Our HubSpot CRM Migration Best Practices - Axon Garside

So you’ve realised your current CRM is not up to scratch and are considering migrating to a better system? Well, you’re not alone. In fact, according to Gartner, 55% of CRM migrations fail to meet business expectations.

Now, this may be for a number of reasons not even remotely connected to your existing CRM system. It could be as simple as poor planning, lack of user adoption or data clarity issues. However, it may not be as simple as that. Having done a deep dive into HubSpot CRM versus the competition, HubSpot offers more options and scalability for B2B businesses looking to fully realise the potential of using a CRM system than the alternatives.

If you implement HubSpot successfully, you can unlock transformational business value. According to Nucleus Research, organisations that successfully implement and optimise CRM systems report an average 8.7x return on investment (ROI) for every $1 spent. Now that you’re looking to migrate to another CRM system, it’s about time you start seeing a return like that, too.

This article guides you through our process for migrating our clients from one CRM to HubSpot CRM and how you can do it yourself.

Just a quick caveat before starting, this article is tailored to those who have decided their existing CRM isn’t fit for purpose and know HubSpot is the answer for them. Suppose you’re reading this and you don’t have an existing CRM in place. If so, we recommend reading our HubSpot Onboarding article to understand your options for implementing HubSpot and getting onboarded successfully.

Our HubSpot Migration Playbook

From start to finish, this playbook is very similar to our 5 Stages of a Successful HubSpot Implementation guide. And there’s good reason for this.

This is because it follows similar principles to if you were implementing a CRM for the first time. However, with the complication of migrating from your existing system, this guide takes into account doing an overview of your existing system, what can be better moving to HubSpot and how to deal with those changes.

So without further adieu…

Step 1:  Existing System Overview

The first step is to do an overview of your existing system. This helps form a basis of what you do and don’t like about your current solution, and what needs to change moving forward.

For existing HubSpot users, we use our Portal Audit checklist to help understand where their existing CRM is creating problems for their business. Although this checklist is tailored towards HubSpot users currently, the principles can be replicated for other systems.

As part of this overview, we check for:

• Data Quality & Structure – Identify duplicate, outdated, or incomplete records that could affect reporting or automation. Check for consistent formatting across key fields like names, email addresses, and phone numbers.
• Contact and Company Segmentation – Evaluate how contacts and companies are grouped. Are lists up to date and logically segmented? Are tags or labels used consistently, or is segmentation too broad, too fragmented, or lacking altogether?
• Pipeline Configuration – Review the number of sales and service pipelines in use and whether they accurately reflect current sales processes. Check that each stage is clearly defined, aligned with the real-world journey, and free of outdated or duplicate stages.
• Activity Tracking – Look into whether calls, emails, meetings, and other activities are being logged consistently. Are integrations with communication tools working correctly, and do they give a clear picture of customer touchpoints? And, most importantly, do you have a single view of the customer? This can be limited or non-existent on some CRMs, but if you can, do.
• User Access & Permissions – Audit who has access to the CRM and whether their permissions are appropriate for their role. Remove inactive users and make sure sensitive data is protected through proper access controls.
• Automation & Workflows – Identify all active workflows. Are they still relevant and working as intended? Check for redundant or conflicting logic, broken triggers, and outdated automation that could be causing inefficiencies or errors.
• Reporting & Dashboards – Review the reports and dashboards in place. Are the right metrics being tracked? Are the reports aligned with business goals and actively used by the team, or have they become cluttered and irrelevant?
• Integrations & Connected Apps – List all connected tools and platforms. Are they syncing properly and contributing to a streamlined workflow? Remove anything unused or unreliable, and identify any integration opportunities to reduce manual work. This can also be a good opportunity to see how these integrations can be brought back into HubSpot to simplify your tech stack.
• Customisations & Configuration – Review all custom fields, modules, or objects. Are they still needed? Is naming consistent and easy to follow? Consider whether the CRM is configured in a way that supports your team’s workflow and user experience.
• Adoption & Usability – Assess how well the CRM is adopted across the team. Are people logging in regularly? Which features are underused or misunderstood? Identify pain points and training gaps that may be holding the team back.

