How do I migrate data from HubSpot, Pipedrive or Salesforce without losing anything?
Almost every failed migration has the same cause: contacts moved, history did not. Without history, the team goes back to the old system — or to Excel — within the first month.
Short answer
- Export four separate entities: contacts, companies, deals and activities (emails, calls, notes).
- Keep the original identifiers, so the contact–company–deal links can be rebuilt.
- Clean the base before the import, not after: imported duplicates multiply.
- Rebuild the pipeline stages with the same names, so historical reports stay comparable.
- Run both systems in parallel for two weeks, then switch the old one to read-only.
Export checklist
- Contacts — with every custom property, not just the standard ones.
- Companies — with VAT number, address and the link to their contacts.
- Deals — with value, stage, creation date, close date and loss reason.
- Activities — emails, calls, notes and meetings, with date and author.
- Attachments — quotes and signed contracts, if stored in the CRM.
- Users — so deals are assigned to the right people, not to a generic account.
The correct import order
- Create the users first, so assignments have somewhere to land.
- Import companies, because they are the "parent" of contacts.
- Import contacts and link them to companies by the original identifier.
- Import deals and link them to contact, company and user.
- Import activities last — they are the most numerous and the slowest.
- Check on 10 randomly chosen customers that the record looks complete, not just that the totals match.
Common migration mistakes
- Migrating everything, including contacts dead for 5 years. The new base starts dirty.
- Skipping activities because "there are too many" — those are exactly what drives adoption.
- Cutting access to the old system on the same day as the import.
- Not checking deduplication, so the same company appears three times with different spellings.
How 4softcrm helps
- Import from CSV files exported from HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce or Zoho, with step-by-step field mapping.
- Deduplication at import, so the same contact does not enter the base twice.
- Custom fields, so you do not have to drop properties from the old system.