The Great Migration: Moving over to the HubSpot Enterprise CRM Suite

See why MidMarket and Enterprise businesses are migrating to HubSpot to solve disjointed tech stacks, siloed data, gross inefficiencies, and high expenses in our HubSpot Migration deep dive.

Here's the thing: “it's not you, it's me”, doesn't ring true when it comes to outdated tech, clunky workflows, and siloed, inaccessible data.

Business leaders are eyes open to this truth, seeking a competitive advantage by migrating from siloed systems to powerful, user-friendly, and integrated platforms.

In fact, the CRM software market is expected to grow by over 14% through 2025, and between 70% and 80% of CRM investments are for software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools, as businesses prioritize shorter deployment times, easy scalability, and lower costs. 

Increasingly, businesses are eying HubSpot to reduce the size of their tech stack and maximize their strategic data. HubSpot’s all-in-one solution empowers executives and decision-makers in Marketing, Sales, Digital, Customer Service, and Operations teams to work more efficiently, automate manual tasks, and deliver more meaningful and personal customer experiences. 

“If something's easier for your internal users, it's going to be easier for your customers,” explains Michele Herzog, Director of Technology at Mole Street.

“It’s not just about making things great for your teams; it’s making things great for your customers, whether that’s more personal sales conversations, easier-to-use self-serve portals, or quicker customer service resolutions.”

At Mole Street, our consulting team of HubSpot experts, full-stack developers, strategists, and implementation and integration specialists are well-versed in navigating complicated client requirements, unique industries, and highly technical and data-heavy HubSpot migrations. (Humble brag: we hold the highest level of HubSpot accreditations and certifications available.)

Ready to make the move? Let's explore why businesses are migrating to HubSpot, Mole Street’s five-phase migration process, platform-specific migration recommendations, and what to keep in mind when you’re ready to migrate to HubSpot.

Platform Migration Recap: Types of Migrations

A platform migration replaces legacy software with a new platform to empower your teams with greater capability, efficiency, security, and features.

Popular migrations include moving to a new CRM, switching marketing automation tools, and transitioning your website from one content management system (CMS) to another (in the case of a full HubSpot website migration).

Each migration looks a little different. For example:

• A CRM data migration moves over a tremendous amount of important business data, like target accounts, key contacts, sales pipeline, historical wins and losses, and attribution data.

• A marketing automation platform migration moves over your audience database, creative assets (like emails and landing pages), customer journeys, lead scoring models, reporting, and other media.

• A website migration moves your current website as is, to build on another CMS. We call this a “Lift and Shift”.

• A service platform migration moves over knowledge base articles, support tickets, or an FAQ section.

To make the process even more complicated, many companies seeking a tightly integrated tech stack are migrating multiple platforms at the same time.

For example, we helped our client, The Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP), migrate their CRM, Angular website, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud instance to HubSpot Enterprise simultaneously, while performing website UX testing, competitor analysis, and an SEO audit, to design a foundation for the future state of GARP's digital experience.

Regardless of the platform(s), all successful migrations combine thorough planning, stakeholder alignment, clear requirements, technical expertise, user experience design, data management and integrations, and change management to seamlessly move from one technology to another, without disruption.

Let’s dig deeper: why are so many businesses taking the leap to migrate to HubSpot?

Make the Move: 3 Reasons Businesses Migrate to HubSpot

Businesses are exploring HubSpot in pursuit of a more powerful, integrated, scalable, and data-centered platform.

They’re in good company: HubSpot boasts more than 205,000+ customers in over 135 countries. They’re consistently ranked at the top of award lists, landing in the number one spot for best Global Software Company in G2’s 2023 Best Software Awards.

Here are three reasons businesses are migrating to HubSpot:

1. Single, User-Friendly Platform

HubSpot powers all areas of your business, orchestrating marketing, sales, customer service, operations, and web experiences under one roof.

“HubSpot is all in one: marketing, customer service, and sales functionality work off of one code stack and one contact database.” explains Chris DiPietro, Senior Solution Architect at Mole Street. “There's a lot more automation triggers in HubSpot for marketing and sales. Everything is in one place, so it's a lot easier to use, and there’s more visibility and insight."

As DiPietro alludes to, most competitors (Salesforce, for example) add capabilities by acquiring companies and tools, cobbling together different code bases and user interfaces (UI).