Follow these 10 CRM audit fundamentals, and you will have a better gauge of where the pitfalls of your current solution are and where you need to improve. From there, you will be able to design the requirements for your HubSpot CRM portal.

Step 2: Note Your HubSpot CRM Requirements

Having audited your existing system, the next step is to think about the design and development of your new portal. This isn’t just about listing features you need, it’s about understanding what data every team needs within a CRM so it supports them, not restricts them.

This may be as simple as just having a CRM set up correctly and working for all your teams. But it may be as complicated as a non-out-of-the-box solution, such as managing field services through an integration or integrating customer portals to your customer data.

Either way, there are a few things you need to define at this stage for your migration to be a success:

• Business Objectives – What are the key outcomes you expect HubSpot to support? Whether it’s improving lead conversion, shortening the sales cycle, or enabling better reporting, your objectives should shape every aspect of your CRM setup.
• Team Use Cases – Outline how each team (sales, marketing, service) will use HubSpot day to day. This helps determine what tools and features need to be prioritised in your portal build.
• Key Fields and Properties – What information do you need to collect and manage? Define essential contact, company, deal, and custom properties. Use this as a chance to simplify and only carry over what’s relevant and ditch redundant data from your existing system.
• Reporting and KPIs – Identify the metrics that matter to your business and how you want to visualise them in HubSpot. This includes dashboards, key reports, and any custom views that stakeholders will rely on.
• Process Mapping – Map out your core processes: lead capture, deal progression, ticket management, handovers between teams, and so on. This ensures your portal is built around real workflows, not assumptions.
• Integration Requirements – What other systems does HubSpot need to connect with? List out platforms such as email marketing tools, customer support software, finance systems, ERP’s and what data should flow between them.
• Permission Structures – Define user roles and access levels early. HubSpot’s permission sets can be tailored by team, role, or seniority, so it’s important to plan who needs visibility or editing rights for what.
• Compliance & Security – If your organisation handles sensitive data, ensure your portal requirements include GDPR compliance, data retention policies, and user-level security controls.

By stage three, you should first understand the downfalls within your current setups and why you’re experiencing silios in your customer data, but now also understand what’s needed to make migrating to HubSpot CRM a success. This is where you can begin the baby steps of building your portal.

Step 3: Excerpt a Sample of Data

This step is fairly explanatory.

Before going live or even playing around with your HubSpot portal, you should begin with a sample set of your existing customer data. This will help you identify what ‘things’ need to be created within your CRM to properly store data and ensure that it’s useful for your team.

This will help you consider:

• Properties - Help you understand what properties that either, you can use with HubSpot’s native properties, or what custom properties you need to create to have a complete view of your customer.
• Objects - Help you understand if you need custom objects, and therefore, which HubSpot tier you need to complete this

We touched on this briefly in the previous step, but this step gives you a chance to really dig into the data you need in order to make business decisions.

If you have any data that you’re tracking currently that isn’t relevant to either your teams or doesn’t contribute to anything meaningful in the way of business decisions, this is your time to exile them from your CRM. In the short term, this helps ‘clean up’, merge or enrich your customer data, only migrating across the data needed to implement HubSpot successfully. In the long term, it sets the notion that you should only record the data that’s essential, rather than clogging up your CRM with unnecessary data.

This will also make setting up a sandbox CRM portal a lot simpler and make the whole HubSpot CRM migration process a whole lot more efficient.

Step 4: Create a Sandbox CRM Portal

First of all, what is a sandbox portal?

A sandbox HubSpot CRM portal is a separate, non-production environment that mirrors your main portal and allows you to test changes without affecting live data or business operations.

It’s designed to help teams trial custom configurations, workflows, automation, and integrations in a safe setting before anything is deployed in the main CRM. This is especially important during a HubSpot CRM migration, where it’s crucial to validate setup decisions, avoid disruption, and confirm that everything works as expected.

