HubSpot CRM Migration: Moving a Manufacturer Off Act! Without Pausing Sales

Moving off a legacy CRM is one thing. Moving while the sales team is still quoting, updating records and creating new opportunities is another.

For this HubSpot CRM migration, Hypha had to solve two problems at once: restructure company data that HubSpot’s standard domain matching would have handled incorrectly, and move years of Act! history without losing the activity happening during the project. A parent/child company structure and staged migration with a final delta import made the cutover possible without putting sales on hold.

A commercial building products manufacturer came to Hypha ready to leave Act! behind. Their sales team sells through architects, contractors and reps, with nearly every opportunity passing through estimating before it becomes a quote.

They needed HubSpot Sales Hub Professional to support that model without losing years of relationship history or asking estimators to stop quoting while the migration happened. The HubSpot CRM migration ran from April through September 2026 and ended with the full team working in HubSpot.

What Was Holding Back Their Sales Process?

Act! had held the company’s customer history for years, but it wasn’t built around the way they sell. A single commercial project can involve an architect who writes the spec, a contractor who buys the product and a rep working between them. Tracking those relationships against the same opportunity was difficult, while leadership had limited visibility into what was being quoted and what was ultimately being won.

The people using the system every day also needed different things from it.

• Five estimators managed deals and quotes.

• Two business development reps opened new opportunities.

• A sales support specialist handled deal entry and data hygiene, while a sales manager owned the pipeline and forecast.

• Marketing was also working outside the CRM: Trade-show and website leads were being captured in lists and spreadsheets, with no clean way to segment or follow up on them inside the system.

The brief came down to a few hard requirements: keep the history intact, give leadership real forecasting, give marketing a proper home for its leads and don’t disrupt estimating along the way.

Why Couldn’t a Standard HubSpot Data Migration Handle the Records?

The first complication surfaced in the company records. Many organizations in the database had multiple locations operating under the same corporate domain.

HubSpot leans heavily on company domain to match and deduplicate company records and automatically associate contacts with companies. With this data, a default import risked reading several distinct branches as one company, collapsing them and attaching contacts and deals to the wrong location.

Hypha’s data architect had to determine which records were true duplicates and which represented separate locations that needed their own record. Those legitimate locations were then structured with parent/child company associations, allowing each branch to keep its own contacts and deals while remaining connected to the parent organization.

It’s slower and more deliberate than a bulk import, but when the underlying data is structured this way, there isn’t a reliable shortcut.

Worth knowing: HubSpot’s domain-based matching is a sensible default for most companies. For businesses whose customers operate multiple locations under one domain, it can merge records you intended to keep separate unless the migration plan accounts for it.

How Do You Migrate off a CRM Your Team Is Still Using?

Solving the data structure was only part of the migration. The sales team was still working in Act! throughout the implementation, creating contacts, logging activity and moving deals forward.

That meant a one-time CRM data migration at the beginning of the project would have started aging almost immediately.

Hypha handled the cutover in stages. The main data set moved into HubSpot first, allowing configuration, testing and training to happen against real records. Once the team was ready to switch, everyone agreed on a cutoff point in Act!. Hypha then ran a delta import to capture anything created or changed since the initial load.

That final pass closed the gap between the two systems and kept recent activity from being left behind during the transition.

What Hypha Built in HubSpot

Once the data structure was settled, Hypha configured Sales Hub around the way the company actually sells.

Deal pipelines follow the estimating and quoting process, while workflows handle routine steps along the way. Forecasting and reporting give the sales manager and leadership visibility into pipeline and activity without relying on manual exports.

Several connections brought activity that had previously lived outside the CRM into HubSpot. The Outlook integration logs reps’ email against the relevant records. The company’s Gravity Forms were connected to HubSpot so web inquiries enter the CRM as contact records. Marketing Hub Starter also became the central place for list management and segmentation.

Trade shows got their own process as well. Hypha built a lead capture setup using HubSpot properties and mobile scanning so contacts scanned at a booth are associated with the appropriate event and segment as they enter the system. Marketing can now see which show produced which leads and follow up accordingly.

Training followed the same role-based approach as the implementation. Estimators and reps focused on the parts of HubSpot they use to manage deals. Administrators learned how to maintain the system. Leadership focused on reporting and forecasting.

Worth knowing: Adoption usually decides whether a CRM migration succeeds. Training each group on the part of the platform it actually uses gets people productive faster than one session that tries to cover everything.

What Changed After the Cutover?

The team is now out of Act! and working in HubSpot, and users have reported that the new system is faster and more reliable than what they had before. Sales and leadership have better visibility into activity and pipeline, while marketing has a repeatable way to capture and track trade-show leads instead of relying on disconnected lists and spreadsheets.

The initial phase was about getting the foundation right. Now, the company data is structured correctly, the sales process now runs inside the CRM and the team has a stable base for whatever comes next.

Planning a Move off a Legacy CRM?

If your customer data has quirks a standard import won’t handle, or your team can’t afford downtime during the switch, we’ve done this before. Talk with our team about what a clean migration to HubSpot could look like for you.