CRM Migration for a Global Insurance Broker — Zero Pipeline Loss Across 8,400 Active Accounts

"Every CRM migration I have ever been part of has had data issues for weeks afterwards. This one did not. Celumai's approach of treating the pre-migration data quality work as the real project — not the migration itself — is exactly right."

— Global Head of Operations, Global Insurance Broker

We had been on our legacy CRM for eleven years. It held everything — every client interaction, every renewal, every contact. The thought of migrating was terrifying. We had seen other firms lose data and spend months in cleanup. We needed a firm that had done this before and could guarantee we would not lose a single renewal.

The legacy CRM had eleven years of data with inconsistent field naming, duplicate records created by multiple acquisitions, and 180 active renewal opportunities mid-cycle. Any data loss or corruption would have direct revenue impact. The migration window was a single weekend — brokers needed to be working in Salesforce by Monday morning.

We ran a twelve-week pre-migration programme before a single record was moved. This included full data profiling, deduplication of 2,400 duplicate accounts identified across the acquired businesses, field mapping validation with the brokerage ops team, and three dry-run migrations in a Salesforce sandbox. The actual migration was rehearsed until it could be completed in 18 hours.

The production migration executed over 28 hours — ahead of the 48-hour window. Every record was validated by automated reconciliation scripts comparing source and target counts, field by field. Active renewal opportunities were migrated last with manual validation by the ops team for each one.

Zero records lost. Zero active renewals disrupted. Data quality score improved from 58% to 92% as deduplication and standardisation cleaned eleven years of accumulated issues. All 180 brokers were operating in Salesforce by Monday morning.

Is this familiar?

Salesforce challenges in BFSI — what we see most often

CRM migrations are high-risk projects that most firms approach the wrong way. The instinct is to focus on the migration itself — the technical act of moving data from one system to another. The reality is that 80% of migration risk lives in the data quality of the source system.

Duplicates, inconsistent field formats, broken relationships between records, and orphaned activities all need to be resolved before migration begins. Migrating without this work produces a new CRM with the same data problems as the old one, plus the confusion of a new interface.

Celumai treats CRM migration as a data quality programme with a migration at the end. If your firm is planning a CRM migration, the first question we ask is: how long can you give us before the migration date?