Switching CRM is not an IT project, it is a business project. Your customer records, your sales history, your automations and your team’s habits are all on the line. A poorly prepared migration costs more than the subscription it was meant to save: lost fields, duplicates, sales reps drifting back to their spreadsheet, and six months of commercial ground given up.
Nuagix has migrated Quebec SMBs to Zoho since 2019, as a Zoho Premium Partner. More than 350 implementations and more than 250 optimizations of existing systems later, we have seen just about everything a CRM can hold in the way of surprises. This page explains how a migration to Zoho unfolds, from Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Monday.com, Excel, Access or a custom-built system, and what to plan for so the operation goes through without loss.
Why Quebec SMBs leave their current CRM
The reasons come up with striking regularity. The per-user cost that climbs at every renewal, first of all: an SMB of ten sales reps that paid a reasonable amount at the outset finds itself three years later with an annual bill that far exceeds what the full Zoho One suite would cost for the same team. Then the scattering: the CRM on one side, invoicing in another tool, marketing emails in a third, projects in a fourth, and nobody knows anymore which data is authoritative.
There is also the question of add-ons. Many platforms sell the CRM as a loss leader, then bill separately for electronic signatures, forms, advanced reports, the client portal, customer support. Zoho One settles that logic by giving access to the whole set of applications for a single price per employee.
Finally, compliance. Since Quebec’s Law 25 came fully into force, businesses must know where their clients’ personal information resides and who can access it. Zoho offers data hosting in Canada, which considerably simplifies the answer to that question. We come back to it below.
Our migration method, step by step
A successful migration rests less on the import tool than on the work done before you click “import.” Here is the sequence we follow on every project.
1. Inventory of the current system
We extract the full list of modules, custom fields, picklists, automations, reports and integrations in place. The goal is not to reproduce everything: it is to decide, knowingly, what deserves to cross over. On a CRM used for five years, it is not unusual for half the custom fields to be empty more than ninety percent of the time.
2. Cleaning the data at the source
Duplicates, closed accounts, contacts without a valid email, opportunities open for three years. We prefer to clean before the migration rather than after: a doubtful record imported into the new system becomes a doubtful record the team gets used to. This is the step clients underestimate the most, and the one that determines the quality of the result.
3. Designing the data model in Zoho
We establish the mapping between each source field and its destination in Zoho CRM: standard modules, custom fields, relationships between accounts, contacts, deals and products. This is where the value of an experienced partner comes into play. A free-text field in Salesforce can become a controlled picklist in Zoho, which improves report quality for years to come, but it takes a business decision, not a technical setting.
4. Trial migration in a test environment
We first load a representative sample, then the full dataset, into a separate environment. Your team validates against records it knows by heart: the biggest client, the most complex file, the one that changed hands three times between reps. If those three are right, the rest follows.
5. Rebuilding automations and reports
Workflow rules, automatic assignments, notifications, email templates and dashboards do not migrate: they are rebuilt. That is good news. Most businesses take the opportunity to remove automations that no longer serve a purpose and to simplify those that had piled up over the years.
6. Training the team before the switch
We train users while the old system is still running, on their own migrated records. A team that discovers the new CRM on the morning of the switch is a team that goes back to its spreadsheet the following week.
7. Cutover and delta migration
On the agreed date, we reload only the records created or modified since the trial migration, then the old system goes read-only for a transition period. We stay available during the first weeks, because that is when the real questions surface.
Migrating from Salesforce to Zoho CRM
Salesforce is a powerful platform, and that is precisely the problem for an SMB: the power is paid for in licences, in add-ons and often in external administrator fees. The businesses that call us have generally concluded that they use a fraction of what they pay for.
Technically, the migration goes well. Accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, activities, notes and attachments transpose to the equivalent Zoho CRM modules. The points that need attention lie elsewhere: validation rules, record types, role hierarchies and formula fields call for a one-by-one analysis. Custom code does not cross over — it is rewritten with Zoho’s automation tools, which is often the occasion to find that a good part of it no longer had any use.
Count on three to five weeks for an SMB of five to fifteen employees with standard Salesforce use, more if custom developments are in production.
Migrating from HubSpot to Zoho
HubSpot separates the CRM from its Marketing, Sales and Service hubs, each with its own tiers. The businesses that migrate generally do so when the free or starter tier no longer suffices and the price jump becomes hard to justify.
