Salesforce to HubSpot: What Nobody Tells You Before You Migrate

The decision to move from Salesforce to HubSpot usually starts in one of three places: the renewal quote lands and someone finally does the math, a new VP comes in and wants "their" platform, or the team has just had enough of building reports that take 45 minutes and a Salesforce admin to pull off.

All valid reasons. But the sales pitch for HubSpot makes it sound like you'll be up and running in a few weeks. Here's what actually happens.

Your Salesforce data is messier than you think

Every Salesforce org I've migrated has the same problem: years of accumulated junk that nobody wants to deal with.

Custom fields that were created for a campaign in 2019 and never used again. Picklist values that started clean and slowly drifted — "Enterprise," "enterprise," "Ent," and "Large" all meaning the same thing. Contacts imported from trade shows five years ago that never got cleaned up. Duplicate records everywhere because someone turned off duplicate rules "temporarily" and forgot to turn them back on.

Before you move anything, you need to audit what you actually have. Pull a full field inventory from Salesforce and go through it with the people who use the system daily. Not leadership — the reps, the admins, the ops people. They'll tell you which fields matter and which ones haven't been touched in years.

I typically see Salesforce orgs with 300-500 custom fields. After a proper audit, maybe 80-120 of those are actually worth bringing over. The rest? Dead weight. And migrating dead weight into a clean system defeats the entire purpose of moving. (If data quality is already a problem for you, read what data hygiene actually means for HubSpot admins.)

The data models don't translate 1:1

This is where migrations get tricky, and where a lot of DIY attempts go sideways.

Salesforce uses Accounts and Contacts as separate objects with a lookup relationship. HubSpot uses Companies and Contacts with an association model that works differently. In Salesforce, a Contact belongs to one Account. In HubSpot, a Contact can be associated with multiple Companies. That sounds like a small difference until you're mapping 50,000 records and your Account hierarchy doesn't translate cleanly.

Opportunities become Deals, but the pipeline structure is different. Salesforce Opportunities have Sales Stages with probability percentages built in. HubSpot Deals have pipeline stages that you configure yourself. If you've been relying on Salesforce's forecasting tied to stage probabilities, you'll need to rebuild that logic in HubSpot.

Then there's Activities. Salesforce Tasks and Events have a specific structure — they're tied to a "WhoId" (Contact/Lead) and a "WhatId" (Account/Opportunity). HubSpot activities associate to records differently. Email logs, calls, meetings, notes — the association model matters here because if you get it wrong, reps lose visibility into the history of their accounts.

Custom objects? If you're on Salesforce Enterprise, you probably have a few. HubSpot supports custom objects on Enterprise tier, but the implementation is different. Each one needs to be rebuilt and the relationships remapped.

Your integrations are more tangled than the org chart

Make a list of every tool connected to Salesforce. Then make it longer, because you missed some.

The obvious ones — your marketing platform, your billing system, your support tool — those you'll remember. It's the ones running quietly in the background that bite you. The Zapier automation someone set up two years ago. The custom API integration your developer built for the quoting tool. The data enrichment service running on a schedule. The Slack notifications tied to Opportunity stage changes.

Every single one of those needs to be accounted for. Some will have native HubSpot integrations ready to go. Some will need to be rebuilt with different middleware. And some — the custom stuff — will need development work that wasn't in anyone's original estimate. This is one of the reasons we scope every engagement with an integration audit built in.

I tell clients to budget 20-30% of their migration timeline just for integration work. It's almost always underestimated.

Reporting doesn't just "move over"

If your leadership team lives on Salesforce dashboards, you need to set expectations early: those exact reports won't exist on day one in HubSpot.

Salesforce reporting is powerful but complex. HubSpot reporting is more accessible but structured differently. Custom report types in Salesforce don't have a direct equivalent. Cross-object reports that join Accounts, Opportunities, and Activities need to be rebuilt using HubSpot's custom report builder, which has its own logic for how objects join together.

