Two facts shape every Marketing Cloud Next conversation and they pull in opposite directions. There is no announced end-of-life forcing you off your current platform. And there is no automated migration that lifts your journeys, content and code across.
Together they create a trap: because nothing forces the decision, teams defer it; because nothing automates it, the eventual project is larger than anyone budgeted.
What this package delivers
- Five inventories — journeys, custom code, data model, integrations, content — in a spreadsheet your team can maintain.
- A complexity score across the five dimensions that actually drive effort.
- A recommended path with the rejected alternatives and why — the part that survives a steering committee.
- The data-foundation gap sized as work, not described as a concern.
- Written trigger conditions, so “not yet” is a plan rather than drift.
The inventory changes the conversation
Most migration debates happen without anyone knowing what is actually running. Two to three weeks of structured work replaces speculation with a spreadsheet everyone can read.
The dormancy dividend
Sort your journeys by entry volume over the last 90 days and read the bottom half. In most estates a large share are paused, superseded, or entered by nobody. Every one is scope you do not migrate — and this single exercise routinely removes more effort than any tooling decision.
Effort tracks complexity, not size
A retailer sending fifty million emails from twelve clean templated journeys is an easier migration than a mid-market B2B org with forty journeys held together by AMPscript and an undocumented CloudPage.
Scored one to five: code density, data model complexity, integration surface, journey criticality, organisational readiness. Low across the board is a project. High is a multi-quarter programme. Mixed — the common case — usually points at hybrid.
Four paths, and you pick one explicitly
| Path | Who it fits |
|---|---|
| A — Greenfield | New business units, brands or regions with little existing usage |
| B — Hybrid coexistence | A working estate plus genuine appetite for unified-data or agentic use cases |
| C — Phased replacement | Committed, large estate, multi-quarter runway, migrating by domain |
| D — Deliberate deferral | Heavy custom code, no data foundation, no use case the current platform cannot serve |
Deferral only counts with written triggers
“Not yet” must come with the conditions that change the answer: the data model reaches a defined state, a named use case appears, the custom-code footprint drops below an agreed level, or the vendor announces something material. Reviewed quarterly, in fifteen minutes. Without triggers, deferral is not a decision — it is the absence of one. Those triggers are a deliverable here.
What you walk away with
- The five inventories, maintainable
- A complexity score with the reasoning behind each dimension
- A recommended path, plus the two you rejected and why
- A first-phase plan scoped to something deliverable in a quarter
- The data-foundation gap, sized
- Trigger conditions and a review date, whatever the recommendation
Every item on that list is defensible in front of a CFO, which matters more than most technical documents admit. Migration business cases fail on vagueness far more often than on cost.
Best for
- Teams being told by a vendor or an agency that they need to move, without evidence either way
- Organisations that have deferred the decision twice and would like to stop
- Anyone who needs to put a number in next year’s budget
- Teams whose leadership has asked “what would this cost us?”
Price and duration
From €5,900. Two to four weeks. Fixed scope, fixed price.
The recommendation is genuinely open. If the honest answer is that you should stay where you are for another two years, that is what the report will say — and you will have it in writing, with the conditions that would change it.
Not ready for the full assessment? The Engagement vs Next comparison covers the framework, and the free Migration Check gives you a rough verdict in two minutes.
Sound like your org?
Thirty minutes, free, no slides. Bring your questions about scope, timing or whether this package is even the right one — you will get straight answers.