Your CRM Migration Went Live. So Why Does Nothing Work?

The project was signed off. The data moved. The old system was switched off. And six months later your team still keeps the real numbers in a spreadsheet.

This is more common than most consultancies admit, and it hits healthcare and life sciences teams hard. Foundations depend on donor history. Medical device teams depend on clean event and account data. CROs depend on knowing which campaigns turn into studies. When the CRM breaks, the work does not stop. It just moves back into email and spreadsheets.

We have spent 18+ years doing CRM consulting on HubSpot and Salesforce, and a fair share of that work is fixing a migration someone else finished. Here is what we have learned.

The signs your migration did not land

You do not need an audit to know. Look for these:

• People cannot see the whole record. Staff open a contact or account and the history, gifts, deals or activities they expect are not there.
• Marketing and sales keep separate lists. The same person exists twice, once in each system, with different details.
• Reports get rebuilt by hand. Someone exports data every week to answer questions the CRM should answer.
• Work happens outside the system. Requests and follow-ups run through inboxes, calls and spreadsheets.
• Nobody trusts the numbers. Leaders ask for the figure, then ask where it came from.

If three or more sound familiar, the problem is usually not your team. It is how the system was set up.

What a rescue looked like at Connecticut Children's

Connecticut Children's Foundation moved from a legacy system to Salesforce with a large IT consulting firm. The migration went poorly. The user experience was weak, key features were broken, and the contact and account views staff relied on did not work. Donor data was hard to track, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud was not connected to the Nonprofit Success Pack.

We did not start over. We started with discovery across Salesforce NPSP, Marketing Cloud, Classy and iWave to find the real pain points. Then we wrote a plan with short, mid and long term goals, built so daily fundraising work would not stop while we fixed things.

From there, the work was practical:

• Redesigned the main page layouts and permission sets, so staff could see what they needed.
• Built new reports and dashboards for the research and sales teams to track activity, goals and progress.
• Replaced manual email, call and spreadsheet work with case management.
• Connected Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud, so the team stopped managing duplicate contacts and could segment donors properly.

The result: over a one-year project, the sales, research and marketing teams got one shared view of their donors, and fundraising grew 1.5x.

As Lauren M, VP Operations, put it: "I have no hesitation that when we need outside consulting in the future, Moblize.it will be the first number we call."

Five steps we follow to fix a broken CRM

Every rescue is different, but the order of work rarely changes.

1. Find the real pain before touching anything. Talk to the people who use the system every day. The loudest complaint is not always the root cause.
2. Plan in stages. Fix what blocks daily work first, then reporting, then the larger changes. Nobody can pause fundraising or a sales quarter for a rebuild.
3. Fix the record view. If staff cannot see the full picture on one screen, adoption will not recover, whatever else you fix.
4. Connect marketing and sales. One contact, one record, synced both ways. This is where duplicate data and arguments about attribution end.
5. Give each team a dashboard it trusts. Build reports around the questions leaders actually ask, so the spreadsheet can finally retire.

The same pattern in life sciences

The details change by industry. The pattern does not.

• Allucent, global CRO: marketing ran on HubSpot and sales on Salesforce, with no data passing between them. After a six-month project with a two-way HubSpot and Salesforce integration and custom dashboards, marketing could follow leads from conferences, webinars and landing pages through to paying customers.
• GammaTile, medical device: event leads ran on manual uploads and messy spreadsheets. After we connected iCapture, HubSpot and Salesforce, duplicate conference lead records fell 43%, with no more manual uploads.

Different teams, different platforms. In each case, the fix started with understanding how people actually work.

Sometimes the answer is smaller than you think

Not every broken CRM needs a new platform or a full rebuild. Often it needs better layouts, a working integration and reports people trust. We would rather tell you that than scope a bigger project. Projects run from 4 weeks to 6 months depending on scope, and we can stay on with managed services afterwards if you want a long-term partner.

Get a straight answer on your CRM

Book a 30-minute CRM assessment. We will look at what is broken, what is worth keeping and what to fix first. No pitch, with or without an engagement.

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