Migrating from HubSpot or Salesforce

Powerful, general-purpose, and heavy on custom fields. The work is deciding what to bring — not getting it out.

Who this is for

Agencies who outgrew — or over-bought — a general-purpose sales CRM.

Steps

  1. Export contacts, and deals/opportunities if you use them.
  2. Before importing, decide which custom fields you actually use. Most accounts have far more than anyone looks at.
  3. Recreate the fields worth keeping under Settings → Custom Fields.
  4. Map lifecycle stage / deal stage to a disposition here — your stages won't be named the same.
  5. Import customers and leads separately.

The custom-field sprawl problem

These systems accumulate fields for years. You don't have to triage them first — anything you don't map is kept on the record anyway, so nothing is lost. Recreate the ones you'll filter or automate on; leave the rest as stored data.

Stages don't map one-to-one, and shouldn't

A HubSpot lifecycle stage or a Salesforce opportunity stage is a sales-process concept that rarely lines up with dispositions here, which drive real behaviour — whether the AI is texting, whether the dialer queues them. Map by what should HAPPEN to the contact next, not by matching stage names.

Zoho and Pipedrive

Same shape, smaller: contacts plus deals, moderate custom fields. Everything here applies.

What you'll lose, and it's usually fine

Reports, dashboards and workflow automations don't transfer. Neither does email-open tracking, so any sequence branching on 'opened the email' has to be rebuilt around a reply or a booking. In practice those are stronger signals.

Common mistakes

  • Recreating all 60 custom fields before importing. Bring what you use.
  • Matching stage names literally and ending up with dispositions that trigger the wrong behaviour.
  • Assuming deal history comes across — it doesn't.

Related

Where this lives in the app

This is documentation for Virtual Closer. Book a walkthrough or sign in.