HubSpot, on the other hand, differentiates itself by building each of their hubs on their own platform and codebase. Users receive a single, seamless experience moving from hub to hub, reducing the overall learning curve and unlocking a complete picture of customer data and business performance.

This integrated approach pays off — after one year of using HubSpot’s Customer Platform, businesses increased their close rate by 119%, and those working with solution partners to fully activate their platform closed 91% more deals in 2023. 

By forgoing the buy it and bandaid it approach, HubSpot unifies all aspects of business operations and customer sales lifecycles and can more readily scale with your growing business.

2. Empowered Teams with Greater Efficiency and Data

HubSpot replaces siloed and inefficient workflows with accessible data, improved reporting for attribution purposes, and powerful automations.

From Marketing to Customer Support and Sales, HubSpot's integrated hubs empower teams to have more genuine, personal, and meaningful marketing and sales interactions.

A HubSpot data migration feeds accurate attribution data into reporting dashboards without excessive complexity. Layering data across hubs replaces siloed, single-view reports with the holistic context teams desperately need to make better strategic decisions.

“With HubSpot, everything lays on top of the same CRM and same set of data, so you can blend data together a lot more seamlessly to build better reporting.” explains Herzog. “We can use datasets to pull custom SQL-style queries to feed reports (without using a data warehouse or third party tool). It’s extremely powerful.”

HubSpot is easy to use and completely customizable. It’s easy to create custom objects, automations, and workflows to empower your teams to work how they work best.

3. Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) than Competitor Platforms

Collectively, benefits like greater efficiency and productivity, better strategic insights, more actionable data, and improved ease of use directly impact customers’ bottom lines, resulting in a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than comparative platforms and an ability to scale as your business grows.

The initial migration can often be the most expensive part of the project. Painstakingly moving and preserving business data and reimagining and building a better, user-friendly, automated HubSpot experience takes forethought and upfront resources, but ultimately drives higher rates of adoption, utilization, and productivity.

From there, HubSpot can be much less expensive to manage, monitor, maintain, and optimize. It’s built to scale with your organization, with steep discounts for bundling hubs or moving to higher-tier plans.

HubSpot is also so user-friendly that most companies can self-manage the platform without relying on IT or developers to make changes, update campaigns, or deploy website experiences, accelerating overall time to market.

Plus, HubSpot leads in empowering Sales and Marketing teams — two supergroups responsible for driving new business and revenue for your organization.

Across Mole Street’s key business KPIs — TCO, total time to value (TTV), adoption rate, and ROI — HubSpot outperforms its competitors.

Successful HubSpot Migrations: Mole Street’s Five-Phase Process

Migrating from one technology to another is a major strategic undertaking that requires careful planning, clear processes, and close collaboration from internal teams.

Like any big change, migrations frequently come with natural anxieties:

• Concern about preserving business rules, workflows, and automations.

• Stress from time and resource limitations.

• Sensitivity to the risk of losing critical business data.

• Worry about learning and training on a new platform.

• Questions regarding the upkeep of current systems, during the transition.

If you’re feeling any of these uncertainties over the unknown, we get it. We’ve been there and have successfully guided clients through this migration process countless times.

“We get deeply ingrained to understand your goals and help you see all of the implications that migrating to HubSpot will have on your business.” DiPietro shares. “We take the time to understand your current end-to-end process and make it work that much better in HubSpot.”

There’s no one-size-fits-all, grab-and-go strategy. Instead, our team’s approach is deeply rooted in proven processes, quality assurance, and technical excellence, which puts our clients at ease and ensures seamless migrations.

Christie Alexander, former Assistant VP, Project Management + Marketing Operations at GARP, says it best:

“The Mole Street team was exceptional, from great communication to attention to detail. I was very impressed with their automation experience, professionalism, and personality. We’ve had other partners before and transitions felt chaotic. With Mole Street, it was completely different.” 

Without going too deep, let’s explore our team’s five-phase HubSpot migration process to reduce risk and anxiety.

Phase 1: Planning a Seamless Migration

Planning your migration is the most crucial and time-intensive part of the process.

Moving platforms is exciting, and it’s natural to want to rush, but complete and thorough planning sets your migration up for success in the long run.

Think about planning a cross-country move. Did you take all your belongings, throw them into garbage bags, and shove them into your cramped trunk?

