You are not leaving Salesforce because it is a bad product. You are leaving because you are paying enterprise prices for a platform that needs an administrator you do not have. That is the conversation we have almost every week with Quebec SMBs, and it is worth having honestly rather than as a sales pitch.
Why an SMB leaves Salesforce
Salesforce is a remarkable platform. It is also built for organizations with a dedicated admin, a budget for consultants, and enough volume to justify per-seat pricing that climbs with every module. A twelve-person business rarely has any of the three.
What we hear, almost always in this order:
- The bill keeps growing: Sales Cloud, then Service Cloud, then a few AppExchange add-ons, then more storage. Each one is defensible on its own; together they are a number nobody planned for;
- Nobody on the team can change anything: adding a field or adjusting a report means calling an external consultant, so the system slowly stops matching how the business actually works;
- The CRM is an island: invoicing lives somewhere else, support tickets somewhere else again, and the same client is entered three times;
- Most of it is unused: the features that justified the price are switched off, and the team works in a spreadsheet beside the CRM.
If none of that sounds like you, you probably should stay on Salesforce. We say so plainly when it comes up.
What you keep, and what changes
Zoho One is thirty-odd applications under one subscription per employee. The CRM is one of them. That single fact changes the economics: the invoicing, the support desk, the projects, the e-signature, the forms, the newsletter and the analytics are already included rather than purchased one at a time.
What you keep: the pipeline discipline, the reporting, the automations, the permissions structure, the mobile access. Zoho CRM does all of it.
What changes, honestly: Salesforce has a deeper ecosystem and a larger partner network. If your business depends on a specialized AppExchange application with no Zoho equivalent, that is a real constraint and we will tell you before you commit, not after.
What actually gets migrated
This is the question that decides whether a migration is a relief or a disaster. Here is the honest inventory.
- Accounts, Contacts, Leads: transferred with their fields, including the custom ones;
- Opportunities: with stages, amounts, close dates and history;
- Activities: calls, meetings, tasks and notes, attached to the right records;
- Attachments: files and documents, carried over with their records;
- Products and price books: including per-client pricing;
- Quotes, orders and invoices: with their line items;
- Cases: into Zoho Desk, with their conversation history;
- Campaigns and email lists: into Zoho Campaigns or Zoho Marketing Automation.
What does not transfer as-is: Apex code, Visualforce pages, Flows, validation rules, reports and dashboards, and the permission model. These are rebuilt in Zoho. That is not a loss — it is the one opportunity you will get to drop the workarounds that accumulated over the years instead of copying them into a new system.
The traps, named in advance
We would rather you hear these from us now than discover them in week three.
- The Salesforce contract: it is usually annual and does not cancel mid-term. Check your renewal date before you plan the switch, or you will pay for both platforms at once;
- Salesforce IDs: any external system that references Salesforce record IDs — a website form, an ERP, a custom integration — will need remapping;
- Data quality: a decade of use leaves duplicates and dead records. Migrating the mess costs more than cleaning it first;
- Attachment volume: a large document library takes real time to move. It is planned, not improvised;
- The export itself: Salesforce gives you your data, but the export has quirks. Getting it complete is a step of its own.
How it runs, step by step
- Inventory: what you actually have in Salesforce, object by object and field by field, and what is still in use;
- Clean-up: duplicates, inactive contacts, abandoned fields. Decided with you, never behind your back;
- Field mapping: every Salesforce field finds its place in Zoho, validated with you before anything moves;
- Test migration: a first pass into a test environment that you inspect yourself, with your own records in front of you;
- Rebuild: automations, reports and permissions built in Zoho, keeping what works and dropping what does not;
- Cutover: the final transfer, on a date you choose, with Salesforce kept in read-only for as long as you want it;
- Training and follow-up: your teams trained on Zoom, and corrections in the weeks that follow.
What moves the price and the timeline
We do not publish a flat rate, because a flat rate for a migration is either padded or wrong. Four things drive it:
- Data volume and quality: fifty thousand clean records are easier than five thousand messy ones;
- How much was customized: a near-standard Salesforce org migrates quickly. One with dozens of Apex triggers takes analysis;
- How many processes change hands at once: sales only, or sales plus invoicing plus support;
- Integrations: every external system connected to Salesforce has to be reconnected.
We set the figure and the schedule at the first meeting, before any commitment, and you follow the project afterwards in Zoho Projects.
After the cutover
A migration that ends on transfer day is a migration that fails in month two. What actually determines whether it works is the weeks that follow: the team’s questions, the report that needs adjusting, the automation nobody anticipated.
That is the part we do not bill as an extra. More than 350 implementations and more than 250 optimizations to date, and the pattern is always the same — the value shows up once people stop working around the system.
Frequently asked questions
Can we keep the full Salesforce history?
Yes, and it is what we transfer first. Opportunities, activities, notes and attachments carry their dates and their owners. If some part cannot be carried over, you know before the cutover, not after.
How long does a migration take?
A focused migration — CRM only, reasonable volume — runs in a few weeks. One that also covers invoicing and customer service takes longer, because the challenge is no longer the transfer but the order in which teams change tools.
What happens to our Apex automations?
They are rebuilt, not converted. Most of what Apex was written for is handled natively in Zoho by workflows, blueprints and functions. The rare case that genuinely needs code gets code — in Deluge, Zoho’s scripting language.
Will our teams be lost?
Zoho CRM is closer to Salesforce than people expect: same vocabulary, same pipeline logic, same record structure. Training runs on Zoom, in French or in English, and the first weeks after go-live are the ones that matter.
Can we migrate in stages?
Yes, and it is often the right call. Sales first, then invoicing, then support. Salesforce stays available in read-only during the transition, which takes a great deal of pressure off the team.
Where will our data be hosted?
In Canada. We host our clients’ Zoho environments in Canada and configure privacy settings against Quebec’s Law 25. For a business holding client records and contracts, that answer needs to exist in writing.
What if we decide to stay on Salesforce after all?
Then you stay, and you have lost nothing but a meeting. We would rather tell you that Salesforce is the right platform for you than sell a migration that will not pay for itself. It happens, and we say so.
Let us look at your situation together
Thirty minutes on Zoom is enough to know whether this is worth doing. We look at what you have in Salesforce today, what it costs you, and what a move would actually involve. You leave with a clear picture and an order of magnitude. No obligation, no sales pitch.