HubSpot Bulk Migration

Overview

Move CRM data into HubSpot from Salesforce, Pipedrive, or Copper — or extract it back out — without losing cross-system IDs, breaking associations, or flooding the portal with duplicates. This is not a data-mapping worksheet. It is the code, sequencing, and guardrails your migration runs at 2am against 150K records when the daily API quota is finite, HubSpot has no bulk-delete API, and a bad import leaves permanent junk that requires a support ticket to remove.

The six production failures this skill addresses:

1. ID continuity loss — source CRM IDs are not preserved in HubSpot. Fix: create a custom source_crm_id property on every object type before the first record lands, and write the source ID into it during import.
2. Association re-creation failure — contacts, companies, and deals in the source are associated; batch-importing them independently creates records without associations unless a second pass re-links them after all IDs are known. Fix: import in order (companies → contacts → deals), then re-link in three association passes.
3. Import dedup missing existing records — HubSpot's batch upsert deduplicates contacts by email, but only when email matches exactly. Missing or differently-formatted emails create duplicates. Fix: normalize email to lowercase + trimmed before every import; use batch/upsert not batch/create for contacts.
4. Field type mismatch — source date fields in M/D/Y format fail HubSpot's ISO 8601 validation; multi-picklist values not in HubSpot's allowed enumeration are silently dropped. Fix: run a pre-migration dry-run that validates every field against HubSpot's property schema before writing a single record.
5. Rate limit exhaustion — 100K contacts at 100/batch equals 1,000 API calls; association re-linking doubles that. Combined with retries, a naive migration burns the 500K daily quota before finishing. Fix: budget calls per run, sleep between burst windows, and use the CSV import API for volumes above 10K.
6. Rollback impossibility — HubSpot has no bulk-delete API. Fix: maintain a local source_id → hubspot_id mapping file throughout the migration so batch/archive calls are programmable.

Auth: set HUBSPOT_ACCESS_TOKEN environment variable to a private app token with CRM write scopes. For token caching, rotation, and multi-portal routing see the hubspot-auth skill in this pack.

Prerequisites