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      Should I Migrate Leads from My Legacy CRM to Leads or Contacts in HubSpot?

      May 22nd, 2025

      When migrating to HubSpot, it’s important to understand how it handles leads differently from many other CRMs. In HubSpot, a lead cannot exist as a standalone record—it must be associated with an existing contact or company. This fundamental difference can cause confusion during migration, especially if your legacy CRM doesn’t require such associations.

      What Happens If Leads Aren’t Associated?

      If your legacy CRM allows leads without associations, some of your records might lack a linked contact or company. When the MigrateMyCRM app attempts to migrate these into HubSpot as leads, HubSpot will return an error stating that a required association is missing.

      To prevent data loss, our app assigns a default company to these leads so they can be created in HubSpot. However, this means you could end up with dozens—or even hundreds—of leads tied to the same random company, even though no such connection existed in your source CRM.

      Association vs. Text Field: What’s the Difference?

      It’s essential to distinguish between two things:

      • An actual association: a clickable hyperlink in your source CRM that connects the lead to a company or contact page. These records will migrate correctly as HubSpot leads.

        contact1 

      • A text field: a field containing a company name or contact name/email that’s not linked to another record. When you click it, you will be prompted to edit the string value. These leads will be assigned a default association in HubSpot during migration.

        lead

      Only real associations enable proper linking in HubSpot. A text field with a company name is not sufficient.

      When Does Leads-to-Leads Migration Work Seamlessly?

      Migration of leads to HubSpot's Leads object works smoothly in the following scenarios:

      • Both the source and target CRMs are HubSpot portals.

      • All leads in your legacy CRM are properly associated with a contact or company that is also being migrated.

      What Are My Options If Leads Lack Associations?

      If your legacy CRM has unassociated leads, we can explore workarounds. The most common (and cost-free) solution is to migrate leads to HubSpot Contacts instead. You can then configure your CRM settings to treat them as leads as well.

      If migrating directly to the Leads object is critical to your business, SyncMatters team can help by:

      • Replacing the default association with a specific company or contact of your choice.

      • Offering customization services: If a lead lacks a formal association but contains a company name or contact email in a text field, our engineers can search for the company/contact in HubSpot, match the records, and create the appropriate association in HubSpot.

      Note: This customization involves a few tech hours and will incur additional charges.

       

      Still need help?

      Please submit an inquiry on the contact page, email support@syncmatters.com, or reach out to us via chat.