HubSpot Marketing Migration Pre-Launch Checklist
Why is it helpful to follow a HubSpot marketing migration checklist? Migrating to HubSpot Marketing Hub is a smart decision to help your marketing team improve efficiency and drive revenue, but you have to do it right to recognize the benefits. Marketing “automation” isn’t automatic. Without a strategy, a migration won’t magically fix broken processes, clean up your data, or drive adoption on its own. If you don’t prepare properly, you’ll end up with the same inefficiencies, wrapped in a prettier bow.
Enterprises face even more complexity when considering and migrating to HubSpot. Salesforce integrations, data governance, and multi-team alignment add layers of risk. Without a solid pre-migration strategy, teams waste time, lose data, and struggle to adopt the new system.
To avoid the pitfalls, follow this HubSpot marketing migration checklist. You can even get started while your HubSpot contract is stuck with your procurement team!
Why Migrations Fail (And How to Get Yours Right)
We’ve had clients come to us after migrations didn’t end well or left them with the same old problems. Common mistakes we’ve seen include:
Lack of internal alignment: No clear owner, no cross-team collaboration. Marketing sets up Marketing Hub to align to their goals with no thoughtful alignment to ROI or integration with other systems like Salesforce.
Poor data hygiene: Bringing bad data into HubSpot creates work you have to do later. Even worse, it can roadblock you from using all of the features in the HubSpot engine.
Rushed integrations: Syncing with Salesforce (or other tools) without cleaning up first, creating sync errors or messes in both systems.
Forgetting adoption & training: A migration is useless if no one uses the system effectively.
The fix? Plan for success before the migration starts.
Instead of treating migration as an IT project, approach it as a business transformation. The goal isn’t just to move data—it’s to improve workflows, optimize the customer journey, and enable marketing & sales to work better together. It is important to maximize marketing and sales technology through migrations that improve your business process first, then layer on the technology to support it.
HubSpot Marketing Migration Checklist
Follow these steps before you are ready to start your migration to HubSpot.
Step 1: Get Your Internal Champions Aligned
This isn’t just a marketing initiative—it impacts sales, revenue operations, and leadership. You need internal champions from each function:
- Marketing: Owns lead generation, automation, and reporting.
- Sales: Ensures CRM integration aligns with sales processes.
- Revenue Operations: Manages data governance and system connections.
- Executive Sponsor: Drives buy-in and secures resources.
Who’s leading the migration? Clearly define roles and responsibilities so nothing falls through the cracks.
Step 2: Start with the End in Mind
Before touching your tech stack, answer: What does success look like?
- What KPIs will prove this migration was worth it?
- How will you train and onboard teams?
- How will you ensure adoption across departments?
Pro Tip: Set up a governance framework now. Create documentation, establish workflows, and define who owns what. Otherwise, your HubSpot instance will become messy fast.
Step 3: Fix Broken Processes Before Moving to HubSpot
A new platform won’t fix bad habits. If your marketing and sales alignment is off in your old system, it will be off in HubSpot, too.
Audit these before migrating:
- Lead management: Who owns leads? When do they move to sales?
- Sales-marketing handoff: Do you have key definitions for your customer journey or just a bunch of acronyms that everyone describes slightly differently? HubSpot lifecycle stages are a critical part of setup. Make sure these are documented with entry and exit criteria that is easy to follow.
- Attribution & reporting: How will success be measured?
It is never too early to start planning the process discussions.
Step 4: CLEAN YOUR DATA (Seriously, Don’t Skip This)
If you migrate junk, you’ll get junk results. Period.
Before moving anything to HubSpot:
Get honest about your data quality. How bad is it? You might need to invest in Operations Hub or data cleaning tools to make this step easier and more thorough.
- Deduplicate records (Salesforce is notorious for duplicates).
- Standardize fields (Job titles, lead statuses, and lifecycle stages).
- Purge outdated or inactive contacts. Marketing contacts cost money. Don’t waste storage on dead leads.
- Align contact & company properties. Mapping must match across systems. It is helpful to think about what objects need what data so there is a source of the truth.
Pro-tip for the Salesforce and HubSpot sync: If fields aren’t mapped properly, you’ll lose data or create mismatches that frustrate sales teams. Set up governance rules before connecting the systems.
Step 5: Plan Your Integrations Wisely
Many enterprises migrate to HubSpot but keep too many unnecessary tools. Before integrating anything, ask:
- Do we really need this integration, or can HubSpot replace it?
- Will this integration cause data conflicts (like Salesforce custom fields vs. HubSpot default fields)?
- Does this tool create duplicate efforts or inefficiencies?
Pro-tip: Overcomplicating integrations leads to confusion and poor adoption. Only connect tools that add value, simplify workflows, and enhance data visibility. Plus, there is often cost savings when you bundle HubSpot Hubs. This could be a good opportunity to simplify your entire tech stack.
Step 6: Define Your Customer Journey & Lead Flow
Your marketing automation, CRM setup, and reporting all depend on having a clearly defined customer journey. Be specific.
- Lifecycle stages: If you have them defined, does everyone describe them the same way?
- Lead scoring rules: What qualifies a lead for sales engagement?
- Entry/exit criteria: What happens when a lead becomes inactive or unqualified? When are they marketing-owned vs. sales-owned?
Document everything so this can be part of your set up, adoption training, and future new hire onboarding.
Step 7: Understand the Scope
You should be treating your migration like a project with clear deliverables, owners, timelines, roles, and responsibilities. Make sure you have a realistic scope that you and your team can handle. HubSpot solution partners, like SmartAcre – a Platinum HubSpot Solutions Partner, have done this many times and are available to support you throughout marketing and sales automation setup (and help you wave HubSpot onboarding fees).
Lessons Learned from HubSpot Migrations
Here are some of the biggest mistakes we’ve seen and tips on how to avoid them.
Skipping change management: Teams resist new tools if they don’t understand the “why.” Build an onboarding plan early.
Assuming the Salesforce-HubSpot sync is plug-and-play: It’s not. Misaligned data structures cause duplicate leads, lost records, and reporting failures.
Not defining success metrics early: If you don’t measure adoption, how will you know if the migration worked? Set benchmarks now.
Automating everything: It’s tempting to set up complex automation right away, but start with LESS automation first. Test manual workflows before automating. Get sales and marketing feedback on what’s actually useful so you only automate what is proven to work.
No plan for documentation and training: We recommend building a HubSpot playbook to keep track of key processes. We provide a HubSpot playbook with all of our migrations or implementations.
Make Your Migration a Launchpad, Not a Landmine
A successful HubSpot migration isn’t just about moving data, it’s about setting up better processes, cleaner data, and smarter automation. Get these steps right, and HubSpot will be an asset, not just another tool in your stack. Explore our proven track record with HubSpot implementations, onboarding, and migrations to understand what’s possible with your technology stack.