Lead capture forms to ensure new leads flow into the new system
- Checkout pages and order processing to avoid revenue disruptions
- Billing and subscription workflows
- Customer portals and membership access
Plan each migration during low-traffic periods and test small datasets before moving everything
From there, plan to migrate your other data and systems in order of importance, with historical or legacy data last. You may also want to consider waiting to move certain data or web pages until after an upcoming launch date, or around the time your contract with another tool ends.
lightbulb_2Pro tips
Follow these best practices from Ontraport’s team, who has supported thousands of businesses in migrating their tech stacks to Ontraport’s unified CRM platform for nearly 20 years.
- If your contacts are organized in lists or segments, you should import the list or segment name so you can create tags or groups in your new system accordingly.
- It may be helpful to migrate a list of contacts who have opted out of your marketing communications so you ensure you remain compliant with regulations.
- When you recreate your forms in your new CRM system, be sure to include form settings to ensure correct tracking and tagging for segmentation and follow-up.
- Remember to also recreate the related assets:
- Confirmation page that visitors see after they fill out the form
- Automations that are triggered by your forms
- Email and/or SMS messages that are sent via those automations post form-fillout
- Email text: In most circumstances, you can copy/paste the text of your emails from your old platform to your new one. Make sure your email text is placed in a plain text document before copying/pasting.
- Email images: Your images, including banners and footers, are usually hosted with your email system. You may need to re-host these images in your new platform so they show up when you send emails in your new system.
- There's an approval process for sending SMS marketing messages, so allow time to complete the application and get it approved before you’ll need to send them in your new platform.
- If migrating subscriptions, payment plans and credit cards, that involves both the old and new system. It's important to consider timelines because it'll take time for the payment processor to export credit card data and the new one to import.
- Encrypt and securely transfer membership credentials to avoid login issues.
- Links and other promotional tools in your previous system will no longer work once you move systems. Alert your affiliates of the switch over and provide them with new links.
Phase 3: Post-migration optimization and adoption
Phase 3: Post-migration optimization and adoption
Step 1: Test and train your team
- Perform end-to-end testing to validate data integrity and ensure automations are functioning correctly.
- Conduct live transaction tests to confirm orders and payments process smoothly.
- Train employees to ensure full adoption and avoid workflow disruptions.
Step 2: Optimize and scale
- Set up dashboards to monitor marketing and sales performance.
- Analyze insights to refine campaigns and improve engagement.
- Iterate and improve based on CRM performance data.
Make the most of your unified CRM
Make the most of your unified CRM
Migrating to a unified CRM isn’t just a software switch — it’s a business transformation.
With careful planning, phased execution and continuous optimization, your business will transition seamlessly — and be better positioned to scale.
When I switched all my systems over to Ontraport, the difference was night and day.
Ready to make the switch?
Ready to make the switch?
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