Salesforce to HubSpot migration: what changes and what to plan for
How Salesforce leads, accounts, opportunities, custom objects and automations land in HubSpot, and the decisions to make before you move.
The short answer: In a Salesforce to HubSpot migration, leads and contacts become HubSpot contacts, accounts become companies, opportunities become deals and cases become tickets. Flows, Apex, reports and integrations don’t transfer and must be rebuilt. Custom objects need HubSpot Enterprise. Most customised Salesforce moves take 45 to 90 days or more.
Salesforce is the most common system companies leave for HubSpot, and the most complex to leave. Years of customisation, automation and integrations live in a Salesforce org, and none of it moves on its own. This guide covers how the data maps, what has to be rebuilt and the decisions to make before you start.
How Salesforce objects land in HubSpot
| Salesforce | HubSpot | What to decide |
|---|---|---|
| Leads and Contacts | Contacts | HubSpot keeps everyone in one object. Use lifecycle stage and lead status to preserve the distinction. |
| Accounts | Companies | Duplicates and parent/child hierarchies |
| Opportunities | Deals | Pipelines, stages, probabilities and amounts must reconcile exactly |
| Opportunity contact roles | Deal and contact associations, with labels | Which roles matter to your reports |
| Cases | Tickets | Service pipelines and history |
| Tasks, events, emails | Tasks, meetings, emails and notes on the timeline | Original dates and owners, and how many years to keep |
| Custom objects | Custom objects | Require a HubSpot Enterprise subscription; on lower tiers, model the data differently |
| Campaigns | Campaigns and attribution | Attribution history needs a deliberate plan or it’s lost |
What has to be rebuilt
Automations
Salesforce Flows, Apex triggers, approval processes and validation rules don’t import into HubSpot. Each one needs to be understood and either rebuilt as a HubSpot workflow, replaced with a standard HubSpot feature, or retired. This is usually the largest single piece of work in a Salesforce migration. See rebuilding your automations in HubSpot.
Reports and dashboards
Reports don’t migrate. List the reports leadership actually uses, rebuild those first, and reconcile them against Salesforce before cutover. Many orgs have hundreds of reports nobody opens; leave those behind.
Integrations
Every tool connected to Salesforce, from email and calendar sync to billing and quoting, needs to be reconnected to HubSpot, replaced or retired. Check that a HubSpot integration exists for each one before you commit to a date.
Five decisions to make first
- Which HubSpot tier you need. Workflows and sequences need Professional. Custom objects need Enterprise. Buying too low means rebuilding later; too high means paying for features you won’t use.
- How leads and contacts merge. Decide how lifecycle stage and lead status will represent where each person is in your funnel.
- Pipeline design. Use the move to simplify stages that grew messy over years, but agree the new design with sales leadership before anything is built.
- How much history to keep. Activity history drives both effort and value. Many teams keep two to three years and archive the rest.
- Whether Salesforce stays for anyone. If part of the business keeps Salesforce, plan the sync. See keeping Salesforce and syncing it with HubSpot.
Where Salesforce migrations go wrong
- Automations discovered after go-live, when leads stop being routed
- Attribution and campaign history left behind because nobody planned for it
- Custom objects with no home because the HubSpot tier was chosen before the audit
- Reps trained on HubSpot in general, not on their own pipeline, so adoption stalls
- Salesforce switched off before the pipeline was reconciled
What to expect
A customised Salesforce migration commonly takes 45 to 90 days or more, depending on automations, integrations and data quality. Plan for at least one full rehearsal, a short dual-run period and training before go-live. For budgeting, see how much a HubSpot migration costs.
Our Salesforce package covers the full move, including automations, reporting and rep training, with a fixed price and our 30-day guarantee. Start with a free risk scan of your org.
Sources and further reading
- Getting started with the HubSpot CRM Data Migration Service, HubSpot Academy
- Do you need HubSpot Enterprise for custom objects?, Meticulosity
- Create workflows, HubSpot Knowledge Base
- Salesforce to HubSpot migration cost, Huble
- Why mid-market B2B companies are switching from Salesforce to HubSpot, The Pedowitz Group
Platform features and policies change. Check the vendor’s current documentation before acting on any detail in this article. This article is general information, not legal advice.