Moving from Salesforce to HubSpot is a great opportunity, but it’s also easy to get wrong. Many teams run into trouble when they carry over messy data, skip important steps, or try to make HubSpot work like Salesforce.
This blog breaks down the most common mistakes people make during a Salesforce to HubSpot migration and shows you how to avoid them. Whether you’re in RevOps, sales, or leadership, this is your chance to not just move systems, but make them better.
Salesforce is powerful but it can also feel heavy, complex, and expensive. Many teams find themselves spending more time managing the system than using it. That’s where HubSpot comes in.
HubSpot offers a cleaner, easier-to-use CRM that’s built for growing teams. It combines marketing, sales, and service tools in one place, so your team can work faster, stay aligned, and focus on the customer, not the software.
If you’re looking for a system that’s simpler to manage, quicker to train on, and more flexible for everyday work, HubSpot is a smart choice.
91% of companies with more than 11 employees now use a CRM to stay organized and grow smarter. But the benefits only show up if you migrate the right way.
Migrating from Salesforce to HubSpot can unlock faster workflows, better visibility, and a more modern CRM experience, but only if it’s done right.
Too often, teams rush the migration or treat it like a simple data transfer. The results are broken automations, messy records, confused users, and lost opportunities.
To help you avoid that outcome, here are eight of the most common mistakes we’ve seen—and practical ways to prevent them:
One of the most common mistakes is moving everything from Salesforce without checking if it’s clean or useful. That includes old leads, duplicate contacts, empty fields, and inconsistent formatting.
Messy data creates confusion and slows your team down. It also makes automation, reporting, and segmentation harder to use in HubSpot.
30% of small businesses say data migration is one of the hardest parts of adopting a new CRM—and much of that challenge starts with poor data hygiene.
How to avoid it:
Field mapping sounds simple, until it isn’t. Salesforce and HubSpot use different structures, especially when it comes to custom fields and objects. If your mapping is incomplete or mismatched, you’ll end up with broken records, missing data, or processes that just don’t work.
For example, what was once a custom object in Salesforce may need to become a custom property, ticket, or workflow in HubSpot. If you don’t catch that early, teams could lose critical visibility into things like contract terms, onboarding tasks, or deal stages.
How to avoid it:
Salesforce is extremely flexible, and many companies build complex automations, custom objects, and multi-step flows to match their internal processes. HubSpot, while powerful, takes a different approach: it favors simplicity and ease of use over deep customization.
If you try to recreate your entire Salesforce setup in HubSpot, you’ll likely hit limitations or end up with a clunky experience. Worse, you’ll miss the chance to simplify things and streamline how your team works.
How to avoid it:
Your team needs context to do their job well. That means seeing past emails, call notes, meetings, and tasks attached to contacts, companies, or deals.
But during migration, this activity history is often skipped, either because it’s hard to move or someone assumes it’s “not critical.”
In reality, missing activity history can cause major problems. Reps might follow up without knowing what’s already been said. Customer success might miss key details from onboarding calls. And worst of all, your team may stop trusting the CRM because it feels incomplete.
8% of companies say invalid or incorrect data is one of their biggest CRM challenges, and lost activity history falls squarely in that category.
How to avoid it:
A CRM migration affects multiple teams—sales, marketing, RevOps, customer success—but many migrations fail because these teams don’t align on goals, priorities, or workflows. What matters to one team might be overlooked by another.
For example, if marketing needs to track lifecycle stages but sales skips those fields, reporting breaks. Or if CS needs a certain property for onboarding handoff but no one mapped it, the experience falls apart.
This kind of misalignment leads to confusion, rework, and low adoption. And adoption is everything. 70% of CRM projects fail, and poor usage is the top reason.
How to avoid it:
Your CRM doesn’t just store records, it powers how leads flow through your pipeline. If you skip reviewing your lifecycle stages and lead routing rules, you risk breaking the handoff between teams, delaying responses, or missing leads altogether.
Salesforce might have complex logic built in, MQL triggers, round-robin assignment, lead status updates. HubSpot can handle much of this too, but the setup is different.
If you don’t rework the logic for HubSpot’s workflows and properties, leads can easily fall through the cracks.
How to avoid it:
Even with a perfect migration, your system won’t succeed if your team doesn’t know how to use it. Many companies make the mistake of focusing only on the technical setup, and forget to invest in training, documentation, or change support.
That’s a huge risk. New systems often come with new terms, steps, and ways of working.
Without proper guidance, people get frustrated, use the CRM the wrong way, or abandon it altogether. The system then gets blamed for problems that are actually tied to poor rollout.
And it’s more common than you’d think. 43% of CRM customers use fewer than half of the features in their CRM. That means even well-built systems often go underused, simply because teams aren’t set up to succeed.
How to avoid it:
Good training builds confidence. And confident teams actually use the tools you worked so hard to set up.
A lot of teams breathe a sigh of relief once the migration is done, and then they stop. But going live isn’t the finish line. It’s the start of the next phase: optimization.
Even with the best plan, things come up once your team starts using the system in real time. You might notice reports are missing key data.
Automation might not behave as expected. People might be misusing fields or creating workarounds. That’s normal—but if no one’s checking in, these small issues grow into big problems.
How to avoid it:
A CRM is never truly “done.” But with a little post-migration care, it can go from “this feels new” to “this works for us” very quickly.
Switching from Salesforce to HubSpot isn’t just a tech project, it’s a chance to clean house, simplify your systems, and build something that actually works better for your team.
Avoiding the most common pitfalls—from messy data to missed training—sets you up for long-term success. A thoughtful migration leads to faster adoption, clearer workflows, and a CRM your team can rely on.
Take your time. Get input from across the business. And remember: every step you take to plan and align now saves you hours of fixing later.
Download the complete Salesforce to HubSpot Migration Guide to get everything you need for a smooth transition—detailed checklists, expert-backed strategies, and step-by-step guidance for avoiding costly mistakes.
Whether you’re leading the migration or supporting the rollout, this guide will help you plan smarter, migrate cleaner, and get your team up and running faster in HubSpot.