Four Tools, One Mess: Replacing Salesforce with Airtable CRM

When a consulting firm's CRM is too complicated for the people who are supposed to use it, the CRM stops being the system of record. The data lives somewhere else — usually in spreadsheets, email threads, and memory. That's the situation a professional services firm came to Connex with: Salesforce for client contacts and opportunities, Pardot for email marketing, Excel for financial reporting, and Airtable for marketing and social media — all partially connected, none of them authoritative.

The firm — a 15–30-person professional services consultancy with roughly 20,000 contacts — had accumulated a stack over several years. Salesforce handled CRM, but the team found it overly complex. The Director of Technology had built over 70 custom Excel formulas to pull data out and make it usable. Pardot handled email campaigns, but the team's real reporting need was simple: who opened what, and how are campaigns performing.

Meanwhile, the marketing team had started building in Airtable for social media planning and new business development. Airtable was working well — it was the Salesforce and Pardot layers that weren't. The firm's goal: consolidate everything into Airtable, migrate the CRM data out of Salesforce, and eliminate the Excel-middleman entirely.

The complicating factor: the Salesforce Opportunities object alone had 100 fields, with multi-year financial data rolling up into annual calculations. This wasn't a simple CSV export.

The Connex team scoped Phase 1 at 50 hours across three workstreams.

All contacts and companies from Salesforce were consolidated into a single master CRM base in Airtable. The migration covered 20,000 contacts, the company records linked to them, and Salesforce Opportunities (the financial engagement records — each with up to 100 fields). Existing Airtable tables for consultant contacts were linked to and incorporated, not replaced.

With 20,000 migrated records and ongoing data coming in from form submissions and external consultant databases, deduplication was the project’s biggest operational risk. The Connex team built both automated deduplication workflows and script-based tools for identifying, merging, and flagging duplicates. Make (formerly Integromat) handled ongoing syncing of records from external databases into the master CRM, with new contacts from form submissions added automatically — including duplicate prevention logic.

One of the structural choices that had caused friction before: the contacts/companies database and the project management workspace were mixed together. Connex separated them into distinct bases, then linked them — so the project list could pull in related team members and client context without the two systems cluttering each other. This also made it possible to give different team members appropriate access to each workspace without opening up everything.

The firm's technology lead was a self-described Microsoft person who valued Excel's reporting output — specifically KPI dashboards that looked a particular way. Rather than force a full break, the Connex team implemented an Airtable → Excel query connection using Airtable's Power Query integration. This meant the reporting consumers could continue working in Excel while the source of truth moved to Airtable. The 70+ custom Excel formulas weren't carrying data anymore; they were reading it from a clean database.

The firm went from four disconnected tools to a unified Airtable CRM with Make-powered automation handling ongoing data flow. Salesforce's annual renewal (typically $75–150/user/month for a team this size) became unnecessary. The Pardot layer was replaced by simpler email marketing tools connected to the Airtable contact data.

The engagement started as a defined Phase 1 scope and extended into ongoing development through 2024 and 2025, with additional work available as needed. As of early 2026, the firm remains an active Connex client.

Consulting firms accumulate tool sprawl the same way their clients do: each tool gets adopted for a specific problem, by a specific person, at a specific moment. Salesforce gets added because it's what enterprise CRMs look like. Pardot gets added because Salesforce bought it. Excel gets added to make Salesforce data usable. By the time someone steps back and looks at the whole picture, there are four monthly invoices and no single source of truth.

The migration question is always the same: can we get the data out cleanly? In this case, 20,000 contacts and a 100-field Opportunities object sounds intimidating — but it's a solved problem if you know Airtable's per-plan record limits and build the deduplication layer upfront rather than after the fact.

If your CRM is one tool, your reporting is another, and your data lives in spreadsheets in between, you're not alone — and this is fixable. The Connex team has migrated complex CRM data out of Salesforce, Pipedrive, HubSpot, and custom systems into unified Airtable bases with automation keeping them current. Book a free discovery call.