Moving from Salesforce in a weekend: a checklist

Switching CRMs has a reputation for taking a quarter and ending in tears. It doesn’t have to. Most of the teams we help move from Salesforce do it over a single weekend, with reps working in Modal on Monday morning. The trick is doing the thinking in the week before, so the weekend itself is mostly waiting for imports to finish.

This is the checklist we use. It assumes a sales team of 10 to 100 people and a Salesforce org that has grown for a few years without much tidying.

The week before

Decide what not to bring

Every Salesforce org carries fields nobody has filled in since 2021. Export a field usage report and mark anything that is empty on more than 90% of records. You can still import those later if someone misses them. In our experience, nobody does.

• List every object in use: standard ones and any custom objects.
• Mark fields to drop, keep or merge.
• Decide how much activity history to bring. Two years is usually plenty.
• Note any automation (flows, process builder, triggers) that a person relies on every day.

Map objects and fields

Modal’s importer proposes a mapping for you, but it helps to agree the big pieces first.

Salesforce	Modal	Notes
Account	Company	Matched by domain where there is one
Contact	Person	Linked to companies by account ID and email domain
Lead	Person, with a lead status field	Or keep them in a separate list
Opportunity	Deal	Stages mapped one to one, or merged
Custom object	Custom object	Lookups become relationships
Task and Event	Timeline activity	Replaced going forward by inbox sync

Leads are the one place teams differ. If your reps treat leads and contacts as the same people at different moments, import leads as people with a status field. If a separate team works leads, keep them as their own list.

Connect inboxes early

Ask every rep to connect their Google or Microsoft account to Modal before the weekend. Sync starts straight away and backfills two years of email and meetings, which is often more complete than the activity history in Salesforce.

Friday afternoon

1. Freeze Salesforce. Set it to read-only for everyone except admins. Tell reps any change after this point will be lost.
2. Run the export. Use the Salesforce connector in Modal rather than CSV files. It keeps record IDs, owners and relationships intact.
3. Import in order. Companies first, then people, then deals, then custom objects. Each step links to records that already exist.
4. Check the preview. The importer shows the first 50 records of each object before writing. Open a few you know well and compare them with Salesforce.

Saturday

Saturday is for checking, not building.

• Compare record counts per object. Small differences are usually duplicates the importer merged; check the merge log.
• Spot-check your ten largest open deals: amount, stage, owner, close date, contacts.
• Rebuild the views your team opens most. Ask three reps in advance which ones they use.
• Recreate the handful of automations from your list, as triggers in Modal.
• Build the forecast dashboard your sales leader looks at on Monday morning.

Sunday

Leave Sunday free if you can. Its job is to absorb whatever went wrong on Saturday. If nothing did, send the team a short note with three links: their own deals view, the forecast dashboard, and a two-minute video of how to log a call.

Monday morning

Hold a 30-minute session at the start of the day. Don’t tour every feature. Show reps their own deals, how emails already appear on them, and where to type the next step. Answer questions for the rest of the day in one Slack channel.

Keep Salesforce read-only for 30 days, then export a final backup and cancel it. In almost every migration we have run, someone needed to look something up in the old system in the first fortnight, and nobody needed to after the first month.