Salesforce to HubSpot without a single day of downtime
Expensive, over-engineered, and nobody could use it
This 120-person company had been on Salesforce since its founding. What started as a standard implementation had grown into a tangled web of custom objects, Apex triggers, managed packages, and workarounds built by three different Salesforce admins over five years.
The annual Salesforce bill had crossed six figures. Less than half the team used it correctly. Most reps had developed shadow systems in spreadsheets and Notion because the CRM was too complex. Marketing was on a completely separate stack with no CRM integration. And every migration quote they had received estimated 4-6 months and a six-figure budget.
- 50,000+ contact records with significant duplication and data decay
- 8,000 deals across 4 pipelines with inconsistent stage definitions
- 200+ workflow rules and process builder automations, many conflicting or orphaned
- 15 third-party integrations connected via API, Zapier, and native connectors
- 3 managed packages adding cost with diminishing value
- Marketing running on Marketo with a fragile Salesforce sync — no unified view of the customer
- Previous migration quotes: 4-6 months, $150-250K
Migrate the system, not the mess
Most migration projects fail because they try to replicate the old system in the new platform. We took the opposite approach: use the migration as an opportunity to redesign the data architecture and business processes from scratch, then move only the data and automations that serve the new model.
Discovery
Ran a complete Salesforce audit: every custom object, field, automation, report, dashboard, and integration. Classified each as migrate, redesign, or deprecate. Interviewed power users from each department to understand which workflows were mission-critical versus legacy cruft. Mapped every integration endpoint and data flow.
Design
Designed the target HubSpot architecture: consolidated 4 pipelines into 2, standardized property naming conventions, mapped Salesforce custom objects to HubSpot equivalents (including 3 custom objects), designed the integration architecture for all 15 connections, and built a field-by-field migration mapping for every record type.
Build
Set up the HubSpot portal in parallel while Salesforce remained live. Built all pipelines, properties, automation workflows, and integrations in a staging environment. Wrote custom migration scripts to handle data transformation, deduplication, and association mapping. Ran 3 full test migrations with validation reports before the real cutover.
Launch
Executed the production migration over a weekend. Ran both systems in parallel for 5 business days with automated sync to catch any gaps. Cut over integrations one by one with rollback plans for each. Delivered role-specific training for sales (2 sessions), marketing (1 session), CS (1 session), and leadership (dashboard walkthrough).
Optimize
Ran daily data validation checks for the first two weeks. Fixed 12 edge cases in automation logic based on real usage. Decommissioned Salesforce after 30 days of parallel confirmation. Consolidated the Marketo migration into HubSpot Marketing Hub, eliminating the sync issues entirely.
8 weeks, zero data loss, and a CRM people actually use
The migration was completed in 8 weeks — not the 4-6 months quoted by other vendors. Not a single business day was lost, and no deal or customer record was dropped. The team went from dreading their CRM to actually using it.
- 50,000+ records migrated — contacts, companies, deals, tickets, and custom objects moved with full association history and activity timeline preserved
- 0 days of downtime — parallel systems and a weekend cutover meant the sales team never missed a beat
- 40% cost reduction — annual CRM + marketing automation costs dropped from the Salesforce + Marketo stack to a consolidated HubSpot Enterprise suite
- CRM adoption jumped from 48% to 94% within 60 days — reps stopped maintaining shadow systems
- 200 Salesforce automations were consolidated into 34 clean HubSpot workflows, eliminating conflicts and reducing maintenance overhead
- Marketing and sales were on the same platform for the first time, enabling true closed-loop attribution
- The VP of Sales called it “the smoothest system change in the company’s history”
Everyone told us a Salesforce migration would be brutal — months of pain, data loss, angry reps. Checkpoint did it in 8 weeks, and our team was more productive on day one in HubSpot than they had been in years on Salesforce. We should have done this two years ago.
Thinking about migrating off Salesforce?
Let’s talk about what a clean, fast migration actually looks like — without the 6-month timeline or the data loss horror stories.
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