Migrating from Salesforce to HubSpot is a strategic decision that can transform the way your team works. This guide will walk you step-by-step through the process, from initial planning to go-live.
Why migrate from Salesforce to HubSpot?
Salesforce is a powerful but complex platform. Many companies find that:
- Licensing and maintenance costs skyrocket year after year.
- The learning curve is steep and user adoption is low
- You constantly need external consultants for any changes
- The user experience is not intuitive, which generates resistance from the team
HubSpot offers a more agile alternative, with a modern interface, predictable costs and the ability for your internal team to manage the CRM autonomously.
When is it time to migrate?
Not all companies should migrate. Here are the signs that it's a good time:
- Your Salesforce bill exceeds $50,000 per year but you're not using 80% of the functionality.
- Salespeople constantly complain about the complexity of CRM.
- Every change requires an external consultant and takes weeks to complete
- You want to integrate marketing automation and CRM in one platform
- Your marketing team already uses HubSpot and you want to unify data
When you should not migrate
- You have very complex customizations in Apex that have no equivalent in HubSpot
- Your organization uses specific Salesforce Industry Clouds
- You rely on native Salesforce integrations with critical legacy systems
- Your technical team is highly specialized in Salesforce and doesn't want to change
Preparation Phase
Before touching anything on either platform, you need to do a thorough groundwork.
The first thing is to understand what you currently have:
- Custom objects and fields: Document all custom objects, their relationships and fields. You will need to decide what to migrate and what to discard.
- Workflows and automations: Map all active Process Builder, Workflows and Flows. Many will need to be recreated in HubSpot.
- Active Integrations: Lists all integrations (Marketing Cloud, Pardot, ERP, BI, etc.) and evaluates how to replicate them.
- Users and permissions: Documents the structure of profiles, roles and permission sets.
- Data quality: Analyze duplicates, empty fields, inconsistent data.
Do not try to migrate everything at once. Define clearly:
- Which objects you will migrate (Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities...)
- What date range (last 2 years? All history?).
- Which automations are really critical
- Which integrations must be ready by day 1
Project planning
A typical migration from Salesforce to HubSpot takes 2-4 months for mid-market companies. The timeline depends on:
- Volume of data to be migrated
- Complexity of the data model
- Number of integrations
- Availability of internal team
Design of the data model
This is the most critical part. HubSpot's data model is different from Salesforce. The standard objects in HubSpot are:
- Contacts: Equivalent to Contacts + Leads in Salesforce.
- Companies: Equivalent to Accounts
- Business: Equivalent to Opportunities
- Tickets: Equivalent to Cases
Key Differences
- HubSpot does not differentiate between Leads and Contacts. Uses the lifecycle stage.
- No native Account hierarchy concept (can be simulated with custom objects).
- Many-to-many relationships require intermediate custom objects
- Limit of 10 pipelines per object (vs unlimited in Salesforce)
Data migration execution
Data migration has to be done methodically. The first thing is a pre-cleanup:
- Remove duplicates in Salesforce before migrating.
- Standardize phone, country, etc. formats.
- Fill in critical empty fields
- Archive obsolete records (closed opportunities from 5 years ago, etc.).
Migration Order
- Companies (Accounts)
- Contacts (Contacts + Leads)
- Business (Opportunities)
- Activities and notes
- Attachments (if applicable)
Migration tools
- Import2: HubSpot's official tool, free, good for simple migrations.
- Trujay: Specialized tool for Salesforce → HubSpot migrations
- Custom scripts: For complex migrations, custom development with Python + APIs
Replicate integrations
Salesforce integrations will need to be recreated in HubSpot. The most common integrations are:
- ERP (SAP, Dynamics, NetSuite): Use Zapier, Make or develop custom integration.
- Marketing Automation: If you were using Pardot, HubSpot Marketing Hub replaces it natively.
- BI (Power BI, Tableau): HubSpot offers native plugins
- Telephony: Aircall, Ringover and others have native integrations.
Training and adoption
The best technical migration fails if the team does not adopt the new tool. The training plan we recommend includes the following sessions with content differentiated by teams:
- Admins Team (4-6 hours): Advanced configuration, automations, reporting.
- Sales (2-3 hours): Business management, activities, email tracking
- Marketing (3-4 hours): Workflows, lists, email marketing
- Management (1-2 hours): Dashboards, forecasting, analytics
Common mistakes to avoid
- Migrate dirty data: Garbage in, garbage out. Clean before migrating.
- Not doing enough testing: Do at least 2 full test migrations.
- Underestimating training: Users need more time than you think.
- Not having a rollback plan: Have a plan B in case something goes wrong.
- Migrating in the middle of peak season: Choose a time of lower business load.
- Not involving key users: You need champions in every department.
Final migration checklist
Pre-launch (1 week before):
- ✓ Test migration completed and validated.
- ✓ All critical integrations working.
- ✓ Permissions and users configured.
- ✓ Training completed for all users.
- ✓ Communication plan sent to entire organization.
Go-live day:
- ✓ Salesforce goes to read-only at 6:00pm Fri.
- ✓ Final migration executed over the weekend.
- ✓ Data validation completed.
- ✓ HubSpot activated Monday 9:00h
- ✓ In-person/online support during the first 48h.
Post-launch (first 2 weeks):
- ✓ Daily Q&A sessions for the first 5 days.
- ✓ Exclusive Slack/Teams channel for migration doubts.
- ✓ Monitoring of adoption metrics.
- ✓ Rapid adjustments based on feedback.
Final recommendation.
A well-executed migration is not noticeable. Users should be able to work from day 1 without significant interruptions. If you spend enough time on preparation, the go-live will be smooth.