The CRM part migrates without trouble: companies, contacts, deals, tasks and associated emails. The subtlety is in the marketing. HubSpot’s smart lists, sequences and workflows find their equivalent on the Zoho CRM and Zoho Campaigns side, but the logic differs. We rebuild the journeys rather than copy them, and we check sending reputation before switching over communications, to avoid a delivery dip at the moment of change.
A point often forgotten: HubSpot forms embedded in the website must be replaced with Zoho forms, otherwise new prospects keep arriving in the old system for months.
Migrating from Pipedrive to Zoho CRM
Pipedrive appeals for its simplicity and its visual pipeline. Businesses leave it when they want to go beyond sales: invoicing, customer support, project management, human resources. That is exactly Zoho One’s territory.
The migration is one of the simplest we handle. Pipedrive’s model, centred on organizations, people and deals, maps almost one to one onto Zoho CRM’s accounts, contacts and opportunities. Pipeline stages reproduce faithfully, activities and notes follow. Most of the work consists in taking advantage of the move to structure what Pipedrive left in free-text fields, and to connect the applications the business was using on the side.
Migrating from Monday.com to Zoho
Monday.com is not a CRM to begin with, it is a work management tool that many businesses have folded into a CRM. That gives flexible boards, but also unstructured data: the same client written four different ways, dates in free text, amounts that will not add up.
The migration therefore calls for a longer-than-average normalization step. We separate what belongs to the customer relationship, headed for Zoho CRM, from what belongs to project management, headed for Zoho Projects. Businesses almost always gain in clarity: sales reps stop working in the same board as project managers, and each recovers a tool designed for their job.
Moving off Excel to Zoho CRM
The spreadsheet is still the most widespread CRM in Quebec, and it works — up to a certain threshold. That threshold arrives when two people have to work in it at the same time, when the file circulates by email in three versions, or when an employee’s departure carries off the only up-to-date copy.
Migrating from Excel is technically easy and humanly demanding. Easy, because a clean file imports in a few hours. Demanding, because the spreadsheet almost always holds implicit conventions no one has written down: a “status” column with eleven different values meaning three things, comments in the margin, coloured cells that mean something to one person only. We spend time interviewing the users before the import, to turn those conventions into structured fields.
The result is worth the effort: shared history, automatic follow-ups, reports that produce themselves, and data that belongs to the business rather than to one employee’s workstation.
Migrating from a Microsoft Access database to Zoho
Microsoft Access databases are still very much alive in Quebec’s manufacturing and service SMBs. They were often built ten or fifteen years ago by a resourceful employee, and no one in the business is able to modify them anymore.
The good news is that Access is a real relational database: the tables, keys and relationships are explicit, which makes transposing to the Zoho CRM model much easier. The delicate part concerns the forms and queries that carry the business logic, sometimes accompanied by macros or code. We document them, we validate with you what is still relevant, then we rebuild that logic with Zoho’s workflow rules and custom functions.
The main risk with an Access database is not the migration, it is waiting: as long as it runs on a single workstation without a backup, a disk failure can carry off the business’s entire history.
Migrating from a custom-built or Quebec CRM
Some businesses use custom-developed software, sometimes built by a vendor that no longer exists, sometimes by an employee who left long ago. Others use a local CRM they have outgrown. In both cases, the first question is not technical: is it still possible to extract the data, and in what form?
We begin by validating access. Native export, direct database access, an application programming interface, or as a last resort extraction from printed reports. This check is done early, because it determines the real timeline of the project. We have already carried out complete migrations from text exports of systems dating to the nineteen-nineties.
We have also developed particular expertise in migrating from CentrixOne, a Quebec CRM used by many SMBs across the province. If that is your situation, our dedicated CentrixOne to Zoho migration page details the module mapping and the pitfalls specific to that platform.
What migrates, and what does not
Let us be clear from the outset, because this is the most frequent source of disappointment.
Migrates: accounts and companies, contacts, leads, opportunities and their stage, products and price lists, quotes and orders, past activities, notes, attachments, emails associated with records, record owners and original creation dates.
Is rebuilt rather than migrated: automations and workflow rules, reports and dashboards, email templates, layouts and validation rules, profiles and permissions, integrations with third-party tools.
Does not cross over: custom code specific to the source platform, system audit logs, and generally the detailed field-by-field change history. If that history has legal value for your sector, we plan a consultable archive of the old system rather than trying to reproduce it.
