The vendor will tell you the migration went well. Who tells you the truth?
Independent, client-side oversight of CRM platform selection and migration. Nine years operating Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Eloqua, HubSpot, Dynamics 365 and Dotdigital from the inside, with no implementation practice and no platform to sell.
The problem
Platform decisions are the most expensive CRM decisions a business makes, and they are usually made with the least independent information. The vendor is selling. The implementation partner is paid by the day. The internal team has operated one platform and is comparing it to demos of the others.
Migrations fail quietly. The data arrives, the campaigns resume, the project closes green. What does not survive is the operating model: contact rules rebuilt from memory, integrations simplified to hit the deadline, reporting that no longer reconciles with the numbers the board was shown before.
The cost surfaces a year later as a platform blamed for problems the migration created.
What usually goes wrong
Requirements come from demos. The evaluation scores what vendors show rather than what the business does, so the winning platform fits the pitch, not the operating model.
The implementation partner defines done. The people delivering the migration also decide when it is finished, and their incentive is sign-off, not survival of your rules.
The data moves, the rules do not. Contact rules, suppression logic and integrations get rebuilt from memory under deadline pressure, and simplified where memory runs out.
Scope is traded quietly. Every slipped milestone is recovered by dropping something that will not be missed until it is: a reconciliation report, an edge-case journey, a consent nuance.
Nobody owns acceptance. Without pre-agreed acceptance criteria, go-live is declared when the campaigns send, not when the numbers reconcile.
The review
Three ways in, depending on where you are:
Selection. Requirements defined from your operating model rather than from vendor feature lists. A structured evaluation you own, scoring what your business actually does. Saiga takes no referral fees from any platform, which is rarer than it should be.
Pre-migration readiness. A review of what is about to be moved: which data, which rules, which integrations, and what the acceptance criteria are. Most migration damage is decided before the first record moves.
Client-side oversight. Standing on your side of the table through delivery. Challenge to the implementation partner's decisions, protection of the operating model, and a definition of done that means done.
What you receive
Depends on the way in:
Selection: a requirements definition built from your operating model, a weighted evaluation framework you own and can defend internally, scored vendor comparison, and a recommendation with the reasoning shown.
Pre-migration readiness: a full inventory of what is moving (data, rules, integrations, reporting), a risk register ordered by revenue consequence, acceptance criteria for the migration, and a go or not-yet position with the conditions for go.
Client-side oversight: a monthly written position on programme health, a decision log holding the implementation partner's choices to account, protection of the acceptance criteria through delivery, and a closure assessment that says whether done means done.
Scope
Saiga does not implement, configure or build. That is deliberate: assurance is only worth buying from someone with no interest in the work running longer. Implementation stays with your chosen partner; Saiga makes sure their incentives and yours stay aligned.
Who this is for
Businesses selecting or replacing a CRM or marketing platform, and groups consolidating several inherited platforms onto one. Commissioned by the CMO, COO or programme sponsor. Most valuable when engaged before the contract is signed; still valuable after, which is usually when the call happens.
Why Saiga
Nine years inside CRM and lifecycle functions at Disney+, Barclays, Informa and ICAEW. Enterprise scale, regulated environments, and the platforms this work runs on: Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Braze, Eloqua, HubSpot, Dynamics 365, Dotdigital.
Saiga is independent of every vendor. There is no implementation to sell you afterwards and no platform to recommend.
After the engagement
Selection tends to lead to readiness, and readiness to oversight, because the same questions carry through the programme. None of that is automatic: each stage is scoped and priced on its own, and each stands alone if that is where it ends.
Price
Readiness and selection reviews from £9,750. Oversight retained monthly for the duration of the programme, from £5,500 per month.
The cheapest time to buy assurance is before the contract is signed.
FAQs
Do you implement?
No, deliberately. Assurance is only worth buying from someone with no interest in the project running longer.
We have already chosen the platform.
Then the readiness review is the entry point. Most migration damage is decided before the first record moves.
Will this slow the programme down?
No. Oversight runs alongside delivery. What it slows down is rework.
Do you take referral fees from vendors?
No, from none of them. That is the point.