A salesforce to hubspot migration case study should prove four things: what did not transfer, what state the data dictionary was in before and after, how many workflows were rebuilt instead of copied, and whether reps still use the system three months later. A headline like "done in six weeks, no business interruption" proves none of them. It tells you how fast the project ended, not whether the thing that went live works.
I read a lot of these. A HubSpot partner's homepage testimonial, for instance, will say the move finished in six weeks with no interruption. I believe it. I also know that "no interruption" and "nothing broke" are different claims, and only the first one is in the quote.
Why speed is the weakest evidence in a migration case study
Speed is easy to report and cheap to produce. You can move records fast if you skip the work that makes them useful: deduplication, field mapping decisions, stage definitions, permissions. The calendar looks great. The cost shows up in month three.
My rule of thumb is that a case study earns trust in proportion to how much it admits. If the story has no losses in it, the author either did not look or did not want you to. So when you read a salesforce to hubspot migration case study, skip the timeline and look for the loss column.
What did not transfer is the first thing to ask for
Every migration leaves something behind. The question is whether the partner knew what, decided it on purpose, and told the client before go-live.
Typical candidates are attribution history, files and attachments, automations that depend on Salesforce-only features, report logic, and permission structures. Object order matters too: HubSpot's import documentation is clear that associations depend on how and when records are loaded, so a wrong sequence quietly strips relationships between contacts, companies and deals.
Here is the test. Ask the partner for the "left behind" list from a past project. Not a summary, the list. A good one has items on it, each with a reason (archived, rebuilt differently, dropped because nobody used it) and an owner who signed off. If the answer is "nothing important was lost," you have learned something, just not what they intended.
The data dictionary state in a salesforce to hubspot migration case study
The data dictionary is the document that says what every field means, who owns it, which values are allowed, and which systems write to it. Most Salesforce orgs that are five years old have none that anyone trusts. Hundreds of fields, several that mean the same thing, a handful nobody can explain.
Migrating that mess one-to-one is what I call a lift and shift, and it is the most common reason a new portal feels like the old one with a different logo. A strong case study states the field count before and after. If a company went from 400 custom properties to 150, that is evidence someone made decisions. If it went from 400 to 400, the project moved furniture.
Duplicates are the same story in miniature. A customer we talked to had around 1,300 duplicate records in their source CRM and untested pipeline stage transitions heading into a deadline-driven move. Those two facts are the project. The platform change is the easy part. Because the two platforms handle duplicates differently, as HubSpot's deduplication guidance explains, a case study should say when the cleaning happened and who decided which record survived.
Workflow rebuilds: count them, and ask what was retired
Automations do not migrate. They get rebuilt, and the rebuild is where judgment lives. A partner who rebuilds every Salesforce flow in HubSpot has copied your technical debt across.
Ask for three numbers: workflows in the old system, workflows rebuilt, workflows retired. Then ask for one example of each. As an example, a lead assignment rule that nobody could explain should be retired, a renewal reminder everyone relies on should be rebuilt, and a stage-change trigger that fed a dashboard nobody opens should be dropped. If a case study cannot produce that split, the rebuild was mechanical.
This is also where routing and stage definitions get tested. Our post on telling a broken portal from a rebuild quote covers the same instinct from the other direction.
Post-go-live adoption is the only outcome that counts
The search results on this topic mostly stop at go-live. That is where the invoice stops, and also where the risk starts. Reps revert to spreadsheets, managers stop trusting the forecast, and marketing quietly rebuilds its own reports.
I don't have a clean industry benchmark for rep adoption ninety days after a CRM move, and I distrust anyone who quotes one. What I would ask a case study for is plain: logins and activity logged per rep at day 30, 60 and 90, forecast accuracy against the old quarter, and the date the old system was switched off for good. Also the report that finance and sales both signed. If attribution was part of the old setup, check what happened to it; a lot of AI-influenced and untagged traffic already lands as direct in HubSpot, as we covered in AI referrals filed as direct traffic.
Is the salesforce to hubspot migration case study about a company like yours?
A case study is only evidence if the subject resembles you. Ask four things: record volume, number of custom objects, number of live integrations, and number of users. A 15-seat team with no custom objects and a 300-seat team with CPQ are different projects that happen to share a title.
Then ask what it cost in total. The quote is one number. Add partner fees, licence overlap while both systems run, rep time lost to retraining, and rework. Worked example, using assumptions only: if 40 reps lose two hours a week for six weeks, that is 480 hours of selling time, before any rework. Good partners will walk through this with you, since it is the honest version of the price.
A short checklist for any salesforce to hubspot migration case study
Before you sign, ask the partner to show you, from one real project:
- The left-behind list, with owners
- Field and property counts before and after
- Workflows rebuilt versus retired
- Adoption and forecast numbers at 30, 60 and 90 days
- Total cost against the original quote
That is five documents. A team that has them will hand them over in minutes, because we pride ourselves on documenting our projects too, as weird as it sounds. A team that does not has told you what you needed to know.
If you want to see what that evidence looks like in our own work, start with our CRM migration case study and the scope on our Salesforce to HubSpot migration service. Judge us by the same list. The same habit applies outside CRM work too: proof beats positioning, which is the argument in SEO rankings versus AI citations and in why bolting AEO onto an implementation shop falls short.