Most companies that outgrow HubSpot reach a predictable inflection point: the sales team needs more complex pipeline management, finance wants CPQ, or the company is entering a market where enterprise buyers expect Salesforce as standard. Whatever the reason, the question becomes the same — how do you get your data out of HubSpot and into Salesforce without losing a year of history or breaking your sales process mid-migration?
This guide covers exactly that. We have migrated dozens of companies from HubSpot to Salesforce, and the same mistakes show up every time. We will walk you through what actually transfers cleanly, what needs manual work, how long each phase takes, and the 8 steps that prevent the most common failures.
When does it actually make sense to migrate from HubSpot to Salesforce?
Before you start, it is worth being honest about whether the migration is worth the disruption. HubSpot is genuinely excellent for most companies under 50 people with a straightforward sales motion. Salesforce earns its complexity when you need:
- Complex sales processes — multi-product quoting, approval workflows, territory management, or channel sales through partners
- Custom object relationships — data models that go beyond contacts, companies, and deals
- Deep ERP or finance integration — connecting CRM data to NetSuite, SAP, or billing systems at a level HubSpot's native integrations don't support
- Enterprise buyer requirements — some enterprise customers and regulated industries expect Salesforce as a condition of the relationship
- Salesforce-native products — Health Cloud, Financial Services Cloud, or Manufacturing Cloud have no HubSpot equivalent
If none of those apply to your current situation, the migration will cost you $10,000–$20,000 and three months of disruption without a clear payoff. Be specific about what problem Salesforce solves that HubSpot does not.
What transfers cleanly from HubSpot to Salesforce
The good news first. These objects migrate reliably with proper tooling:
- Contacts → Salesforce Contacts (standard fields map one-to-one)
- Companies → Salesforce Accounts
- Deals → Salesforce Opportunities (stages need remapping to your Salesforce process)
- Tasks and notes → Activities (with some formatting loss)
- Standard contact/company properties → Standard Salesforce fields
- Associated contacts on a deal → Opportunity Contact Roles
What does NOT transfer cleanly — and why
This is where most migrations run into trouble. Budget extra time for every item on this list:
- Custom HubSpot properties — These need to be recreated as custom fields in Salesforce before you migrate data. If you skip this step, the data arrives with nowhere to land. Companies with 200+ custom properties should budget a week just for field mapping.
- HubSpot workflows — Automation does not migrate at all. Every workflow needs to be rebuilt as a Salesforce Flow or Process Builder rule. This is the most time-consuming part of most migrations and is routinely underestimated.
- Email sequences and templates — These are recreated manually in Salesforce or a connected sales engagement tool. The content transfers; the automation logic does not.
- HubSpot Marketing Hub data — Email campaign history, landing page performance, and form submissions are stored in HubSpot's marketing database, not in a format Salesforce can ingest directly. Marketing history is typically archived in HubSpot rather than migrated.
- Deal associations with multiple contacts — HubSpot allows many-to-many relationships between deals and contacts natively. Salesforce handles this through Opportunity Contact Roles, which requires a mapping decision before migration.
- HubSpot reports and dashboards — These are rebuilt in Salesforce Reports and Dashboards from scratch. The underlying data migrates; the report definitions do not.
The 8-step migration process
Step 1 — Audit your HubSpot data before touching anything (Week 1)
Export all of your HubSpot data and review it honestly. How many duplicate contacts do you have? How many deals have no owner, no close date, or are in a stage that no longer exists in your process? A migration does not clean dirty data — it just moves it to a new system where it causes different problems. This is the most important step and the one most teams skip.
Clean before you migrate. Merge duplicates, close stale deals, and delete contacts that have been unengaged for over two years. Your Salesforce org will be cleaner and cheaper to maintain.
Step 2 — Design your Salesforce data model (Week 1–2)
Before you create a single Salesforce field, map every HubSpot property to its Salesforce equivalent. Document which HubSpot properties become standard Salesforce fields, which become custom fields, and which are being dropped entirely because nobody uses them. This mapping document becomes your migration spec.
Step 3 — Set up Salesforce and create all custom fields (Week 2–3)
Stand up your Salesforce org, configure your sales process (stages, record types, page layouts), and create every custom field identified in step 2. Do not start migrating data until every destination field exists. Records imported with unmapped fields silently lose that data.
Step 4 — Migrate in order: Accounts → Contacts → Opportunities → Activities (Week 3–4)
Sequence matters. You cannot create Contacts without their parent Account already existing, and you cannot create Opportunity Contact Roles without both the Opportunity and Contact already being in Salesforce. Use a migration tool (Data Loader, Dataloader.io, or a specialist ETL tool) and migrate in this exact order.
