We have done a few HubSpot to Zoho migrations in recent weeks and we thought we would share some notes on some of the challenges and pitfalls to avoid.
Migration of Contacts, Deals and Company records are pretty straight forward. That data can be simply extracted from HubSpot and loaded into Zoho. Like every data conversion, there is an order of operations that is important because the address linkages between Accounts, Contacts and Deals needs to be reestablished. It is my sincerest recommendation that you create customer fields in all the Zoho modules and put the Hubspot IDs for each of the records. You will need these in the future to reestablish the links. These fields can be deleted after the conversion (but I would wait a few weeks, just in case you need them!)
First, upload the Company records. Then extract the company records from Zoho so you have a list of Company records with their new zoho record ids and the old Hubspot IDs. Now use some Excel Vlookup magic to apply the correct company Zoho linkages to Contacts. Upload Contacts. Download Contacts from Zoho so you can link Deals to both Companies and Contacts again using Vlookup.
Migration of HubSpot Activities on the other hand is where life gets interesting. First of all, you cannot simply export Activities from HubSpot. Exporting Activities is going to take some programming effort with Ruby or JavaScript accessing the API to extract those records. Here is a good article that explains the process but like everything else the devil is in the details. We developed a tool for extracting the data into a CSV file.
Just as Activities on HubSpot can’t be downloaded, Activities on Zoho can’t be uploaded. You will need another set of programs to do the upload for most of the activities.
Once the Activities are extracted the easiest thing to do is to chop of the csv file into the different activity types. Like with other records, you will need to rebuild the linkages the Zoho Contacts and Company records. Then run a separate program for each activity type. Calls will translate directly into Calls and Notes were just uploaded as Notes into the Contact or Company records. To our knowledge, Zoho emails can’t be accessed even through the API so we converted HubSpot emails to just Events on Zoho so they were captured.
This was just an overview. If you have specific questions, please contact us.