Migration from another CRM, with customer history intact.
Contacts, companies and deals are the easy part. What decides whether a migration works is the mapping underneath them, the deduplication on the way in, and the activity history that tells a salesperson why a customer went quiet two years ago. I run the import in a test environment first and check record counts on both sides before production is touched.
New 24
Qualified 11
Nurturing 38
Handed off 6
Inventory. Mapping. Test import. Cut-over.
Inventory
A full export of fields and objects from the source system, laid out so decisions get made on a visible list rather than from memory. This is also where the duplicates and the ownerless records surface.
Mapping
Field by field: what comes across, what gets merged, what stays behind. Owners, pipelines and stages get mapped here too, because those are the parts people notice on day one.
Test import
The import runs into a test environment first. Counts get checked on both sides, a sample of records gets opened by hand, and whatever looks wrong gets fixed in the mapping, not in production.
Cut-over
A date from which the new portal is the system of record. A transition period on two systems turns into a permanent transition period, so the cut is a decision, not a drift.
A migration stands on mapping, deduplication and counts checked on both sides.
Field mapping before the import
I decide field by field what comes across, and that is a business decision, not a technical one. "Move everything" produces a portal with forty properties nobody fills in and a report that cannot be built.
Deduplication on the way in
Source systems often allow two records with the same email; HubSpot does not. Duplicates get resolved before the import, not after, because merging them later means deciding by hand which record owns the history.
Activity history travels with the record
Emails, notes, calls and meetings come across attached to the record they belong to. A note without an object has nowhere to land, and a contact without history makes a salesperson open the old system again.
Counts checked on both sides
Before production is touched, the number of records on each side gets compared, object by object. A row count that does not match is a finding, not a rounding difference.
Named HubSpot Academy certifications.
Same time zone as EU clients.
Trainings, scope docs, and ongoing support in both.
Let me hear about the system you want to leave.
On the call I go through what sits in the old system, how far back the history matters and who has to make the mapping decisions. A work email address and a topic are enough to book it.
Questions that come up on a first call.
Will sales stop while we migrate?
No. The work runs in a test environment, and the cut-over is a single agreed date. What stops sales is a transition period where half the team writes in the old system and half in the new one, so that is the thing I avoid.
Does the whole conversation history come across?
Emails, notes, calls and meetings attached to records do. How far back I go is a decision worth making deliberately, because five years of activity on inactive contacts is weight without value.
What does not come across?
Notes with nothing to attach them to, and anything the source system's API will not release. Some platforms cap what you can export per day, and email bodies are often the hardest part. I name those limits before I start, not after.
We are still choosing a system. Do you help with that?
Yes, and sometimes that call ends with "stay where you are for now". If HubSpot is the answer, the migration and the configuration are usually one project rather than two.
How long does it take?
It depends on the number of objects, how much history comes across and how many decisions the mapping needs from your side. The part that sets the pace is usually not the import; it is getting a decision on duplicates and ownership.
Is the migration and the configuration one project or two?
One, in almost every case. Moving data into a portal that is not configured yet means importing twice, because the second import has to follow the structure the first one lacked.
What I migrate from most often.
Pipedrive
Deals, activities and pipeline stages without losing history.
Salesforce
Lead, Account, Opportunity, Case and custom objects mapped onto HubSpot.
Zoho
Multi-year contracts split into deals year by year.
ActiveCampaign
Automations and tags translated into workflows and properties.
Bitrix24
Leaving a closed ecosystem without losing correspondence.
Mailchimp
Lists, segments and send history under one CRM.
Zendesk
Tickets, SLAs and support history into Service Hub.
Monday
Boards and Updates translated into CRM objects.
The whole migration or a single piece.
Data comes across together with what grew around it.
<p>Tell me which system you are on and how far back the history has to reach. After the call you have the scope, the decisions somebody on your side has to make, and the limits of what the source system will release.</p>