Dealership CRM Migration Checklist

Written to be used with any vendor, in the order the work actually has to happen.

Your leverage is highest in the moment before you sign a renewal and lowest the day after you give notice. So the first item on this checklist happens before you tell anyone you are leaving.

Ask your current vendor, in writing, exactly what you can extract. Customer records is the easy answer and it is not enough. You want communication history, meaning the texts, the emails and the call records attached to each customer, because that history is what makes a follow up conversation credible six months from now. You want notes. You want appointment history, deal and desking records, task and process history, user assignment so you know who owned what, and lead source attribution so your reporting comparisons still mean something next year.

Then pin down the mechanics. What format, CSV or something structured. Is there a fee. How many years back. How long after termination can you still log in to pull something you missed. Does the export include attachments and documents or just the text fields.

Get the answers dated and saved. Roughly half the pain in a CRM migration traces back to somebody assuming an export would include something it did not. If your current agreement is up for renewal, our page on CRM contract negotiation covers the clauses worth fixing while you still have room to ask.

This is the step stores skip and then discover in production. Every system that currently pushes data into your CRM, or pulls data out of it, has to be repointed. Make the list on paper first.

• Lead sources. Every third party lead provider, every marketplace, every ADF or XML feed. Each one needs a new destination address and each one takes a different amount of time to change.
• Website forms. Contact forms, trade appraisal forms, finance applications, service requests. Include the ones your website vendor built years ago that nobody remembers.
• Chat and messaging. Chat widget, text short codes, any messaging vendor with its own number pool.
• Phone. Tracking numbers, call routing, recording, and wherever call records currently land.
• Inventory. If your CRM shows vehicles, something is feeding it.
• Outbound. Email service, direct mail vendor, equity mining tools, reputation and review platforms.
• Reporting. Anything a general manager or a group office pulls on a schedule.

Next to each one, write the vendor contact, the lead time to change it, and who owns the change. Then work the list. The ADF and XML integration page explains how lead feeds get repointed, and CRM API integrations covers the rest.

A migration is the one moment in the life of a dealership database when deleting junk is easy. Take it.

Duplicates first. Most stores carry the same customer three or four times because they came in from a lead provider, a website form and a walk in, and nobody merged them. Moving all four copies means paying to relocate a problem and then living with it. Deduplicate on the way out, using phone and email as the anchors rather than name.

Then contact data. Old databases are full of disconnected numbers and dead email addresses, and every one of them costs you deliverability and salesperson time. Run the list through validation before it moves. A phone validator and an email validator are built into our platform for exactly this reason, and it is worth doing regardless of who you migrate to.

Then decide the cutoff. Not every record deserves to come across. A lead from 2016 that never answered anything is not an asset. Pick a date range for full migration, a longer range for archive only, and be willing to leave the rest behind. Fewer, better records make the new system faster to use and easier to trust.

Opt out status must come across without exception. A customer who unsubscribed under the old system and then gets a text from the new one is a compliance problem, not a data problem. Our CRM data cleanup guide goes deeper on the mechanics.

The temptation is to accept the defaults and adjust later. Later never comes, and six months on you have a system nobody trusts because the numbers do not match how the store actually works.

Get these right before go live. Lead routing rules, including what happens at 9pm and on Sunday, because the leads that arrive when nobody is scheduled are the ones that decide whether the system looks good in month two. User roles and permissions, so a salesperson does not see gross and a BDC agent does not see everything. Statuses and stages named the way your managers already talk, not the way the vendor's demo store is set up. Follow up processes and drip sequences, at least the three or four that cover the majority of your volume. Templates for text and email, written in your voice.

Then set the response time expectation explicitly rather than hoping. A defined service level with alerts when it is missed is the single configuration that changes behavior fastest. Response time SLAs covers how to set one that people can actually hit.

Build all of it in a test period with a handful of real leads before the whole floor arrives. Configuration errors are cheap to fix in week zero and expensive in week three.

The single most common way a store loses leads during a CRM change is a hard cutover with no overlap. Somebody flips the feeds on a Friday, a lead provider does not update until Tuesday, and four days of leads land in a system nobody is watching.

Budget for paying two vendors for two to four weeks. It is the cheapest insurance in the project. During the overlap, run the new system as the system of record for anything new and keep the old one readable for history and for anything in flight. Do not try to work leads in both. Split attention produces two half worked pipelines.

