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The order matters. Extract what exists and count it, so you know what a successful migration looks like. Clean before mapping, because deduplicating in the old structure is far easier than in the new one. Map field by field with a decision recorded for anything that has no home, rather than creating a custom field for every orphan and starting the new system with the old system's mess.

Test with a full-size trial load into a sandbox, not a sample. Volume is what exposes the problems: duplicate matching rules that merge two real customers, date formats that flip day and month, text fields truncated at the new limit, and relationships that silently break. Compare record counts and a sample of values between old and new, and keep a read-only copy of the source data until you are confident, because the old system usually gets switched off the week after go-live.

Under PECR you must not send marketing by electronic mail to individuals unless they have specifically consented or they are an existing customer who falls within the soft opt-in. The soft opt-in applies where the person bought, or negotiated to buy, a similar product or service from you, you gave them a clear chance to opt out when you collected their details, and you include an opt-out in every message since. It does not cover prospects, bought-in lists or non-commercial promotions.

Corporate subscribers are treated differently. The ICO's guidance is that companies, limited partnerships and government bodies may be emailed, while sole traders and unincorporated partnerships are treated as individuals. Every message must identify the sender honestly and give a valid address for opting out, and opt-outs must be acted on promptly.

Translated into CRM configuration: store the source of each contact, the date and wording of any consent, whether the soft opt-in applies and why, the legal status of the contact where it affects the rules, and the opt-out date. Those fields are what lets you answer a complaint, and they are exactly what gets lost in a rushed import.

Buy the software licences in your organisation's name with your own billing, and hold at least one full administrator account that no external party controls. Consultancies often offer to resell licences and manage the account, which is convenient until the relationship ends and your renewal, your users and your data all sit behind someone else's login.

Where the consultancy handles personal data from your CRM, it is a processor and needs a written contract meeting the UK GDPR requirements, including deletion or return of data at the end of the engagement. Ask specifically about the extracts taken during migration: a copy of your entire customer database frequently lives on a consultant's laptop long after go-live, and nobody has ever asked for it back.

A CRM accumulates personal data indefinitely unless someone decides otherwise. Set a retention position: how long a lapsed prospect stays, what happens to the records of a customer who has not traded for years, and how a deletion request is actioned across the CRM and everything it feeds. Write it down, because the alternative is a justification invented under pressure when a request arrives.

Data quality needs the same routine ownership. A monthly duplicate check, a rule about who may create new picklist values, and a named administrator who reviews inactive users is unglamorous work that determines whether the reporting can be trusted. Budget a small standing allocation of administrator time from the start rather than commissioning a clean-up project in two years.

Define go-live by criteria rather than by date: migration reconciled against agreed counts, the named integrations working end to end, core users trained, and reporting producing numbers someone has checked against the old system. A go-live declared because the calendar said so is how organisations end up running two systems for six months.

Hypercare is the support period immediately afterwards, and it should be written into the agreement with a length, a response time and a definition of what counts as a fix rather than a change. Ask what happens at the end of it: the handover to your own administrator, the documentation of the configuration and automations, and a list of the decisions taken during the project that a successor would otherwise have to guess at.