How long does a CRM integration take? Realistic timeline

It will be transferred, cleaned, and consolidated. Duplicates are the norm — usually the same company exists three or four times in different spellings.

Then one of them is designated as the central source, the others feed into it automatically. Maintaining two equal systems in parallel leads, experience shows, to exactly the contradictions that a CRM is supposed to resolve.

Yes, that's the standard when starting. Before import, duplicates and inconsistent spellings are cleaned up, otherwise the new system just inherits the old mess.

The one your people actually use. For small businesses, a lean system that gets filled automatically is almost always better than a powerful one that stays empty. We recommend based on workflow and team size, not feature list.

With a European provider, data processing agreement, deletion concept, and documented legal basis, yes. A CRM without a deletion concept is an open issue under data protection law — that needs to be set up as well.

Using your real data, not sample datasets. The team practices the workflows it needs daily and receives a brief written summary afterward as a reference.

By making as little maintenance necessary as possible. Everything that can be created automatically is created automatically. What remains manual work is reduced to what is actually needed in daily operations.