Repoint feeds one at a time, not all at once, and verify each one by watching a real lead arrive before you move to the next. Send yourself a test through every single source. A feed that silently stopped is invisible until someone notices the count is low, and by then you have lost a week.

Keep one person responsible for reconciling counts daily during the overlap: how many leads arrived in the old system, how many in the new, and does the total match what the sources say they sent. Running two CRMs during migration covers this window in detail.

Adoption is the real cost of a CRM migration and nobody budgets for it properly. The software is not hard. Changing what forty people do at 8:30 every morning is hard.

Train managers before staff, and train them on inspection rather than usage. A manager who cannot pull the missed follow up list on the new system will stop asking about it, and once managers stop asking, the floor stops entering. That is the whole failure mode, and it happens quietly.

Train the floor on your own records, not the vendor's demo store. People learn the software either way, but only your data teaches them your job. Run short sessions by role. A salesperson needs six things and does not need the other sixty.

Expect a productivity dip of two to four weeks. Say so out loud in advance, because a dip nobody warned about gets blamed on the software and turns into a campaign to go back. Then hold the line on one rule: if it is not in the CRM it did not happen. Any exception granted in week one becomes permanent. The CRM adoption playbook and CRM training cover the sessions themselves.

Go live is not the finish line. It is the point where you find out what you configured wrong.

Week one, watch arrival. Confirm every lead source is still delivering, every day, by count. Confirm routing is assigning leads to people who are actually working, not to a manager who left in March. Confirm texts and emails are sending and, more importantly, that replies are landing back in the thread.

Week two, watch behavior. Pull time to first response and follow up touch counts by salesperson. This is where you learn who quietly reverted to their personal phone. Call recording with transcription makes this reviewable in minutes rather than hours, which is the difference between a manager doing it and a manager intending to.

Weeks three and four, watch outcomes. Appointments set, appointments shown, and whether the numbers reconcile with what the floor believes. Compare against the same period on the old system, which you can only do if you exported your historical reporting before you left. That is why it was on the pre-notice list.

Then fix configuration based on what you saw rather than what you planned. The stores that get the most out of a migration are the ones that treat the first month as a tuning period instead of a verdict.

For transparency, here is what changes if the destination is LeadLocate rather than another vendor.

There is less to configure, because the platform is built as one system rather than assembled from modules. Contact import handles customer records, and lead feeds, custom source feeds and global lead distribution with rules handle the routing side. Communication history from your old system comes across as records you can read; whether it arrives threaded depends entirely on what your previous vendor will export, which is why that question is first on this page.

What tends to surprise people during setup: the phone validator and the email validator cleaning the imported list before the first campaign, call transcription making review possible, RCS with SMS fallback, voicemail drop, lead pages for capture, and DealTracker desking covering loan and lease with a fifty state tax matrix so a payment can be penciled without a DMS connection.

No DMS integration and no inventory feed are required to operate. Month to month with no long term contract, so a migration that disappoints you is not a three year sentence. Pricing is on the pricing page, the demo shows the system running, and you can contact us or call 844-376-2274 to talk through your specific export situation before you commit to anything.

How long does a dealership CRM migration take?

Four to eight weeks is realistic for most single rooftops, with two to four of those weeks running both systems in parallel. The constraint is rarely the software. It is the notice period on your current contract, the lead time on repointing feeds, and how fast your team adopts.

What data should we insist on exporting from the old CRM?

Customer records, notes, communication history including texts and emails, appointment history, deal records, user assignment, lead source attribution and opt out status. Ask for the format, the year range, the cost and the post termination access window in writing before you give notice.

Can we run two CRMs at the same time?

Yes, and you should for a short window. Make the new system the system of record for anything new and keep the old one readable for history. Do not work leads in both, because split attention produces two half worked pipelines.

What is the biggest reason CRM migrations fail?

Adoption, not data. The floor drifts back to personal phones and notepads, managers stop inspecting because the new reports look unfamiliar, and within a quarter the system holds a fiction. The fix is management attention, not software.

Do we need a DMS integration to migrate to LeadLocate?

No. Neither a DMS integration nor an inventory feed is required to operate, which is why the migration can happen independently of whatever your back office is doing. If you have an inventory feed, Inventory Link can ingest it.

Will a new CRM improve our closing ratio?

We cannot guarantee any result, and no vendor honestly can. What a migration reliably does is make response time and follow up depth visible. If those improve, outcomes usually follow, but the improvement comes from what managers do with the visibility.

Tell us what your current vendor will release and we will tell you straight what carries across and what does not. Month to month, no long term contract.