Migrate switchers from a competitor by hand

Hand-migrating switchers means your team moves a prospect's lists, setup and workflows off a competitor for them, at no charge, so switching cost stops being the reason they say no. ConvertKit did this after sales calls. Its monthly revenue had dropped to $1,337 in September 2014. By December 2014 MRR was $3,237, and it later passed $30,000 a month.

How it works

The offer removes the work of leaving. A buyer who already likes your product often still stalls because moving their data feels risky and slow. You take that job off their plate. The ConvertKit case shows one way to run it.

1. Pick a niche. In October 2014 Barry chose email marketing for authors and started direct sales. Later he dropped the authors message and focused on professional bloggers. ConvertKit described itself as a more powerful MailChimp for content creators.
2. Reach out by hand. Barry says he never automated the sales process and sent every email himself from his Google Apps account, so he would not annoy people by mistake. He says so in an interview about ConvertKit's story.
3. Offer the migration only once the call goes well. In Barry's own growth write-up, he explains that after a good call he walked the prospect through migrating, and the team usually did the migration for them. Marketing Examples' breakdown frames the free migration as a way to remove the switching objection.
4. Know your capacity. At the end of 2014 ConvertKit's team was four people, so cap migrations at what your team can absorb.
5. Match the competitor's terms where buyers compare. ConvertKit matched AWeber's 30% recurring affiliate commission.

The December 2014 update reports MRR growing 54% to $3,237 once the niche focus and direct sales came together.

What it takes

Our estimate: about 30 hours of work, and about 30 days before you can read a signal. Most of the hours go into writing a repeatable migration checklist for your top competitor, building or scripting the import, and doing the first few migrations by hand to find the edge cases. Each later migration still costs time, so treat this as an ongoing sales cost, not a one-off build. The signal takes about a month because you need enough qualified calls to compare close rates, and migrated customers need a few weeks of use before you can tell whether they stick.

What to measure

Close rate with and without the offer tells you whether the migration changes decisions or just pleases people who would have bought anyway. A good reading is a clear gap on similar calls. A bad reading is no gap.

Days from signed call to first real use shows whether doing the work for them shortens time to value. If migrated accounts still sit idle, the bottleneck is somewhere else.

Retention by migration type matters because a switcher you carried over can churn back just as fast. Read it by cohort and compare against your churn benchmarks. See how to read a retention curve before judging early data.

Hours per migration against first-year revenue keeps the tactic honest. If hours rise as you grow while account value stays flat, you are buying revenue with labor that will not scale.

Share of new MRR from switchers shows whether this channel is becoming a real source of growth or staying a side effect.

When it backfires

• It eats the team. ConvertKit ran this with four people. If migrations pile up faster than you can do them, onboarding slows and the offer starts to hurt.
• You offer it too early. ConvertKit raised migration after a call went well. Offering it to cold leads invites tire kickers who cost hours and never pay.
• The niche is wrong. ConvertKit changed its target from authors to professional bloggers after many sales calls. Migrating the wrong segment spends hours on customers who may not fit.
• Outreach turns into spam. Barry wrote each email by hand to avoid annoying people. Mass outreach about switching can burn the very audience you want.
• Data comes over broken. A failed import creates a support problem and a bad first week. Test your process on a few friendly accounts first.

Run it as an experiment

We recommend this hypothesis: offering a free, done-for-you migration on qualified calls with users of one named competitor will raise close rate without lowering 90-day retention. Alternate the offer by week across qualified calls, since true random splits are hard with small sales volumes. Log the competitor, call outcome, migration hours, days to first use and retention at 30 and 90 days. Our suggested decision rule: keep the offer if close rate is clearly higher and retention is no worse, and drop or price it if hours per account exceed what first-year revenue can carry. Follow how to run a growth experiment for the write-up, and track it alongside other bets in the growth experiment backlog template.

How strong the evidence is

The grade is a case with numbers: one company documented the tactic and published results as numbers on its own pages. ConvertKit carries it, through Barry's own posts on growth from $1,337 to $3,237 MRR and later past $30,000 a month. A commenter also credits ConvertKit's direct sales and concierge migrations as a turning point for their own company, but that is a single anecdote.

The evidence does not isolate migrations. The growth followed a niche change, direct sales and an affiliate commission match together, and the posts do not split out the share from migrations. The figures are self-reported. The posts give no count of migrations, close rates or retention for migrated customers.