---
title: Is your migration really saving you?
description: Evaluate whether migrating your Marketing Automation Platform is worth the effort and cost. Understand the nuances before making a decision.
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---
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# Is your migration really saving you?
by [Chris Willis](https://gtmwranglers.com/the-corral/author/chris-willis)
Oct 9, 2026, 12:27:51 PM
This is a familiar story. Your Marketing Automation Platform contract is up for renewal. Your team is working effectively in your current platform, but of course it has some frustrating issues. Every platform does. Perhaps you are seeing increasing costs from your current vendor based on their pricing model and your use of AI tokens. Perhaps you are less than satisfied with how innovations have been delivered, or not delivered. The pace of innovation with recent adoptions in AI have only increased expectations concerning the rate of innovation, and perhaps the current platform in your stack isn't meeting expectations.
I understand. It's a real struggle. The marketing platforms we built our businesses on are no longer scrappy startups, but are large enterprises, whose marketing automation product leads must fight for resources among the other areas of the business which may have higher growth potential. Marketing automation perhaps is now a mature category, although there are now disruptors who are challenging that paradigm, and are aggressively positioning themselves as those who will deliver the goods in this space. Your current MAP no longer feels like the rocket ship that it was when you implemented it, but instead like a well-worn Buick with over 100,000 miles and a few shopping cart dents. It does the job well, most of the time, but it's not as sexy as it once was.
Then, at renewal, your vendor comes with a renewal proposal with a steep price increase, and services that were once included are now part of an upgrade package. Your projected budget can't handle this, and you want to cry.
You need a moment. In this moment, you talk to a competitor who is considered reputable, who is all-to-eager to "rip-and-replace" the competitor. They offer you not only equal pricing, but a discount to get you to switch. They tell you "migrating is easy! People do it all the time! Here's our partner agency who will lift and shift your ops in no time flat!"
Let's stop right here. This is a very tempting offer. Many have experienced it. Perhaps this is your current experience. Here's, however, the $100,000 question.
"Is the juice (the license cost savings) worth the squeeze (the effort required to migrate and adjust processes)?"
This is a question you need to answer before you sign on the bottom line and tell your incumbent vendor that you won't be renewing.
I am no stranger to migrations. I have migrated from/to almost every mainstream vendor in this market. There is no such thing as a straightforward "lift and shift." Why?
1. **Different vendors = different methodologies for operations tasks**. Yes. Every vendor has lead scoring. Every vendor has lifecycle processing. Every vendor has workflow and campaign management functionality. Every vendor enables you to dynamically segment your audience. Every vendor integrates with your CRM. However, HOW they do these things can vary widely, and you need to take into account how shifting your {insert core operational process} will change how you work in the new system.
2. **Each vendor has a "secret sauce" that you are very likely leveraging**. Are you in HubSpot and using standardized UTM to "Traffic Source" translations to do ROI reporting? Are you in Marketo Engage and delivering customized and unique "Interesting Moments" to your sales organization via Marketo Sales Insights (MSI)? If you are, and these are critical features, you need to be aware that these are proprietary features of these platforms that aren't easily replicated if you were to switch to a competitive platform. In almost every case I have seen in a migration, I have seen organizations attempt to reverse-engineer these proprietary "must have features" in the new platform with plenty of band-aids and hacks... none of which work really well and create a good deal of technical headache. If you are going to migrate, you need to know what you are losing and make a decision about how you account for lost functionality. Truth is, the competitive vendor will only show you the benefits of their platform, not the limitations.
3. **The incumbent solution is built with your business rules**. I have yet to see a marketing automation platform that is faithfully relied upon that hasn't been customized to include an organization's unique rules... how they manage data, how they segment their customers, the specific agreements between sales and marketing for MQLs, etc. Do you have a business rule that requires intentional duplicates? These business contexts are not being included out-of-the-box with the tool you will migrate to - they must be translated from your old tool into your new tool, and if you are using "secret sauce" elements of the tool you are migrating from to build business rules, the cost to migrate your unique way of marketing may be more difficult than expected.
Therefore, these items must be considered in the migration conversation, and perhaps in the decision itself. Organizations that fail to do so will end up saving $10 but spending $100 in migration complexity and lost business capabilities. Therefore, you need to go into these conversations with the incumbent vendor and any competitors eyes-wide-open, and considering the long-term view.
This is where a pre-migration audit can be extremely helpful. The result should provide these answers:
1. **Is making a switch in platforms the right move for us or not**: Are the gains from additional features/functionality or price reductions worth the effort migrate? Is the ROI there or not, when we consider the full cost of migration, beyond the vendor quotes?
2. **If we don't migrate, where can we cut costs in the renewal:** The juice may not be worth the squeeze to migrate, but it's very likely that an audit will uncover that you are paying for features that you do not need, and can cut costs by not renewing on those features. This will give you some negotiating leverage with your incumbent, which can result in a renewal that is better aligned to your business, or a renewal that results in a cost reduction (vendors don't like to hear this, but they do have to compete for your business)
3. **If you do migrate, how do we do it successfully:** No rose-colored glasses, or bashing the incumbent vendor. You have valuable business processes on your existing MAP, or you spent too much (and can migrate to Mailchimp). Conduct a full audit of the critical business processes, campaigns, forms, and assets that must move to make your migration successful and plan project time to architect them effectively so the gap (if at all) is either minimal OR you get more functionality when you move than before. Once you have a realistic project plan, then you have the tools you need to execute it successfully and choose the right partners to ensure your business is operating effectively in the new system.
These steps, I would argue, are critical. To listen to the siren song of "here's an implementation partner who will shift you in 4 weeks" sounds good in the moment, but it will very likely lead to long-term heartache. Your marketing automation is a critical component of your business, so do not let it go to chance. Do not treat it as if you are trading in your Buick for a new Subaru. It's not quite that simple, so don't treat it as if it is.
**Tags:**
[Marketing Automation,](https://gtmwranglers.com/the-corral/tag/marketing-automation) [marketing operations](https://gtmwranglers.com/the-corral/tag/marketing-operations)
Post by [Chris Willis](https://gtmwranglers.com/the-corral/author/chris-willis)
Oct 9, 2026, 12:27:51 PM
A 18+ year veteran of Revenue Operations who excels at enabling marketing and sales organizations align around common processes, work, and systems. Chris is an expert in Marketo (Certified Solution Architect), HubSpot, and Salesforce CRM and has enabled multiple organizations to drive value through the alignment of people, process, and technology.
[Follow me on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/chriswillis96/)
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