Burned 40 hours on a CRM migration that should have taken 10

Last month my boss told me to move us from HubSpot to Salesforce and gave me two weeks. I figured it would be rough but not that bad. Three days in I realized none of our custom fields mapped cleanly and I had to rebuild 12 workflows from scratch. The worst part was the data cleanup, we had 8,000 duplicate contacts and no one flagged it beforehand. By the end I was pulling 12 hour days just to get the basics working. Has anyone else had a migration blow up way worse than you planned?

3 comments

3 Comments

king.eric1mo ago

Nobody’s talking about how the people who built the old system probably added all those custom fields and workflows one painful ticket at a time, so of course the new setup wasn’t going to just snap into place. Your boss gave you two weeks for something that really needed a month of planning plus a week of testing before you even touched the live data. At least you found the 8,000 duplicates during the move instead of after billing went out, that’s the kind of hidden time bomb that gets people fired.

ben_lewis1mo ago

...and that's when I realized I had forgotten to back up the old database before starting. I spent two full days rebuilding everything from memory because the old server wiped itself clean during the migration process. My boss didn't even look at the new system until the week after it went live, by which point I had already found and fixed six different errors that would have broken our billing. Honestly, the whole thing made me want to go back to using spreadsheets and sticky notes.

cooper.drew1mo ago

Reminds me of the time I rebuilt an entire inventory list from a single crumpled receipt I found in my car.