Moving from HubSpot to Pipedrive

Why teams make this move

Three reasons come up again and again. Cost, once contact tiers grow. Complexity, when a sales team of twelve only uses a fraction of the platform. And speed, because reps want a board they can work in, not a suite they must learn.

One reason to stay is worth naming. If marketing automation is central to your business and lives in HubSpot, moving sales out means running two systems. That can be fine, but decide it deliberately.

What maps cleanly

What does not map

Lifecycle stage has no direct equivalent. Pipedrive separates leads from deals, and status lives in the pipeline. Most teams turn lifecycle into a person field for reporting, then stop maintaining it after a quarter.

Associations are looser. HubSpot allows many to many links between objects. Pipedrive links a deal to one organisation and one primary person, with participants added on top. Plan for that before you export.

Workflows do not transfer. They must be rebuilt as Pipedrive automations, and you should rebuild only the ones you can justify. In practice half of them are historic.

Marketing email history, forms and landing pages stay in HubSpot. If you keep a marketing tool, connect it. If not, export what you need for records first.

Step by step

1. Decide the scope

List the objects you will move and the cut off dates. A common scope is all companies with activity in three years, their contacts, all open deals, won deals from two years, and the notes attached to those deals.

2. Build the stage mapping table

Write your HubSpot pipeline stages in one column and the new Pipedrive stages in the other. Where two old stages collapse into one, say so. This table is also a chance to fix stage names that never worked.

3. Export and clean

Export per object as CSV. Then clean in the file. Deduplicate contacts on email. Merge companies on domain. Normalise country and currency. Remove test records, which every HubSpot instance has.

4. Configure Pipedrive first

Create users, pipelines, stages and fields before importing anything. Every field you import into must already exist, with the right type. A single option field with missing options silently drops values.

5. Test with fifty records

Import fifty organisations, their people and ten deals. Open five by hand. Check the owner, the value, the currency, the close date and the linked person. Fix the mapping, then delete the test set.

6. Run the real import in order

Organisations, then people, then deals, then activities and notes. Do it on a Friday afternoon or over a weekend, with a freeze on updates in HubSpot from the start of the import.

7. Reconcile

Compare counts. Number of open deals, total open value per stage, number of contacts with an email address. If the totals differ by more than a rounding error, find out why before the team logs in.

Keeping the team working during the switch

Announce one cut over moment, not a gradual overlap. Two live systems create two versions of the truth, and reps will pick the one they know.

Give the team a one page cheat sheet. Where do I find my deals. How do I log a call. Where did notes go. That page prevents most of the support questions in week one.

Cost and timing

For a team of twenty, expect four to eight weeks and a project cost in the range of 8,000 to 20,000 euro, depending on data quality and integrations. Cleaning is the biggest variable, and it is the part you can do yourself to save money.

The full breakdown is on the implementation cost page. The method used around the migration is on implementation in 6 steps.

Questions