We hope not! Instead, you took the time to purge broken and useless belongings and moved valuables into a secure storage unit. You bought insurance and hired a nice team of professional movers to take the heavy lifting off your shoulders (hint: we’re the nice team of professionals in this analogy).

You arrived at your new home with all your belongings waiting to be set up exactly how you wanted, creating a space you’re happy to live in each day.

At Mole Street, we handle the heavy lifting and technical complexity of your migration and move you onto a platform that is set up exactly the way you want to work: efficient, reliable, automated, and easy.

Mole Street’s HubSpot Migration Planning Process:

1. Pre-Migration Assessment

First, we conduct a thorough examination of your existing platform to understand its architecture and dependencies. We look at how different objects work, how media assets are used, and how your data feeds reports or triggers actions.

You walk us through typical workflows so we can understand goals and pain points. We talk person-by-person to key users to understand:

• What is their role?

• What do they expect to put into HubSpot?

• What do they need from HubSpot to do their job well?

• What are the goals of each process?

We use this information to build highly specific user stories. We note where it might have taken you eight steps to complete a task and vow to cut that process down to fewer clicks. We assess potential risks and reveal untapped opportunities every step of the way.

We then build a mapping document to:

• Define each object (contacts, data fields, templates, webforms, landing pages, etc.).

• Assess the volume of objects in each category.

• Determine what gets moved into the new system.

• Define its function, field, folder, and action in the new system.

This mapping document is the starting point for our migration plan.

2. Migration Timelines, Documentation, and QA

Next, we work with you to define migration criteria, SMART goals, and metrics for measuring success.

We use this information and our mapping document to identify the most straightforward migration path (typically, a combination of HubSpot connectors, API integrations, third-party migration tools, and manual imports).

From there, we:

• Decide the most effective and seamless order to migrate each object and asset.

• Calculate and document the timeline for the migration.

• Document potential risks and mitigation strategies.

• Lay out the structural migration plan.

• Review and optimize the migration path as a team.

• Define a quality assurance (QA) plan to create checks and balances at every step.

Ultimately, we look under every rock, catalog our findings, identify anything that might go wrong (to ensure it doesn’t), communicate clearly and often, and ensure our client and team are on the same page.

Phase 2: Data Management and Optimization

Data is arguably a business's most meaningful asset, and the most critical component of a migration to get right.

"Our clients deeply value gaining accurate, reliable, and actionable data at their fingertips. Through our thorough data management process, clients become confident in their data for reporting, enabling them to make informed decisions, identify patterns, and take decisive action,” explains
Linda Castano, Data Analyst at Mole Street. 

“Many clients approach migration processes with a sense of trepidation, knowing their data is in disarray. However, they find immense relief in partnering with Mole Street's specialized data team, who expertly guide them through the process, akin to organizing their messy data bedrooms into streamlined and functional spaces. Leveraging advanced coding techniques, we ensure a rapid, precise, and streamlined data cleaning process, enhancing efficiency and delivering superior results." 

We can’t tell you how frequently new clients arrive at our doors after they, or a well-intentioned service provider, botched their CRM transfer and made a mess of their data. In fact, an independent data migration research study found that only 28% of projects experienced no data quality issues at all following a data migration.

Here’s how we safeguard and optimize your data during our migration process:

1. Data Backup to Support CRM Transfer

We take every precaution to safeguard your data from loss, corruption, and damage.

We create duplicate copies of all your digital information, files, and data to preserve historical information and adhere to data management and cybersecurity best practices.

2. Data Quality Review

Remember how refreshed you felt purging your closets during our fictitious move? Clean and actionable data feels so much better than wading through a sea of junk to find that one, usable insight.

Our Data Quality Review starts with a comprehensive assessment and cleaning process to ensure any data migrated is accurate, complete, and optimized for use in the HubSpot ecosystem.

To safeguard your data, we:

• Organize your data to be migrated.

• Document potential errors for your review.

• Review and fix duplicates, invalid email addresses, and corrupted properties, frequently using a data-cleansing script.

• Evaluate data gaps that require a manual export.

• Review all changes and plans for client approval.

At Mole Street, a migration is not successful unless your data and processes are better than they were before: cleaner, quicker, easier, and richer.

