Migrate From Goldmine To Zoho CRM

Goldmine is a popular, feature-rich, on-premise (or hosted on a Cloud) CRM that offers one of the best ROIs for Contact, Sales, Marketing and Service Management. However, there are times when a business wants to leverage several cloud-based applications all of which require to integrate with a CRM, and a single sign-on from a single vendor becomes a rhetorical question, both from an efficiency and budgetary perspective.

We cover one such case study where an existing, long-standing and satisfied Goldmine customer, reached a point where the decision was made to migrate to Zoho One.

The justification was straightforward – Zoho One replaced several independent applications and offered seamless integration at an unbeatable price point at just £1 per user per day.

The current disparate applications being used…

…there are several other applications from various third-parties, but I will stop here as the main purpose of this article is to cover the migration from Goldmine to Zoho, the justification being that Zoho One provided a replacement for all of the above business objectives, quickly summarised as follows:

Although products like Quotewerks and Constant Contact also integrate with Zoho CRM, in this case, the customer decided to replace them in a phased manner.

As a first step, we needed to segment the data in Goldmine so it could be mapped correctly to Zoho, but before we cover that, it is important to understand the database underlying every Goldmine installation.

Goldmine stores all of its data in MS SQL, across various Tables which have been listed below, all of which are connected by the AccountNo, ReciID and LinkedID:

With Primary contacts having multiple email addresses and then Additional Contacts each having an email address as well, it becomes imperative to find the right links within the database.

Also, whilst there is a Notes table containing generic information, completed activities like Calls and Appointments have their own Notes, which are equally important, and perhaps more pertinent.

Add to this the complexity that certain Notes in the Goldmine database are encrypted, and you have the makings of some fun SQL queries.

Then there is the likelihood that Goldmine Users may no longer be employed by your company, and therefore do not exist as Users in your Zoho subscription. What is the big deal you might well ask? Well, your History in Goldmine will be logged against such Users so it is important to manage this as best as possible and typically, we create a separate custom field to indicate the User, and assign ownership a pre-defined Administrator. Of course, where Users are current in both Goldmine and Zoho, all pending and historical activities are mapped directly.

Bear in mind that in Goldmine there are many types of Activities, so it is important to decide which ones have been used in your system, and where you will map them in Zoho, where there are only three types of Activities out of the box. The table below gives you an idea on what we did:

I have deliberately left out Goldmine Email Messages (Received and Sent) from the above list, as these deserve a separate mention (or perhaps a separate chapter!) given the complexity and diversity of usage. Suffice to say, for the purposes of this article, that we can bring in email messages, whether it is from your Exchange Server or from Goldmine SQL tables.

It is important to note that if you have been using the Goldmine link to Outlook, then this functionality is also offered with the Outlook plug-in to Zoho CRM (not in the Free or Standard Edition mind you! Professional Edition required as a minimum). There are some differences of course, most notably that the Goldmine link allows Outlook to select a Goldmine template to send…a feature request that I have raised with Zoho, so watch this space.

Also worth knowing that if you currently use Constant Contact for mass email marketing, integrated with Goldmine, then you can continue using Constant Contact, integrated with Zoho CRM. You should be aware that Zoho has its own Email Marketing App called Zoho Campaigns, which can be subscribed to separately, or bundled with Zoho One.

We can help you choose between Constant Contact or Zoho Campaigns, but in either case, we would recommend integration with Zoho CRM, so all the contact data and analytics (Sent, Opens, Bounces, Clicks etc.) can flow seamlessly.

Once the data in Goldmine has been identified, the next step is to decide where to import it into Zoho – please note that Goldmine has a flat table structure with all Contacts existing as one entity, whereas in Zoho, there are at least three entities that come into play and I give below a table to illustrate:

Of course, there may be many other segmentation values in your database, perhaps across several  fields, each of will need to be mapped based on an agreed logic.

Zoho Import or Zoho Analytics?

When it comes to importing data into Zoho CRM, why would we need Zoho Analytics, when we have import functions across Zoho CRM modules.

The short answer is simply this; if you have simple spreadsheets or CSV files that can easily be mapped to Zoho CRM modules/fields, then the Import functions are very effective. However, if you need to query, blend, merge, and report on data (especially from multiple sources), then Zoho Analytics is essential.

From our experience, with most migration projects you will need both, Zoho Analytics and the Zoho CRM Import functionality…also, I would recommend your Zoho Administrator understand the de-duplication tools and the built-in templates to assist data migration from popular CRMs.

Just to set expectations, no migration is perfect, so prepare to be realistic, especially where ROI cannot be justified.

Finally, I share some links to get you up and running with trial versions, and a free consultation with me: