Defining the customer before a CRM migration
Walter's prior experience · Slalom · Shopify
The situation
Shopify Plus had outgrown HubSpot as its enterprise business grew. Marketing, sales, product engineering, data and finance depended on the same merchant information but viewed it through different parts of the business. A merchant with multiple divisions and storefronts made “what is a customer?” a consequential decision, not just a field-mapping task.
The key judgment
Moving records before agreeing on the business entities would carry the same confusion into Salesforce. Work with the teams that use the information to reconcile their journeys and definitions, then build the migration roadmap around those decisions.
What Walter did
- Led on-site workshops across the five functions to surface their journeys, pain points and needs.
- Analyzed how merchant and customer relationships should map to Salesforce's data model.
- Reconciled the findings into one roadmap and presented it to Shopify leadership.
What happened, and the limits
The roadmap was delivered and read out to leadership, and it led to the first implementation: Slalom was brought back for the first migration, with a Slalom Salesforce team on site.
The lesson Walter carries forward: before a system changes, the people who depend on it need a shared picture of the work and its data. It's the same method Maple Spark Labs starts with: map where people lose time before naming a technology.
This was Walter's work at Slalom, not a Maple Spark Labs engagement or an AI implementation. It does not imply any endorsement by Shopify or Slalom.
- One merchant, many divisions and storefronts
- Shared definitionsCustomers and merchants, agreed before the build.
- Migration roadmapRead out to leadership.