“It’s simple, really. Our goal is to make things better; to give you greater clarity, flexibility, and efficiency in your workday. If you have a process you don't understand in Salesforce, Marketo, or Zendesk, and then we give you a process you don't understand in HubSpot, we have not helped you. If you have to leave HubSpot to do part of the process in another tool, we failed you.” Herzog elaborates.

“We want to keep your process fluid and make things easy for everybody internally. That knowledge and understanding of your full workflow — and our commitment to making it work better for your team — that’s our North Star.”

Phase 3: Migrating to HubSpot

It's migration time! Our team and clients are full of excited energy and ready to GO, but we work with painstaking care to ensure the migration is smooth and hiccup-free.

At this stage, it’s all about our mapping document: clearly defining all the properties that need to be created and populated in the new system. We’ve carefully removed any unreliable data, duplicate contacts, and invalid emails, and we begin transforming and optimizing the data to integrate into HubSpot.

During migration, we:

• Connect the legacy platform’s production to HubSpot’s sandbox or production environment.

• Create all new properties in HubSpot, using our mapping document.

• Create a static list of all objects to migrate.

• Migrate a sample object to test for unexpected outcomes.

• Once validated, start populating the new properties in HubSpot.

• Track every migrated object in our mapping document as it’s moved over.

• Recreate integrations, active lists, and data extensions with matching logic.

• Build or recreate portals, web experiences, customer journey automations, email templates, landing pages, ticket pipelines, and other customer experience assets, depending on the platform migration.

• Create custom reports and dashboards.

Once we’ve completed the HubSpot data migration, we perform extensive testing and quality assurance processes and train your teams to embrace their new platform.

Phase 4: Testing and Training

We follow a detailed quality assurance process to ensure all data, automations, assets, and processes migrate successfully and function as expected.

We also perform user acceptance testing (UAT), documenting and checking all requirements and test cases.

During testing, we:

• Check that all properties (and the correct property type) are in HubSpot.

• Confirm that all migrated objects are in HubSpot.

• Complete user acceptance testing, checking requirements, workflows, and processes.

• Ensure integrations are functioning as expected.

Our internal teams validate every step of our quality assurance process and work with our clients to confirm HubSpot operates as intended and data is clean and accessible, and then they green-light migration success.

We then provide clients with personalized training to help them understand the ins and outs of HubSpot and how to use the system to complete daily tasks.

Our goal is for all users to confidently manage and maintain the new system and have plentiful documentation and support to answer future questions or onboard new team members as they grow.

But we’re not done yet.

Phase 5: Optimization and Support

At Mole Street, we are true partners to clients and are heavily invested in your continuous success.

We offer ongoing services to help clients optimize their processes, automations, workflows, media, and more, to evolve the platform to support future needs.

For example, ongoing support might include:

• Encouraging clients to continuously clean their data, removing hard bounces and duplicate contacts to maintain a healthy and actionable database.

• Identifying future automations and integrations to ease teams’ workloads and reduce complexity, such as integrating with their financial software or event management platform.

• Building new custom email templates, webpages, portal experiences, or automations to uplevel their customer experience and internal workflows.

• Elevating reporting dashboards to provide greater context and visibility across the organization.

Many clients partner with Mole Street long-term, bringing us in to support important campaigns, refresh customer experiences, rethink processes, automate repetitive tasks, enhance reports, and proactively solve their teams’ and customers’ greatest challenges.

A flavor of this five-phase approach is followed for every migration, regardless of your platform. Of course, each platform is different and requires a nuanced approach to migrate without disruption.

Let’s look at the top reasons clients migrate to HubSpot from Salesforce, Zendesk, and Marketo, and key considerations to ensure a smooth migration.

Migrating to HubSpot from Salesforce

Salesforce once dominated the CRM space and has subsequently become a forefront player across marketing, sales, operations, and other disciplines.

Although Salesforce is a market leader in the enterprise space, many of our clients find it overengineered for their needs and expensive to maintain. 

They contact us to help them move away from this behemoth of a tool and onto a more integrated and user-friendly platform, like HubSpot.

2 key reasons clients migrate from Salesforce to HubSpot

1. Salesforce is expensive and requires full-time support

Salesforce may be full of bells and whistles, but it’s notoriously difficult to customize, manage, and extract full value.

Plus, it’s expensive, with confusing and irritating fees, licensing agreements, and upcharges. It’s overkill for many small- to mid-sized businesses to pay for a high-priced platform but only use a small percentage of its features.

