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Importing Data Into HubSpot

As you work to adopt HubSpot, one of your first tasks will inevitably be bringing your data into the CRM. Whether you previously ran your business out of Excel, or were leveraging a legacy CRM to store your data, HubSpot’s import tools make it easy to move your data quickly, while giving you the confidence that your data will be accurate and actionable by your team.

Why Import into HubSpot?

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Import and associate all the data important to your business

You do business with more than just contacts. You’re also engaging with companies, closing deals, and resolving tickets. Maybe you even have a custom object or two. Regardless of how you track your data, import enables you to quickly reflect your business processes in HubSpot. Associate your data across objects to provide additional context and give your team the full picture of who you’re doing business with.

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Data Mapping and Error Validation Made Easy

The only thing worse than cleaning a spreadsheet of data, is realizing you skipped cleaning a column of data…after you finished your import. That’s why HubSpot’s import tool does work up front to auto-map your data to existing HubSpot properties and surface errors in your spreadsheet before you finish your import. This way you can rest assured your data will be clean and actionable from the start.  

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Take action on your data immediately

Once your data’s in HubSpot, you’re off to the races. Auto-fill missing contact or company information using AI. Fix small formatting issues with our data quality tools. Create filtered views for specific reps or spin up automations to take the busy work out of managing your data. With your data accurately reflected in the CRM, you’re able to focus less on data management, and more on growing your business.

What can I import into HubSpot?

HubSpot’s import tools make it simple to get your data into the CRM – but having a basic understanding of the different data points you’re able to import will help you match your existing business processes to the HubSpot data model. Below are the specific elements of HubSpot’s data model you’re able to import. For help formatting your files, take a look at the instructions and example files found here.
Contacts

Objects

Objects are the primary pieces of information that you’re tracking in the CRM. This could be contacts, companies, and deals, or you could have created custom objects to meet your business’ specific needs. Each object will have many individual records – the rows in your spreadsheet. You’ll store information on these records in properties – represented by columns in your spreadsheet.

Each object has specific properties that are needed in order to create new records or find and update existing records within import. These properties will be highlighted on the import mapping guide within the import tool.
Company

Associations

Associations can be used to show the relationship between records. By creating associations between records in the CRM, your team will be able to see information across all associated records quickly and easily to do their job faster with more context.

Let’s imagine you’re importing a spreadsheet of contacts and want to associate them to the companies they work for. If you’re importing one file, simply include the company information on the same row as their associated contacts in your file. If you have two files of data, you’ll need to ensure there is a common column of data between your two files to create the association. You can also add a label that describes the relationship between these two records. 
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Activities

Activities are the different engagements that your team in HubSpot has with the records in the CRM. They could be leaving notes on an open deal, meeting with a company, or calling a prospective customer. Just like you can create and associate records via import, you can create and associate activities using the import tool.

Once imported into the CRM, you can use these activities to report out on the productivity of your team, and see who your top performers are.
Moving to a new CRM might seem intimidating --- there are a lot of moving parts, and the last thing you want is to lose any of your organization's vital historical data. To help you as you begin importing, check out the following resources that breakdown all you need to know about HubSpot’s import tool.

  • For step by step instructions on how to import records and activities, check out this article.
  • For help with reviewing and troubleshooting import errors, check out this article.
  • If you want to leverage our Imports API, check out these developer docs.

Other methods for migrating your data into HubSpot

There are many factors to consider when choosing the best method for bringing your data into HubSpot. Depending on the technical resources at your disposal, where your data currently resides, and whether or not you intend to sync data between HubSpot and another system, there are several options beyond import that you can consider for your data migration.
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Data Sync

Create a recurring  sync between HubSpot and another tool you and your team use to ensure your data is up to date across all the systems important to your business.
Learn more
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Third-Party Integrations

Additional platforms are available to help bring your data into HubSpot. Companies like Import2 and Trujay Group provide data migration services from nearly every major CRM on the market and can help with more nuanced migration projects.
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HubSpot Technical Consultant

Work directly with a HubSpot consultant through all the nuances of your data migration. Build out custom solutions and ensure you’re following best practices throughout the process of moving over to the HubSpot CRM.
Learn more
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API Endpoints

If you have technical resources at your disposal, HubSpot’s APIs will help you automate your data migration your data, and customize the data ingestion to meet your specific needs.

Learn more
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