How much does a CRM migration to Zoho cost
The price depends on three factors, and no others: the volume and cleanliness of the data, the number of fields and automations to carry over, and the number of users to train.
A migration from Pipedrive or from a well-kept Excel spreadsheet, for a team of five, sits at the lower end of the scale and is settled in a few weeks. A migration from Salesforce with custom developments, accounting integrations and twenty-five users is a substantially larger project. Rather than post a price that would mean nothing, we produce a written plan within 48 business hours of our meeting, covering scope, timeline and budget.
What to keep in mind on the financial side: the recurring saving on licences frequently covers the cost of the migration within the first year, especially when the business replaces three or four separate subscriptions with Zoho One at the same time.
Hosting in Canada and Law 25 compliance
A migration is the right moment to settle the question of data residency, because the choice of data centre is made when the account is created and cannot be changed afterward without a new migration.
Zoho operates a Canadian data centre. Your personal information therefore stays in the country, which simplifies your processing register and your privacy impact assessment. Beyond hosting, Law 25 requires knowing who accesses what: we configure profiles, roles and sharing rules right from the migration, rather than letting everyone see everyone while waiting to “clean it up later.”
The five mistakes we see most often
- Migrating without cleaning. Importing twenty years of duplicates gives a new CRM as unreliable as the old one, with the team’s loss of trust thrown in.
- Wanting to reproduce everything identically. Rebuilding in Zoho the workarounds invented to compensate for the old tool’s limits means importing the problems along with the data.
- Switching over without training. Adoption is won before the switch, on real records, not after.
- Forgetting the entry points. Website forms, shared mailboxes, campaigns in progress: if a single channel keeps feeding the old system, the data splits in two.
- Cutting off the old system too fast. We keep read-only access during the transition period. It is insurance that costs almost nothing.
Frequently asked questions about migrating to Zoho
How long does a CRM migration to Zoho take?
For an SMB of five to fifteen employees with standard use of its current CRM, count on three to five weeks between the start of the project and going live. Migrations from a spreadsheet or from Pipedrive go faster. Migrations from Salesforce or from a custom system with custom developments take longer, mainly because of the preliminary analysis.
Am I at risk of losing data?
No, provided you proceed by trial migration. We first load the data into a test environment that your team validates, and the old system remains accessible read-only after the switch. No data is deleted at the source during the process.
Can both systems run in parallel during the transition?
For viewing, yes, and we recommend it. For entering new data, no: two systems active for writing produce two versions of the truth that diverge within the first week. We set a clear cutover date, after which the old CRM goes to view-only.
Will my current automations be carried over?
They are rebuilt, not transferred, because each platform has its own engine. We take an inventory of them, we validate with you which ones still serve a purpose, and we recreate them in Zoho. Most businesses take the opportunity to remove a good many of them.
Will my data be hosted in Canada?
Yes. Zoho has a Canadian data centre and we create your account in that region, which helps your Law 25 compliance. This choice is made when the account is created and cannot be changed afterward without a new migration, which is why it matters to settle it from the start.
What happens if my old system offers no export?
We validate data access at the first meeting. Depending on the case, we go through the vendor’s application programming interface, through direct database access, or through extraction from reports. We have carried out complete migrations from custom systems with no export function of any kind.
How much does a migration to Zoho cost?
The cost depends on the volume of data, the number of automations to carry over and the number of users to train. After a free 30-minute Zoom meeting, we deliver a written plan within 48 business hours covering scope, timeline and budget.
Let’s talk about your migration
Nuagix has been a Zoho Premium Partner since 2019 and received the Sales Achievement award at the Zoho Partner Awards 2024. Our team supports self-employed professionals and SMBs in Quebec with the implementation, migration and optimization of Zoho One.
Here is how we work:
- A free 30-minute Zoom meeting to understand your current system and your goals.
- A written plan within 48 business hours: scope, timeline, budget.
- The implementation. For an SMB of 5 to 15 employees, Zoho CRM goes live in 3 to 5 weeks.
Book your 30-minute Zoom meeting, at a time that suits you. You can also write to us at support@nuagix.ca.
To go further: migrating to Zoho from HubSpot, Salesforce, QuickBooks and Monday, CentrixOne to Zoho migration, Zoho implementation in Quebec and our Zoho consultant in Montreal.