“Many clients come to us looking to change platforms because they feel like Salesforce is nickel and diming them,” Herzog explains. “Every month, there’s a new, unexpected charge. HubSpot just has more consistent and transparent pricing.”

Many companies hire a full-time administrator to run their Salesforce instance — and this only gets more complicated (and expensive) when you have additional clouds, each requiring its own operations lead to maintain it.

Expensive Salesforce setup and licensing costs aside, HubSpot has a far lower total cost of ownership. 

Research on HubSpot’s popular Marketing Hub Enterprise and Sales Hub Enterprise bundle reported that 64% of customers did not have any integration, data migration, or external system interface costs in their first year, and 71% only needed their current staff to manage their software (removing additional personnel costs that are frequently required for platforms like Salesforce). 

Most mid-size companies quickly get up and running on HubSpot’s user-friendly platform, accelerating their speed to market and decreasing their total time to value.

2. Salesforce provides an inconsistent user experience and codebase

Salesforce offers a series of integrated “clouds” that make up its powerful ecosystem: Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and Data Cloud, to name a few.

Most joined the Salesforce ecosystem through a corporate acquisition — meaning they are different platforms, built on different code bases, with unique user interfaces, cobbled together under the Salesforce umbrella.

The tools don’t integrate and “talk to one another” as seamlessly as Salesforce promises, without professional intervention. The disjointed user experiences make the learning curve to transition between clouds far more challenging than in HubSpot.

When clients need access to integrated data and holistic insights to power truly personal and relevant marketing experiences, sales meetings, and strategic planning, getting a complete picture from disparate tools is both a headache and a major risk.

“Salesforce has all these acquisitions that are kind of bolted onto the product. From a user experience perspective, it becomes confusing. There's a lot of pieces that feel a little bit disjointed, like they're glued together,”
Herzog explains.

“HubSpot is quick to describe their hub approach as crafted, not cobbled. Ultimately, HubSpot just works better together than Salesforce. It's easier to use; it’s a better user experience. The combination of cost and ‘Salesforce is challenging for our team to use’ are the two biggest reasons clients are switching to HubSpot.”

Key considerations for a Salesforce to HubSpot CRM data migration:

At Mole Street, consistency, efficiency, and ease-of-use are forefront goals of every migration.

During the business and technical discovery phase, our customers might share a reverse demo, where they walk us through how they use Salesforce in their day-to-day, so we can find opportunities to improve their workflow in HubSpot.

We’re looking to understand the size of the database, complexity of integrations, dependencies, pain points, and overall impact of the migration on their business.

For many, the history of their sales cycle — wins, losses, opportunities, sales conversations, success rates, and reports — is housed in Salesforce to inform strategic growth and improvement.

Needless to say, we migrate this cleaned, transformed, and normalized data carefully and completely, leaving no stone unturned.

As part of our five-phase approach above, a Salesforce migration includes:

• Establishing a robust data synchronization process to ensure a seamless flow of information.

• Using the Salesforce connector sync (HubSpot’s native integration) to migrate data as the system of record. The app marketplace connector makes it easier to migrate simple Salesforce implementations, but if your Salesforce instance is heavily customized, the migration will be more complex and nuanced.

• Employing additional manual imports, APIs, and Python or JavaScript to speed up the process, as the connector can only map a limited number of custom objects at a time when the client has a large number of custom objects.

• Building custom fields and custom properties to reduce objects and optimize workflows.

• Migrating contacts, companies, deals, contact owners, and custom objects to preserve critical data.

• Migrating call history, lists, call notes, emails, logged emails, lead attribution, segmentation lists, and granular historical activity.

• Migrating or recreating emails, templates, landing pages, and other marketing assets if migrating from Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

• Creating custom views, reports, and pipelines to tailor the user experience and inform strategic decisions.

Next, let’s look at how this process compares to migrating from Zendesk to HubSpot.

Migrating to HubSpot from Zendesk

HubSpot Service Hub may be less known in the HubSpot ecosystem, but it’s a complete, powerful customer service software.

Service Hub empowers customer support representatives with automated workflows and connected data to deliver personal support and resolve issues faster.

Zendesk users are taking notice, and are eying HubSpot Service Hub as a solution to disjointed tools and processes.

Why do clients migrate from Zendesk to HubSpot?

