We lost a Marketo migration this summer, and the client was gracious enough to tell me why: pricing was a major factor.
Fair enough. I'm not writing this to relitigate a deal, and I'm not going to pretend the cheaper option is never right. Sometimes it is, and I'll get to when. But I've now seen enough migration quotes side by side to say something useful to buyers: when two proposals for the same migration differ by a wide margin, the difference is almost never efficiency. It's a phase that one of them left out.
Four things, in my experience, and they're the same four every time.
Testing discipline. A real migration has a UAT window with quarantined test data, a checklist of scenarios, and a freeze on new builds in the old system before cutover. That's weeks of calendar time and real hours. The cheap quote tests by going live and seeing what breaks.
Taxonomy work. Your industry picklist has six hundred values in one system and twenty in the other. Somebody has to decide which wins, get a human with authority to sign off, and make the values match exactly so the sync doesn't throw errors. That's not a technical task, it's a political one, and it's the single most common reason integrations stall. It's rarely in the cheap quote because it's hard to estimate.
Deciding what not to migrate. The lift-and-shift approach is cheaper to quote because it involves no judgment. It's also how you end up paying to move ten years of dead leads into a clean system.
Post-cutover support. The two weeks after go-live are when the real issues surface: a workflow that fires wrong, a field that didn't map, a rep who can't find what they need. If the quote ends at cutover, those hours become change orders.
Here's the sincere concession. If you have a two-year-old instance, forty forms, no custom objects, clean data, and a small team that will adopt whatever you give them, you don't need the expensive version. The phases I listed above are proportional to complexity, and a simple migration has little complexity to manage. Paying enterprise-migration rates for that would be a mistake, and any partner who quotes it that way is padding.
The question isn't which quote is cheaper. It's which quote matches the actual complexity of your instance. Ask every bidder the same three questions: What's your testing window and how is test data isolated? Who resolves picklist conflicts and when? What's included in the two weeks after go-live? The answers will tell you whether the price difference is a phase or just margin.
We'll keep losing some deals on price, and that's the market working. What I'd hate is for a buyer to pick the low quote believing it's the same scope. It usually isn't, and the missing phase doesn't disappear. It just moves to your side of the table.
If you've been through this from the buyer side, what did the cheap quote turn out not to include? Genuinely curious whether my list of four is complete.
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