As we’ll come onto later, a sandbox environment is perfect for user acceptance testing, where your colleagues can ‘play around’ with HubSpot without risking customer information. As you can imagine, this is the perfect environment for user training for your users to have a ‘hands-on’ experience and learn all about how the CRM can benefit them in their role.

At this stage, you need to take the information you’ve gathered in the first three steps and start implementing it into this sandbox portal. If this means setting up customer properties and objects, now is the time to do so before you import your sample data. This means that when you input your dummy data, everything should be set up within your portal to import without errors and issues.

However, there are dependencies depending on which HubSpot tier you’re deciding upon. Only Enterprise-level customers have access to sandbox environments to implement directly into a portal. However, if you’re considering a lower tier, a temporary portal can be used to replicate key elements for, albeit, more limited testing purposes.

Step 5: Import Sample Data

Here’s where it starts to become real.

We really like this quote here at Axon Garside to describe the importance of getting this step correct:

A fragmented or messy import can lead to a disorganised CRM where it’s hard for people to source the information they need. 
- Jason Underhill, Raka

This stage helps you understand the structure that’s needed for your customer data, as well as what workflows you need and fields that need mapping with your real data import. Using your sample set of data allows you to spot inconsistencies you may have missed, refine preparation steps and make sure that you’re set up successfully to take this beyond a sandbox environment.

It also gives key stakeholders the chance to view the data within a test environment, which, as I mentioned earlier, gives them a chance to visualise the data within the system and interact with the portal.

The best practices we follow when importing data into the CRM are:

• Use clean, deduplicated data with standardised formatting
• Include varied record types (contacts, companies, deals, etc.) to test associations
• Ensure column headers in your import file match your HubSpot property names
• Use unique identifiers like email addresses to prevent duplicates
• Test imports in small batches before scaling up
• Review imported data thoroughly and document any issues or mismatches

By following these fundamentals for importing your sample data into your sandbox portal, you should have no errors or issues when mapping the data points into HubSpot.

Step 6: User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

User Acceptance Testing is a critical stage in the CRM migration process where real users test the new HubSpot setup to ensure it meets business needs and functions as expected. Unlike technical testing, which checks whether systems work, UAT focuses on whether the system works for your users in practice. This ensures smooth change management for your business.

At this stage, a select group of key stakeholders - usually from sales, marketing, customer service and anyone else that deals with customer data - should be given access to the dummy account and asked to run through selected, typical tasks. This is key to knowing whether your CRM will work in the ‘real-world’ and not just in principle.

For our clients, the UAT checklist is completely bespoke for each client - as you’d expect. This is because CRM isn’t a one-size-fits-all, and during this setup, it needs to be treated as such. However, below is a rudimentary, basic list you can follow to get started with UAT:

• Create, edit, and delete records – Ensure users can add, update, and remove contacts, companies, deals, and tickets, and that mandatory fields are clearly defined.
• Move deals through each pipeline stage – Check that deal stages are intuitive, trigger any relevant automation, and that your salespeople can use it efficiently.
• Log activities – Confirm users can add calls, emails, notes, and meetings.
• Use and create reporting dashboards – Review dashboards to ensure they show accurate, meaningful metrics and are accessible to the right users.
• Test integrations – Confirm external tools like email platforms, meeting schedulers, or marketing automation software are syncing data correctly and in real time.
• Use filters and lists – Ensure users can segment data using filters and lists that are relevant and useful for daily operations.
• Check email templates, sequences, and snippets – Review saved content for formatting, correct personalisation tokens, and ease of use. You need to ensure that your users can access and use these templates.

Including a cross-section of users ensures you get feedback from every angle, reducing the risk of post-launch issues and helping drive adoption from the outset.

Step 7: Go Live Planning & Implementation

You’ve audited your existing solution, relised the potential HubSpot can offer you and planned accordingly, tested both user acceptance and technicalities in a sandbox portal - it’s time to begin planning to go live.

For this step to be a success, you need to ensure that the preparation is put into a structured process so that your HubSpot portal is ‘clean’ from day one.

