Marketing / Agency · $2M-$10M
How a 12-Person Marketing Agency Cut Its CRM Migration From 8 Weeks to 6 Days
2,792 nurture contacts migrated, 150+ email variants deployed, 33K per day outbound capacity, ongoing retainer.
The problem
A marketing agency was bleeding time across 4 CRMs (Close, HubSpot, Calendly, a homegrown tracker). Their original plan was an 8-week migration to GHL with an outside agency quoting $22K. I got looped in to evaluate the quote.
The stack
GHL as the CRM + calendar + email platform. Instantly for high-volume outbound. Clay for enrichment. Airtable as the staging layer. n8n to orchestrate the migration itself.
The architecture
The critical decision was treating the migration as a data pipeline, not a configuration project. Most CRM migrations fail because the team tries to manually rebuild workflows in the new tool. We built an ETL: pull from every source into a clean staging layer, clean once, push once. When the migration inevitably hit a malformed record, we fixed it upstream in the pipeline instead of inside GHL.
The result
6 days to fully migrate 2,792 contacts across 4 sources. 150+ email variants deployed for A/B at scale. Peak daily capacity: 33,000 outbound emails without deliverability degradation. Ongoing weekly retainer followed.
The cost math
Build cost: Heavy tier, all-in under what the competing quote was going to bill just for scoping. Ongoing monthly run cost: under $200 in infra on top of GHL's own subscription. Time saved per week post-migration: around 18 hours of manual reporting and list-pulling.