For RIAs and wealth advisories that acquire. The seller’s Redtail, Wealthbox, or spreadsheet book lands in your Salesforce org clean, de-duplicated, and advisor-ready on a fixed fee per acquisition, in weeks, not quarters.
A Redtail backup looks complete until you load it. Here is what’s actually missing or broken in the typical seller handoff, and what has to be rebuilt before the acquired advisors can work in your org.
Redtail links spouses with a tag. Your Salesforce needs real Household accounts, person accounts, and relationship records, or every review meeting starts with “which one is the husband?”
The standard export leaves email behind in a Zimbra archive. If nobody retrieves and re-attaches it, the acquired advisors lose the paper trail your CCO will ask for.
Duplicates inside the seller’s data, plus clients and COIs you already have. Loading without a match pass means two of everything and a cleanup project nobody budgeted.
Decades of meeting notes come through wrapped in markup and bad line breaks. Unreadable notes get ignored, and ignored notes are lost context on day one.
Recurring reviews, open tasks, and who-owned-what are the first things to vanish in a flat export. They are also the first things advisors notice.
Client documents are a separate pull with their own retrieval rules. They need to end up on the right household, not in a shared drive called “Old CRM.”
Every engagement delivers the same checklist, which is exactly why the second acquisition goes faster than the first.
The timeline assumes a typical single-practice acquisition on Redtail or Wealthbox. Larger books and legacy Salesforce orgs get their own schedule in the inventory report.
You send the LOI date and the seller’s CRM. I send the seller a one-page data request so the handoff happens once, not six times.
Full source analysis, email archive retrieval, duplicate scan against your book. You get the gap report and the fixed fee.
Households rebuilt, notes cleaned, fields mapped, everything loaded and reviewed in a sandbox first. Your team approves the merge file.
Production load in strict dependency order, counts reconciled, ownership and activities assigned, reconciliation report delivered.
The acquired team opens Salesforce and finds their clients, their notes, and their next review. The 30-day fix window starts.
| Vendor “free migration” | Implementation partner | Your ops team | SMC Migrations | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Households | Contacts only; households not rebuilt | Rebuilt, billed hourly | Manual, after hours | Rebuilt with purpose-built tooling |
| Duplicates vs. your book | Not done | Scripted if scoped | Spreadsheet VLOOKUP | Matched, reviewed, merged |
| Email, notes, documents | Usually excluded | Extra scope | Often abandoned | Retrieved and attached |
| Timeline | Fast, incomplete | 8–16 weeks | Whenever it fits | About 4 weeks |
| Pricing | Free, then cleanup | Hourly, open-ended | Hidden in salaries | Fixed fee per acquisition |
| Next acquisition | Start over | Start over | Start over | Same playbook, faster |
Industry benchmarks: scripted Redtail-to-Salesforce migrations typically run 100–200 developer hours, and partner timelines run 8–16 weeks. Destination-vendor migrations generally do not de-duplicate or carry files and workflows.
For firms doing three or more deals a year: a standing arrangement with a per-acquisition fee, a reserved start slot when each deal closes, and one person who already knows your org.
A one-page data request and checklist you hand the seller at LOI, so the export you receive is the export you need. Fewer follow-ups, faster close-to-live.
Each migration leaves behind documented field maps, duplicate rules, and household conventions, so acquisition five takes less of your team’s time than acquisition one.
“Data migration is the scariest part of an acquisition for everyone in the room. It’s my favorite part.”
Elise Pottinger, SMC Migrations
Elise Pottinger has spent 20 years in the Salesforce ecosystem as a solution architect, business analyst, and the person partners call when the data part of an implementation is going sideways. She specializes in Financial Services Cloud for wealth management firms, teaches Salesforce data migration to implementation consultants, and runs the Salesforce Masterclass YouTube channel.
She is currently the standing migration partner for a multi-office wealth advisory that acquires around six firms a year, and has run the same playbook for an Indiana advisory folding acquired practices into Salesforce. The tooling she uses for household reconstruction, note cleanup, and Redtail email retrieval was built for exactly this job.
Twenty minutes on a call is enough to tell you what the seller’s export will and won’t contain, and roughly what it will take to land it in your org.