The first step here is to review any feedback from the UAT. This is the final opportunity to review any bits from the sandbox portal that aren’t fit for purpose and don’t work in conjunction with your user base. Once sorted, you’ll need to prepare a full dataset for import that is:

• Cleaned and enriched
• De-duplicated
• Aligned with the property structures within HubSpot

This means you’re nearly there - you simply need to set a go-live date and communicate cross-departmentally to minimise disruption during the migration period. Alongside this, you should set a cut-off date for using your existing CRM. This means there’s no cross-over between the two systems, and people aren’t using disparate systems to log customer data. From this date, teams should hold off logging anything new in the legacy CRM until the migration is complete.

At this stage, you’ll also want to prepare:

• Admin accounts with appropriate permissions
• Any third-party tools or integrations to be reconnected
• A launch checklist and internal comms plan to manage the switchover
• A backup of your original CRM data, just in case anything is missed

Once everything is in place, your team or implementation partner can begin the final migration. This means importing all cleaned data into HubSpot, confirming accuracy, and switching on automation, reporting, and integrations.

Step 8: Training

Once live, the real value doesn’t come from the system itself, but from how confidently your team uses it.

Training should be included in the Go-Live planning phase to ensure the training is delivered as closely to the data import as possible to avoid delays in data or the need for another import, post go-live. You just need to make sure your team are onboard with HubSpot before actually pushing the ‘big red button’.

As our Commercial Director, Jack Williams, who has over 10 years of HubSpot CRM experience at Axon Garside, puts it:

-The initial outset for some software or technology, and so on, is not the true cost of this. It's the implementation. It's the finding of the people to maintain it. It's optimising it, improving it, taking the time to look at it-

When undergoing training post-HubSpot CRM migration, it’s important to segment your training by department and admin users who all interact with the system differently. It’s important to focus on how each team will use HubSpot to achieve their goals, like, for example, sales teams will need to learn deal management and task queues to be able to use the CRM efficiently. Conversely, marketers will need to educate themselves on list segmentation, workflows, etc. You get the point.

The main KPI at this point is ensuring long-term user adoption. In a nutshell, you want to achieve confidence in the CRM and leave your user-base thinking, “How did we ever work without this?”.

It’s also important not to put a timeframe on people learning the system. Training and development should be continuous to ensure your CRM is ever-evolving to meet your business needs and should continuously develop. An example of this is our work with Legal Island, where it took a year to design, develop and train them up on the CRM, leaving them, in their words, able to run the CRM independently and with confidence.

Follow these 8 steps, and you should be well on your way to a successful HubSpot CRM migration.

HubSpot Migration Services

You may be thinking, ‘This looks like a lot!’ - and we know.

But we also know that you don’t want your business to fall into the 55% of failed CRM implementations and, to ensure success, the playbook to follow has to be thorough and structured. There is, however, support on hand.

You could approach this in DIY fashion - but if you don’t have the software expertise to complete the migration, you could fall into the many pitfalls when it comes to migrating. As mentioned earlier, HubSpot can help you with their onboarding service but it’s very much a ‘set up and leave you to it’ proposition.

The final option which, and we’re biased, is the most thorough is using a HubSpot Solutions Provider to complete your migration.

They can guide you through the exact HubSpot package and tier you need to execute your objectives for a CRM, as well as navigating complicated implementation costs so that you know exactly what you’re receiving and the activities that need to be done.

Some more reasons to use a HubSpot Solutions Partner include:

• Expert setup and configuration – Ensure your portal is built using HubSpot best practices, aligned to your processes, and ready to scale from day one.
• Accurate, low-risk data migration – Avoid errors and broken associations with structured data cleaning, mapping, and testing in a sandbox environment.
• Faster adoption through tailored training – Get role-specific onboarding, hands-on support, and resources that drive long-term user confidence and system usage.

Something to think about…

Supporting you Through Migration

… and if you are thinking about it, then we are on hand to support you in migrating to HubSpot CRM from your legacy system.

We’ve supported countless companies in migrating across to HubSpot and implementing it successfully to ensure user adoption and that your portal is fit for purpose. To begin your journey with us, download our pricing guide and our sales team will be in contact with you to help you migrate over to HubSpot successfully.