Background
Background.
Mid-market apparel brand, B2B wholesale + DTC. Ran on a marketing automation platform and a homegrown wholesale-rep CRM. Two systems, three sync jobs, weekly reconciliation between marketing's segments and sales's account list.
Challenge
Challenge.
The enterprise pricing quote came in at 2.4x their existing cost. The features they actually needed — custom RBAC, BYOK encryption, and an immutable audit log for retail-partner data — were the upgrade triggers. The team modelled cost and switched to evaluating alternatives.
The non-negotiable was migration risk. They had 14 years of contact history, 600+ active sequences, and a wholesale-rep custom data model the homegrown CRM expressed with seven custom objects.
Solution
Solution.
The Pact migration tool ran on a Friday afternoon. It mapped the old platform's companies → Pact Accounts, contacts → Contacts, and deals → Opportunities, with owners and consent state, and custom properties → custom fields. It maps records and fields, not automations or custom objects, so the team rebuilt their highest-volume sequences in Pact first and modelled the wholesale-rep objects as account relationships by hand.
Dry-run reported zero record loss and 12 reconciliation findings (duplicate contacts surfaced for a person to merge before cutover). They cut over at 9pm Friday, finished verification by midnight, and the first rebuilt sequence sent at 10am Monday.
Result
Result.
Migration was 72 hours, not the six-month project the team had originally budgeted. Zero records lost. Open rate on the lifecycle journey lifted 38% in the first quarter — partly the new send-time optimization, partly the unified consent state catching previously-mis-targeted contacts.