The smart move is to audit your Salesforce dashboards before migrating. Figure out which reports people actually look at — not the 47 reports someone created over the years, but the 8-10 that drive decisions. Rebuild those first in HubSpot. The rest can wait or may never need to exist again.

Training takes longer than anyone budgets for

Your team has muscle memory in Salesforce. They know where things are, how to navigate, and they've built shortcuts and workarounds over years of use. All of that resets on day one in HubSpot.

Plan for a productivity dip. It's not a failure — it's reality. Even when HubSpot is objectively easier to use (and for most day-to-day tasks, it is), the transition period is real. I typically see 30-60 days before teams hit their previous speed, and 90 days before they start finding the HubSpot-specific efficiencies that make the switch worth it.

The mistake I see most often: one training session before go-live and then "they'll figure it out." They won't. Or they will, but they'll figure out bad habits that create data quality problems you'll be cleaning up six months later. Proper HubSpot implementation includes training as a core deliverable, not an afterthought.

Run training in waves. Pre-migration orientation (here's what's changing and why). Go-live training (here's how to do your job in the new system). And 30-day follow-up (here's what we're seeing people struggle with, let's fix it). Three rounds minimum.

Historical data decisions are permanent — choose carefully

How much history do you bring over? This question causes more arguments than any other part of a migration.

Sales wants every email and note from every deal ever. Marketing wants all their campaign data. Finance wants closed-won history going back to the company's founding. And the person paying for the migration wants to know why it's taking so long.

Here's the reality: migrating everything is expensive, slow, and often pointless. Do your reps actually reference emails from deals that closed in 2021? Probably not. But closed-won deal data for revenue reporting? That matters.

I recommend a tiered approach:

• Active records (open deals, active contacts, current customers) — full migration with complete history
• Recently closed (last 12-18 months) — migrate with key activity data
• Older history — migrate summary data (deal amounts, close dates, key fields) but skip the granular activity logs
• Dead records (bounced contacts, lost deals from years ago) — leave them behind

Keep your Salesforce org active in read-only mode for 6-12 months after migration. If someone really needs to look up that email thread from 2020, they can. But you're not paying migration costs to move data nobody will ever look at.

Timeline reality check

The sales pitch says weeks. The real answer is months.

For a mid-size company (50-200 employees, Professional/Enterprise Salesforce) with moderate complexity, here's what an honest timeline looks like:

• Weeks 1-3: Discovery, data audit, field mapping, integration inventory
• Weeks 4-6: HubSpot configuration, pipeline setup, custom properties, integration rebuilds
• Weeks 7-8: Test migration with a subset of data, validation, report building
• Weeks 9-10: Training (round one), user acceptance testing
• Week 11: Full data migration (usually over a weekend)
• Weeks 12-16: Hypercare period — daily check-ins, bug fixes, training rounds two and three

That's 3-4 months for a straightforward migration. Add custom objects, complex integrations, or multiple business units and you're looking at 4-6 months. Anyone telling you it'll take less either hasn't done many of these or is planning to cut corners you'll pay for later.

What to do right now if you're considering this

Before you sign anything or commit to a timeline:

1. Pull a complete field list from Salesforce and tag each one: active, questionable, or dead
2. Document every integration touching your Salesforce org — check Connected Apps, Zapier/Make, and ask your team what tools they use daily
3. Identify your 10 most important reports and dashboards
4. Talk to your actual users (not just managers) about what they need from the CRM and what drives them crazy about the current one
5. Get honest about your data quality — if your Salesforce data is a mess, migrating it just gives you messy HubSpot data

A migration done right saves you money, simplifies your stack, and gives your team a system they'll actually use. A migration done fast gives you the same problems in a different interface.

Planning a Salesforce to HubSpot migration? We've handled dozens of them across industries and company sizes. See how we approach migrations or book a discovery call and we'll walk through your specific situation.