Moving from Salesforce.com to Microsoft CRM

[Anonymous]

Dear Marketo Community:

We have made the decision to migrate from Salesforce.com to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. We have about 4 months before we have to finalize the migration.

I am curious how we should handle the transition from Saleforce.com to Microsoft CRM and moving our integration with Marketo. Right now, our Salesforce.com is syncing with Marketo. Of course we will be wanting to switch this synchronization to Microsoft CRM after we have it up and running. I am curious if there are best practices for this type of transition as I don't want to lose any data or have Marketo duplicate all our leads.

My assumption is that we will import all the data from Salesforce.com into Microsoft CRM (with professional assistance of course) and then contact Marketo to help us switch our synchronization from Saleforce.com to Microsoft CRM.

Does anyone have experience with a migration from Saleforce.com to Microsoft CRM and dealt with switching Marketo that can offer suggestions for how best to tackle a project like this such as what to avoid or what to make sure we do?

Thanks in advance,

Micky Thompson
Post.Bid.Ship., Inc.
www.postbidship.com

[Josh_Hill13]

Micky,

I haven't heard of this specific case, however, your plan needs to be more detailed.

If you are running SFDC+Marketo live you will still have valuable data coming into the system while you try to migrate over to MSD. You will also have to migrate things like pages, workflows, etc.

In the other cases I've heard, firms usually end up running both systems for a month or two until everything is migrated properly. Then they shut down the old system. Of course, that's when they migrate from Eloqua to Marketo and can have both systems connected to SFDC.

Since you are migrating SFDC to MSD, there may be some data issues. I'd consider setting up MSD first to get all the workflows, pages, forms, etc ready with a separate Marketo+MSD instance. Marketo should be able to help you do this. Then, over a weekend, shut down Marketo1, migrate all SFDC data to MSD and go fully live.

But that's still a rough overview. I'm sure your migration consultant, Marketo, and MS can help in more detail.

[Anonymous]

I'm a total newbie and unfortunately don't have much to contribute... yet!   However, we have just implement SF (last week) and decided against MSD, I'm curious to know why you chose to make the switch? 

[Anonymous]

Micky-

I would love to connect with you to learn how you implemented best practices with MS CRM and diferent integration capabilities. I am actually migrating 2 other CRMs into 1 MS Dynamics CRM... And starting a new marketo instance with MS CRM, but trying to figure out if I can migrate old data from the old marketo instance with SFDC prior to the completetion of my CRM migration (even though it's advised against, I need to identify all risks and potential soultion - ie: duplicates!) Please Help!

[Anonymous]

We did the same migration from SFDC to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online last year. Sounds like you are on the same tight timeline we were. We didn't find it easy, but we learned a lot. Shad, our marketing ops expert, posted to the community a detailed set of considerations that I think you will find very useful:

 https://community.marketo.com/MarketoDiscussionDetail?id=90650000000PezUAAS

(Note that at the time we were running 2011 Online, and now everyone is on 2013 Online, so some things may be out of date.)

Shad would be happy to talk through this with you if you have questions.

In response to another question on this thread, we made the move for cost savings.

-Carl