Our marketing automation rollout tanked because nobody actually checked the data mapping first

So I manage a team of 5 at a mid sized SaaS company in Austin and we spent 3 months migrating from HubSpot to Marketo. We followed every checklist, watched every webinar, thought we had it perfect. Then our lead scoring started returning garbage values and nobody could figure out why. Turns out the guy who set up the custom field mappings copied the old Salesforce API names instead of the new ones. We sent about 300 leads to our sales team with the wrong company size data before we caught it. Our VP almost flipped his desk when he found out. What tools or methods do you guys use to validate data accuracy before flipping the switch on a new platform?

3 comments

3 Comments

ross.river1mo ago

Copied the old API names" is exactly where this falls apart but here's something nobody's bringing up - you probably didn't have a proper smoke test environment. Before you go live with any migration you need a staging instance that mirrors prod with dummy data. Run your whole workflow there first, end to end, with a few test leads that have known values. If you can't do that your first real run is basically guesswork. Also check if your validation step was even looking at the right things. Most teams just check that fields map to fields, not that the values inside those fields actually match what the original system had. That's the real blind spot.

oscarcooper29d ago

Did you ever have a friend who thought they could just copy a config file and call it a migration? I watched a guy at my last shop do this exact thing with a CRM swap, spent two weeks mapping fields manually, then found out his staging box had different timezone settings than prod. All his test data looked right because he was checking during business hours, but timestamps got mangled when the cron kicked off at midnight.

troy4391mo ago

Copied the old API names" - sounds like a process problem more than a tool problem honestly.