Zendesk is a popular, standalone service platform that integrates well with other technologies.

Clients come to us to migrate off Zendesk to simplify their tech stack, reduce integrations, and unlock their customer support data.

These clients have other technologies running different parts of their business, like HubSpot Marketing for their marketing automation platform or HubSpot CMS powering their web experience. They’re managing an array of integrations feeding data to and from Zendesk to disparate applications or systems.

In this case, it becomes a no-brainer to migrate from Zendesk to HubSpot Service Hub, to condense the tools and plentiful integrations into an all-in-one platform running their business operations, customer support, and customer experience.

By moving to HubSpot, service reps gain better insights and faster resolution times, while Executives and Marketing and Sales teams gain a holistic view of customers’ activity and pain points.

This information might be used to:

• Optimize ticket pipeline flow to reduce time to resolution.

• Provide support representatives with better information to quickly solve common customer complaints.

• Improve the website experience, so customers can better answer questions and reduce calls to customer support.

• Fuel more personal and relevant automated marketing campaigns and sales meetings.

Ultimately, by migrating to HubSpot’s integrated platform, every business and customer insight is accessible to continuously improve the organization as a whole.

Key considerations when migrating from Zendesk to HubSpot Service Hub

In our experience, Zendesk’s HubSpot app marketplace connector is not as robust and effective as other platform connectors. Without a reliable connector, and due to the complexity and critical nature of the internal processes used in service pipelines, a Zendesk migration can be more complex and costly. 

Our Zendesk migration follows the five-phase approach and mimics our Salesforce migration process.

In addition to moving over expected data, like company (Zendesk Organizations) and contacts (Zendesk users), migrating critical customer service data includes:

• Migrating tickets, ticket attachments, ticket pipelines, and knowledge base articles.

• Optimizing workflows and ticket pipelines to create automation rules and efficiency throughout the process.

• Setting up agent notifications and permissions.

• Customizing views and creating reports to help customer support reps better manage service inquiries and resolve issues.

Up next, let’s dig into migrating from Marketo to HubSpot.

Migrating to HubSpot from Marketo

Marketo is a popular marketing automation tool used for email marketing, account-based marketing, lead management, social advertising, landing pages, web forms, and other multi-channel marketing experiences.

Marketo, acquired by Adobe in 2018, is typically focused on outbound marketing rather than unifying your entire business, leading many users to evaluate HubSpot as a comprehensive replacement.  

Why do clients migrate from Marketo to HubSpot?

1. Marketo requires extensive integrations

Are you sensing a theme here? HubSpot dominates the marketing space for their all-in-one platform, feature-rich capabilities, accessible data, and ability to scale with your organization.

Marketo users are eager to reduce the complexity of managing Marketo’s dizzying number of integrations to simplify their tech stack and break down data silos.

Connection is powerful: we helped a global educational testing provider migrate data, marketing operations, and automations from Marketo to HubSpot while integrating Salesforce, On24, and Cvent to improve lead management and data synchronization. We migrated over 1 million contacts, enhanced campaign effectiveness and lead tracking capabilities, and improved efficiency and usability through an integrated HubSpot ecosystem.

2. Marketo isn't the industry thought leader

HubSpot is known for prolific thought leadership.

In fact, you’d be pressed to speak to a marketer who hadn’t learned marketing best practices through HubSpot’s content, enrolled in their robust HubSpot Academy, attended their conference, or listened to HubSpot speakers on keynote stages, webinars, and podcasts.

With its emphasis on email and inbound marketing, it’s not surprising that Marketo users view HubSpot as the leader in the marketing space, and an opportunity to uplevel their use of automation, personalization, and customer experience innovation.

Key considerations when migrating from Marketo to HubSpot

“Every Marketo instance is… confusing.” Herzog laughs, “It’s not even the data that’s confusing — the data maps pretty solidly and JSON objects have been the same across platforms for a very long time. But, it's the process, automations, and historical email and activity data. Getting that out of Marketo is a bit more technically challenging, and a huge opportunity to streamline and simplify things for our clients.”

Outside of the five-phase approach, our Marketo migration includes:

• Setting a realistic migration timeline (only 50MB of Marketo data can be exported daily, so it might take multiple days to export a client’s full database).

• Using scripts to clean, normalize, and update data for import into HubSpot and batch testing as data is imported.