Start with a test migration of 100–500 records in a Salesforce sandbox, verify the results manually, then run the full migration. Never migrate directly to production without a sandbox test.
Step 5 — Validate data integrity after each object (Week 4)
After each object migration, compare record counts between HubSpot and Salesforce. Spot-check 20–30 records manually across different segments (new customers, old customers, different deal stages). Look for missing fields, broken relationships, and garbled text encoding. Fix errors before migrating the next object.
Step 6 — Rebuild your automations as Salesforce Flows (Week 4–6)
Work through your HubSpot workflow list and rebuild each one in Salesforce. Prioritise by business impact — lead routing, deal stage automations, and task creation first. Email sequences and lower-priority nurture flows can come later.
This step takes longer than expected for most teams. If you had 50 HubSpot workflows, budget 2–4 hours per workflow on average, including testing.
Step 7 — Recreate reports and train your team (Week 6–8)
Rebuild your core sales reports and dashboards in Salesforce before you cut over. Sales managers should be able to run their pipeline review on day one without going back to HubSpot. Run two to three training sessions for the sales team — the goal is not to teach every Salesforce feature, but to show people exactly how they do the things they did in HubSpot every day.
Step 8 — Cut over and freeze HubSpot (Week 8–10)
Set a hard cutover date. After that date, all new records go into Salesforce only. Keep HubSpot in read-only mode for 60–90 days as a reference, then cancel your subscription. Do not run both systems in parallel as the source of truth — you will end up with two out-of-sync databases and no one will trust either.
How long does a HubSpot to Salesforce migration take?
- Simple migration (under 50k records, few custom properties, clean data): 4–6 weeks
- Mid-complexity (50k–200k records, 50–200 custom properties, some workflow recreation): 6–10 weeks
- Complex migration (multiple HubSpot portals, custom objects, 200+ workflows, dirty data): 10–16 weeks
These timelines assume a dedicated resource on your side for data validation and user acceptance testing — not just a project manager who adds migration tasks to their existing workload.
How much does a HubSpot to Salesforce migration cost?
For US SMBs working with a certified Salesforce partner, expect:
- Simple migration: $5,000–$10,000
- Mid-complexity: $10,000–$20,000
- Complex migration: $20,000–$50,000+
The biggest cost driver is not data volume — it is workflow complexity and data quality. Companies that invest two weeks in data cleanup before migration consistently spend less on the migration itself than companies that try to migrate everything as-is.
The three mistakes that cause migrations to fail
- Migrating dirty data. Duplicates, blank required fields, and records with no owner do not get better when they move systems. They get worse, because Salesforce's validation rules start rejecting them.
- Underestimating workflow recreation. Most teams think the migration is the hard part. It is not. Rebuilding HubSpot automations in Salesforce Flows — with proper testing — is almost always the longest phase of the project.
- Skipping the sandbox test. Migrating directly to production without a sandbox validation means your first indication of a data mapping error is when a salesperson calls with a broken record. Always test in sandbox first.
Frequently asked questions
Can I migrate from HubSpot to Salesforce without losing email history?
You can preserve email logs as Activity records in Salesforce, but the formatting may not be perfect. Full email thread history with attachments is typically archived in HubSpot rather than migrated. Most teams find that 6–12 months of email history is sufficient to migrate, with older history left in HubSpot as an archive.
Do I need a Salesforce implementation partner for this migration?
For simple migrations with clean data and minimal customization, an experienced Salesforce admin can handle it internally using Data Loader. For anything involving custom objects, complex workflows, or over 100k records, a Salesforce implementation partner reduces the risk of data loss and cuts the project timeline significantly. The cost of getting it wrong — re-importing data, rebuilding broken relationships, or losing historical records — usually exceeds the cost of doing it right the first time.
What happens to HubSpot Marketing Hub after we migrate to Salesforce?
Many companies keep HubSpot Marketing Hub and connect it to Salesforce via the native HubSpot-Salesforce integration rather than abandoning it entirely. Salesforce Marketing Cloud is significantly more expensive and complex than Marketing Hub. If your marketing team is happy in HubSpot, the HubSpot-Salesforce integration is often a better answer than a full platform replacement.
Ready to plan your migration?
We have done this migration dozens of times for US SMBs. If you want a straight answer on what your specific migration will involve — what data is at risk, how long it will take, and what it will cost — book a 30-minute scoping call. No pitch, just an honest assessment of what you are looking at.
You can also see our full Salesforce integration services if you need to connect Salesforce to other systems after the migration is complete.