Weeks 1–2: Discovery and data model design
A good consultancy starts by interviewing sales, marketing and service — not by opening settings. Output: a process map and a data model (objects, pipelines, properties, associations) that mirrors how you actually sell.
This is where DIY implementations quietly fail. Property sprawl, missing associations and pipelines that don't match the sales motion are almost impossible to fix cheaply later. Two weeks of design prevents a rebuild.
Weeks 2–4: Migration with reconciliation
If you're moving from Salesforce, Pipedrive or spreadsheets, this is the highest-risk phase. A consultancy runs field mapping, dedupe rules, test loads into a sandbox, and a final load with a reconciliation report — record counts and field-level checks proving every record arrived intact. We treat 100% reconciliation as the definition of done, as we did on a 70,000+ record migration.
Weeks 4–6: Automation, integrations, reporting
With clean data in place, the build phase configures workflows with naming governance, connects integrations, and builds the dashboards leadership will judge the project by. Every automation ships documented: what it does, why it exists, who owns it.
Weeks 6–8: Training, adoption and handover
Implementations die at adoption, not at go-live. Role-based training (reps learn deals, managers learn forecasting, marketers learn lists and campaigns), a hypercare period for issues, and a documentation pack your future hires will thank you for. After handover, the portal is yours — that independence is the deliverable.
What you should demand in the proposal
- A discovery phase with named outputs (process map, data model).
- Sandbox test loads and a reconciliation report as the migration acceptance criterion.
- Named consultants and their weekly time commitment.
- Weekly demos of working configuration, not status decks.
- Documentation and training listed as deliverables, not extras.
- A hypercare period after go-live.
Common mistakes
- Starting the build before the data model is agreed.
- Treating migration as import/export with no reconciliation report.
- Measuring the project by go-live date instead of team adoption.
- No hypercare period — issues surface in week nine when nobody is contracted to answer.
- Documentation treated as an optional extra.