• Using the field update API to bridge the export gap, looping the script if necessary.

• Migrating contacts, companies, and other database and marketing data.

• Rebuilding marketing emails, lead workflows, lead scoring models, nurture campaigns, landing pages, web forms, and other marketing assets.

• Continuously testing and optimizing.

Clearly, each migration is different, based on the platform, requirements, and company size, needs, and goals. For example, Marketo instances with larger numbers of live web pages take more time and typically require knowledge of HubSpot’s CMS (including managing domains and redirects) to complete this migration successfully. 

Regardless, upfront planning, technical solutioning, and rigorous quality control are the basis for any successful migration. So should you migrate to HubSpot yourself or hire a HubSpot expert, like our team at Mole Street?

Should You DIY or Hire a Migration Partner?

• Is business booming, and you’re ready to scale?

• Are you looking to decrease operational costs by replacing outdated or clunky systems?

• Are you getting ahead of security concerns, data privacy regulations, or compliance requirements?

• Are you investing in digital transformation to gain a competitive edge?

These represent just a handful of reasons your business may be moving to HubSpot and deciding how to handle the migration.

HubSpot doesn't perform migrations, but it can provide your internal team with support and resources to migrate themselves.

Depending on the size and complexity of your organization, processes, and database, migrating using internal resources might make sense.

At the same time, it’s easy for even the simplest migrations to go very wrong.

"There's just so many little things we’ve seen go wrong. You forgot to take all the objects, or you didn’t create the right properties and bring over the right data. You forgot HubSpot keys on email and requires a contact owner, so you create a ton of duplicates,” DiPietro explains.

“You didn’t clean up your data first, so you’re missing emails and the data’s unreliable. It doesn’t match your process, and you can’t integrate the messy data with the tools you use. You have no idea who the lead belongs to, where it came from, when it was touched last. You can’t report. You can’t track how effective your campaigns are. You're just filled to the brim with useless junk data and creating these bigger issues. Just a big, big headache.”

Save yourself the headache by asking these questions to inform your migration strategy:

• What are your goals for this project, and how do they ladder up to business goals?

• Is your internal technical team HubSpot certified?

• Has your team executed a successful migration before?

• Is your team well-versed in your integrations and how they’ll function in HubSpot?

• How many stakeholders will be involved in this project?

• What is your timeline to stand up HubSpot and retire previous systems?

• Do necessary team members have the bandwidth, and how might this project impact other priorities?

• How big is your database, and how clean is your data?

• How many workflows, automations, tickets, custom reports, etc., do you have?

• How efficient is your current process?

• Do you have internal staff and resources to rebuild marketing assets like emails and landing pages?

• Who will handle change management and training?

This list of questions is far from comprehensive, but it demonstrates how much forethought and planning goes into a successful platform migration.

A certified HubSpot solutions partner, like Mole Street, extends your team’s bandwidth and helps you avoid costly mistakes, unnecessary risks, and ultimately, big, big headaches.

Mole Street is Your Migration Partner

“We’re goal-oriented. If a client comes to us to build an integration, for example, we’re not just going to build that, hand it over, and send an invoice,” Herzog laughs. “We want to help clients solve the true problem. So, it’s the planning and discovery to truly match the solution to the challenge, rounded out by our technical acumen, that sets us apart.”

At Mole Street, we've built our careers on successfully migrating mid-market and enterprise customers to HubSpot. We offer HubSpot-as-a-Solution™, Technical HubSpot Consulting, and Growth-Driven Design.

We’re mission-driven, gritty, and curious — and we help clients reach their full potential. Our 70% client retention rate (four years running), is a testament to our commitment to client success.

As a leading HubSpot Elite Partner (in the top .05% of their agencies!), with previous HubSpot employees on staff, we've seen and solved it all.

We have deep experience helping teams unlock efficiency, uplevel reporting, increase adoption, and reduce overall time-to-value.

Plus, we’re not just an implementation partner. We'll help you fix your data, improve system usability, create a better content strategy, and optimize your processes. We can build marketing assets, email templates, web experiences, and reports. We have comprehensive solutions for your needs.

Herzog sums it up well:

“From what they tell me, our clients get that feeling of finding something nobody else has found. They’re like, here’s a secret weapon — a true partner — that our competitors aren’t yet using. Then we prove it — and keep on proving it.”

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