Are you working with SugarCRM and are thinking about migrating to Salesforce CRM?

…but worried that the data migration process is too hard? We have just completed a migration for an Open Source database support organisation with almost 100 staff using Import2 services in (almost) 2 clicks.

Our customer had been using SugarCRM for about 3 years but was beginning to struggle with integration with Marketing Automation tools (think Marketo or ExactTarget, not just mass email tools like VerticalResponse, MailChimp or Constant Contact). The Marketing team were getting criticised because of the quality of the Leads, the Sales team were frustrated with how the system worked, and Finance and Operations had minimal visibility of Contract Management.

As part of the project, the client wanted to migrate ALL of the existing data within SugarCRM including Leads, Accounts, Contacts and Opportunities. Now that doesn’t sound too hard, after all we’ve done hundreds of data management exercises. But then a couple of users asked if all the Notes, Activities and Emails were going to be migrated; and then what about those custom fields and wouldn’t it be great if the created date were maintained between the systems so the age of Leads and Contacts could be kept?…..the difficulty level started to increase.

Difficult yes, but not an impossible task with Salesforce Data Loader – and made even easier with our preferred tool Skyvva Dataloader – but now definitely starting to become a much more complicated project.

So before pricing up a project to manage all the data for our customer, we checked the trusted Salesforce Community and specifically Salesforce Appexchange; sure enough, there was a listing by Import2.

The Import2 solution was fantastic! You enter SugarCRM credentials and Salesforce CRM credentials and a test run starts nearly straight away.

A quick chat with Mark from Import2 via Skype verified some finer details:

• Import2 will create the custom fields, and picklist values for those custom fields, and will also create standard fields.
• Import2 maps SugarCRM User email addresses to Salesforce User email addresses (make sure your users are aligned).
• We needed to ensure SugarCRM currencies are enabled in Salesforce (this was a global rollout, US, Canada, Australia, many European countries and Japan).
• Tidy SugarCRM Account annual revenue data (removing non-numerical characters).
• Don’t forget to log a case with Salesforce Support to enable Write access to Audit fields (Create date, Created by, Last Modified date, Last Modified by)
• Import2 maps the following tables:
  • Tasks -> Task
  • Notes -> Events or Notes (configurable, default is Events to save audit fields)
  • Emails -> Tasks
  • Completed Calls, Meetings -> Events
  • Upcoming Calls, Meetings -> Tasks

We did a test run a few weeks ago and everything looked good so we moved forward and created record types, page layouts and a plan for the final migration just prior to our ‘go live’ date.

The final migration started on a Friday morning and took about 12 hours. It migrated about 70,000 records including all the interdependencies. Once it finished there were 10 records that needed the data cleaned in SugarCRM before a quick restart (the mechanism knows which records failed).

• Phone number fields value too long in SugarCRM
• Address field values too long in SugarCRM
• An email address treated as invalid in Salesforce CRM

The customer is now ready to deploy to 22 Sales reps, Sales Engineers, Sales Admin and Management on time and on budget.

Disclosure: We have not been compensated for this post and Import2 did not request that I write it. I just wanted to share our experience with this great service.