Know what the migration costs before the vendor does.
Moving from a legacy CRM to Salesforce has a knowable cost shape: people, integrations, customisation, and the state of your data. This puts an honest range on it — including the multipliers that never make the sales deck.
Six inputs, one honest range
Estimates are fine. The two selects matter more than you want them to.
Excludes Salesforce licences and internal staff backfill. AUD ex GST. Poor data preparation extends timelines by ~25% on average — which is why the data-quality select moves the number more than any slider.
A real programme
Big enough to need governance, small enough to fail quietly. The three moves below are where migrations this size go right or wrong.
Where the money goes
Cost per user at the midpoint: $2,905 vs roughly $2,600 for the typical mid-market migration.
Your three moves
Audit the data you intend to move
Profile duplicates, ownership and completeness before signing a contract. It is the single biggest cost lever on this page, and the only one fully in your control.
Typical scope: 2–4 weeksInventory integrations and kill half
Every integration carried across is build, test and maintenance forever. Migrations are the one moment you can retire the ones nobody will admit are dead.
Typical scope: 2–3 weeksFix the baseline before the partner does
Agree what "done" means, per function, with volumes — before the SOW is signed. Programmes that skip this average 30% scope creep.
Typical scope: 1–2 weeksGet your migration cost report
- Your full cost range with drivers ranked
- Timeline range and the multipliers applied
- The three moves that protect the budget
- The pre-contract checklist for partner negotiations
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Questions people ask
What does the estimate include?
Discovery, build and configuration, data migration, integration work, testing, training and cutover — the implementation partner side of the programme. It excludes Salesforce licences, internal staff backfill, and third-party tools.
Why does data quality move the number so much?
Because data work is the part that always blows out. Poor data preparation extends timelines by an average of 25%, and scope creep adds an average of 30% to cost. Cleaning data mid-migration costs three to five times what cleaning it beforehand does.
Is phased really more expensive than big bang?
Usually about 10% more in delivery cost, because you run dual systems and build temporary bridges. It is also dramatically lower risk, which is why most enterprise programmes choose it anyway. Cheap and catastrophic is not cheap.
How accurate is this?
It is a calibrated range, not a quote — the multipliers come from 250+ APAC programmes, mid-market through enterprise. A two-week scoping exercise against your actual systems will tighten it to a number you can put in a board paper.