Migrate from Salesforce to Braze

Most teams that migrate successfully start evaluating 12–18 months before their contract expires. Some overlap between contracts is unavoidable — but teams that give themselves that runway use the migration as a chance to reset and improve their marketing operations, not just lift and shift. We can help you think through the sequencing and build the internal business case well before you need to make a decision.

The framing that tends to work: “Our current setup is limiting what marketing can deliver, and here’s the cost of that.” Leadership needs to see quantified gaps — the revenue impact of 2–3 programs you can’t run or can’t run well, the full cost of ownership beyond the license fee, and a phased approach that shows business-as-usual is protected during the transition. We help clients build this case. Present it as a series of smaller decisions, not one enormous lift.

Generally yes — modern marketing platforms have open APIs and data is extractable. We’ve pulled down large client instances with hundreds of automations running and used AI to audit which ones were actually driving value. The more important question is what to bring vs. what to leave behind. Not everything in your current instance belongs in Braze — some of it belongs in your data warehouse. Migration is the right moment to sort that out.

The honest range is 3 to 18 months, depending on the complexity of your business and how many platforms you’re integrating. The most common pattern: teams that expect 18 months land in 9. The single biggest variable isn’t campaign volume — it’s whether your data already lives in a modern warehouse. If you’re on Databricks or Snowflake, you’re connecting Braze to where your data already lives. That’s a significant lift off the project.

The goal is always to keep sends running, and we structure migrations to run both platforms in parallel during IP warming — sending from both simultaneously during the transition. Our approach to scoping a migration is to take a “zero risk” approach — starting with careful, thoughtful planning for resourcing, integrations, seasonality, and other internal initiatives, then activating that plan with tight project management and clear communication.

Existing CRM integrations — Sales Cloud, Service Cloud — hold. Braze connects to the same APIs, so your customer service agents typically don’t see a difference. Our preferred approach is a Lightning component inside your CRM that pulls engagement data from Braze or your warehouse on demand, giving agents a richer, more timely view than most teams had before.

Not necessarily, but if you already have one — Databricks, Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, Microsoft Fabric — Braze is built to work with it natively. You can query your warehouse directly, sync data into Braze profiles on a cadence you control, or use zero-copy triggers to fire a journey based on warehouse data without ever moving it into Braze. Whether you need a CDP depends on your stack and use case — a separate conversation we’re happy to have.

Yes — all channels in Braze run off a single customer profile and a single data model. Email, SMS, push, in-app messages, content cards — one profile, one place to build and measure. As new channels emerge, they’re fast to stand up because the infrastructure is already there.

More than you’d expect. The core principles of lifecycle marketing don’t change — audience segmentation, journey logic, KPIs, campaign strategy all carry over. What changes is the tool. A lot of the Stitch team has deep backgrounds in Salesforce AND Braze, and have found that transitioning from focusing on Salesforce to focusing on Braze didn’t result in lost momentum for them — but rather, has helped them learn new platforms quickly.

The biggest signal is specificity. Vague answers about “best practices” usually mean a vendor hasn’t actually done the work. Look for a partner who can get granular about how things will function post-migration, not just how the migration itself will run.

What happens to my data architecture, not just my data?

A real migration partner redesigns your data model for how Braze thinks about users, events, and canvases, rather than lifting and shifting your SFMC structure as-is. If a partner can’t explain how your data model changes, expect personalization problems to show up months after cutover.

How do you decide what not to migrate?

Every SFMC instance accumulates dead journeys and segments nobody remembers building. A partner who migrates everything 1:1 is avoiding a harder conversation about what’s actually driving revenue. Ask for a prioritization framework, not a promise to “migrate it all to be safe.”

Who owns the Braze instance 30 days after cutover?

Cutover day gets all the attention, but the month after is usually where migrations succeed or fail. A strong partner builds in enablement and knowledge transfer so your team has real ownership, not a handoff doc nobody opens.

What’s the plan if a journey breaks in production?

Speed and care can conflict in practice. Ask what happens when a critical lifecycle journey misfires mid-migration. The answer reveals whether their methodology is a real operating discipline or just a talking point.

How do you sequence migration around an active campaign calendar?

Your team doesn’t get to pause marketing during a migration. A good partner plans around your always-on flows and campaign calendar instead of treating the project like a clean greenfield build.