Moving from Excel to HubSpot: a 7-step data migration checklist

Author: Ofer · Updated 30 Sep 2026 · 5 min read

Why migration is where most CRM projects fail

The software is rarely the problem. The problem is importing messy data: the same customer three times, phone numbers in five formats, notes in the wrong column. The team opens the new CRM, sees chaos and goes back to Excel.

The 7 steps

1. Collect every source. Spreadsheets, email contacts, phone contacts, the old invoicing program, business cards. Write down where each list lives.
2. Decide what you actually need. Name, company, phone, email, country, source, owner. Old data nobody uses stays behind.
3. Agree on formats. One way to write phone numbers (with country code), countries and company names.
4. Remove duplicates. Merge the same person or company before importing — it is much harder afterwards.
5. Map columns to fields. Every spreadsheet column gets a matching HubSpot property. Create custom properties only when you really need them.
6. Test with 20 rows. Import a small batch, check it in HubSpot, fix the mapping, then import everything.
7. Connect new sources. Website forms and email go straight into HubSpot from day one, so the spreadsheet stops growing.

What about GDPR?

Migration is the right moment to delete contacts you no longer have a reason to keep, and to record where each contact came from. That makes access and deletion requests much easier later.

How long does it take?

For a business with a few thousand contacts in a handful of spreadsheets, preparation and import usually take a few days. The cleaning is most of the work; the import itself takes minutes.

At GrowFlow, moving your data is part of every setup: we collect, clean, import and check it with you before your team starts using the system.

Sources

• HubSpot Knowledge Base — Import records

Ofer, founder of GrowFlow. 20+ years in information systems and CRM, Salesforce Agentblazer Champion.