Migrate from MARS to Salesforce Sales Cloud

MARS Contact records map directly to Salesforce Contact. The primary MARS owner becomes Salesforce OwnerId. Any secondary MARS owner assignments are preserved in a custom junction object (Advisor_Assignment__c) that links the Contact to additional User records with a role field (e.g., primary_advisor, co_advisor, support_staff). We create the junction object during schema design so that relationship history is intact at import time.

MARS Company records map to Salesforce Account. The company type (e.g., Broker-Dealer, RIA, Custodian) maps to a custom picklist field account_type__c. Firm-level and office-level MARS records that represent organizational entities map to Salesforce Account with a parent Account relationship for office-to-firm hierarchy, preserving the original MARS firm-office structure.

MARS Deal records map to Salesforce Opportunity. The MARS dealstage maps to Salesforce StageName via a configured sales process that whitelists the relevant stage values. Closed-Lost and Closed-Won reason fields from MARS custom properties migrate to Salesforce Loss Reason and custom Win_Reason__c fields. The MARS pipeline assignment maps to a Salesforce Record Type that we configure before migration.

Each MARS pipeline becomes a Salesforce Record Type on Opportunity with a corresponding Sales Process that scopes stage values per line of business. If MARS supports multiple deal pipelines for different product types or office structures, each pipeline maps to its own Record Type, Page Layout, and Sales Process so that stage values remain scoped appropriately.

MARS activity records (calls, emails, meetings, tasks) migrate to Salesforce Task (for calls and tasks), Event (for meetings), and EmailMessage (for emails) linked to the migrated Contact and Account records via WhoId and WhatId lookups. The Bulk API 2.0 is required because MARS customers with multi-year histories typically carry hundreds of thousands of activity records. ActivityDate is preserved to maintain timeline ordering.

MARS Owner records map to Salesforce User by email match. Primary owner becomes OwnerId on the record. For MARS records with multiple owner assignments, we provision the primary owner as OwnerId and create Advisor_Assignment__c junction records for each additional User. Owners without a matching Salesforce User go to a reconciliation queue for the customer's admin to provision before record import resumes.

MARS advisor team structures (multiple advisors assigned to a single client or deal) require a custom junction object in Salesforce because Salesforce supports only one OwnerId per standard record. Advisor_Assignment__c is a custom object with lookup fields to Contact, Account, and User, plus a Role__c picklist (primary_advisor, co_advisor, associate, support) and Effective_Date__c to preserve when the assignment began. We pre-create this schema before any data import so that advisor team relationships are intact from day one.

MARS product performance data (sales by product, AUM by advisor, revenue attribution) that does not map to standard Salesforce Opportunity Line Items becomes a custom Product_Performance__c object. We pre-create this object with fields for Product__c (lookup to Product2), Rep__c (lookup to User), Period__c, Revenue__c, and AUM__c. The customer chooses the granularity of performance metrics to migrate based on their reporting requirements.

MARS notes and attachments migrate to Salesforce Note (for text notes) and ContentDocument via ContentVersion (for files). Notes are linked via ContentDocumentLink to the parent Contact, Account, or Opportunity. File attachments are uploaded via the Salesforce Content API and linked to the parent record to preserve document context.

Any MARS custom fields that do not map to standard Salesforce fields become custom fields on the equivalent Salesforce object using the __c suffix per Salesforce naming convention. We pre-create the full custom field schema in a Salesforce Sandbox for validation before production migration, including field type mapping (MARS text to Salesforce Text, MARS date to Salesforce Date, MARS picklist to Salesforce Picklist or Multi-Select Picklist), validation rules, and help text.

MARS firm and office hierarchy maps to Salesforce Account with parent Account relationships. The firm-level record becomes the top-level Account; office-level records become child Accounts under the firm Account. This preserves the MARS organizational hierarchy inside Salesforce's standard account structure without requiring custom objects for organizational entities.

Historical MARS engagement records (past calls, emails, meetings) are linked to migrated Contact and Account records via WhoId and WhatId resolution. We resolve the MARS contact and company references to their Salesforce IDs using the import mapping table before activity records are inserted. Any MARS engagement record that references a MARS-only entity (not yet migrated) is held in a staging table for a second-pass delta migration after the parent records land.