Migrate from Salesforce to Hubspot CRM: a Step by Step Guide

Do you know Salesforce is one of the first Software-as-a-service (SAAS) companies? Being founded in 1999, they were the first to introduce cloud-based data storage to the business world.

 If they’ve been in the business for so long, then why migrate from Salesforce to Hubspot? Because Salesforce has become complicated? This may not be the only reason why you should move to Hubspot. 

Then why should you consider migrating? Let’s have a look at their features to understand more about them: 

Cost: The first and foremost characteristic of Hubspot is that the platform is FREE. Although there are paid plans as well. If you only want to operate a CRM, you can do that for free. Salesforce, on the other hand, charges for CRM access. Another factor to consider is that in Salesforce, you’ve to pay an additional fee per user. Whereas in Hubspot, you can add as many users as you want, irrespective of the plan (free or paid).

Marketing features: Hubspot has more extensive marketing features in its free and starter plan. It provides you with all-in-one marketing and sales tools without letting you spend your money on individual tools. Salesforce’s marketing features are equally extensive, but all tools must be purchased individually. It makes the product a bit expensive and unaffordable for businesses with tight budgets.

Onboarding process: Both platforms offer a strong onboarding process. Hubspot provides step-by-step guidance from the moment you log in till you set up your account. Salesforce gives you a demo, and later on you’ll have to navigate your way through all the tools. 

Sales reporting and forecasting: Hubspot offers advanced sales reporting services, but you need to pay for an upgraded plan to access the feature. Basically, you can only get the same features with baseline plans. 

Other than a few differences, Hubspot and Salesforce are similar to each other. Both platforms offer top-notch services. You can choose any of the CRMs depending on your requirements and budget. 

Without wasting any more time, let’s move on to discuss the migration process of Salesforce to Hubspot:

Step 1: Team Onboard:

The first step of migrating CRM is to onboard a team. It is often easier to implement a migration successfully when a team understands the level of difficulty.  

Highlight the steps involved in the procedure to your team. Explain the benefits of the upgraded CRM to them, so that they know the reason behind the migration and support it with equal enthusiasm. Make sure you communicate the entire process to them for a seamless migration.

Step 2: Review your current process:

Every company has its own sales and marketing process. The way you onboard a client, follow up with clients, take notes, and maintain data in Salesforce must be different from that of the process you’ll follow in Hubspot. 

It is recommended to review the process and audit it before migrating the CRM to Hubspot. You can make changes to the current way of onboarding your clients or to any other process and adopt new ways. However, make sure you do everything before you begin the migration. 

Step 3: Plan your migration timeline:

Finalize your cutover dates and start migrating the data accordingly. Once your pilot team starts working on migrating the CRM, the rest of your team will be inputting the data into Salesforce during the pilot period. Any changes or data inputted between the cutover date and the pilot periods should be transferred to the new CRM before the cutover date. Otherwise, you will have to manually enter the data, which will require a lot of time. 

Step 4: Plan your data migration and data mapping

While shifting to a new house, would you like to take all the junk to your newly built house? No, right? 

The case is the same with Hubspot as well. Review all the data, delete what’s not needed, remove duplicates, alter if necessary, and keep all the relevant ones. But this is not it. You’ll have to do data mapping as well. 

Data mapping requires you to trace each object and property in Salesforce to each object and property in HubSpot. Since Hubspot's architecture differs from Salesforce's, you have to know all the properties before starting the migration.

Step 5: Choose a Hubspot plan:

As we have mentioned earlier, Hubspot is absolutely FREE. But if you want to upgrade your account with more marketing or sales features, you could buy a plan that suits your needs. 

Hubspot offers a variety of plans, including free, starter, professional, or enterprise plans. Each plan comes with a variety of features. For example, in professional or enterprise plans, you’ll have to purchase onboarding, which will make your migration process more smooth. 

But note that there is a stark difference in the pricing of all the plans. Review your needs and proceed with the plan that perfectly fits your requirements.

Step 6: Set up your integrations: 

Who doesn’t use integrations to keep things running smoothly? Without integrations, all your clients' data will remain scattered. Hubspot allows you to integrate multiple platforms to turn its CRM into a single user interface. 

It's wise to plan your integrations along with the migration. During the migration of your data, you can test integrations and make changes as needed. Hubspot has a marketplace where you can find a variety of tools according to your needs. Hubspot's marketplace offers more than 500 CRM integrations. If you don’t find a tool that fits your needs, Hubspot allows you to do custom integrations as well.

Step 7: Training

You might be wondering what it has to do with the migration, but it's an equally important step. What’s the point of migrating to a better CRM when your team doesn’t know how to use it? 

Training your team will provide them with a proper understanding of the software, integrations, and tools. Start with the basics, get them familiar with the tools, then proceed to advanced levels when they are comfortable.

Step 8: Run a pilot

The team that you onboarded initially will do a test of the Hubspot CRM after the migration is done. Allow your team to test the Hubspot CRM in multiple ways to check all the possibilities.

 Make sure that your team is in contact with the support team, in case they face any problems while testing the CRM. Keep track of all feedback regarding the architecture, data, and tools. And implement changes to the architecture and processes based on feedback from the team.    

Step 9: Final migration 

It’s time to wrap up all your data left in Salesforce and transfer it to Hubspot. The data entered into Salesforce while the migration process was going on needs to be transferred to Hubspot.

Migrate the data and then, instruct your team to stop using Salesforce. You don’t need to delete all your data right away. We'd suggest you keep the backup for a few days to ensure all your data has been migrated successfully. 

Keys to remember before migrating

• You should only transfer the data you intend to use in the future. So make sure to clean all the junk and duplicate data.
• Tell your team members about the benefits and plans.
• Check all integrations thoroughly.
• Make sure you connect your Hubspot account with your email tool.

The process of migration isn’t easy, but the hassle will be worth it once you complete all the steps. At Analytico, we’re here to help you migrate seamlessly. Get in touch with us if you want to migrate to Hubspot CRM.