HubSpot to Pipedrive data migration: How to Preserve Conversation History When Migrating HubSpot to Pipedrive

A HubSpot to Pipedrive data migration is usually planned around moving contacts and deals. But the real risk for Benelux sales teams is losing the conversation history that explains what actually happened in the pipeline: emails, calls, meetings, notes, and the files attached to them. When that history is missing or no longer linked correctly, operational reporting dashboards stop being trustworthy. Trends break on the migration date, response-time reporting becomes meaningless, and sales cycle analytics suddenly looks better or worse for the wrong reasons.

Why Conversation History Matters for Operational Reporting Dashboards Benelux

Conversation history matters because most operational dashboards are built on activity data and timestamps. If you track time-to-first-response, number of touchpoints per stage, stage velocity, or handover quality between SDRs and Account Executives across the Netherlands and Belgium, you rely on a clean trail of activities connected to the right people, organisations, and deals. Once those links are gone, you don’t just lose context for the team. You lose the ability to report accurately and make decisions based on real performance.

The Risk: What Gets Lost When You Move from HubSpot to Pipedrive

The biggest mistake companies make when moving from HubSpot to Pipedrive is treating conversation history like a nice-to-have. In practice, it’s the hardest part to migrate because it’s not only data, it’s data with relationships. A single email might need to appear on a contact record and on a deal record. A meeting might involve multiple contacts. A note might have an attachment that should remain accessible later. If you only export the core records via CSV and import them into Pipedrive, you can end up with a CRM that looks complete at first glance, while the timeline of work is gone or disconnected.

Step 1 – Scope the Migration: Which Conversations Must Survive the Move?

Start by defining what you actually need to preserve. Keeping everything forever sounds safe, but it often creates cost and complexity without improving reporting. A practical approach is to decide which activity types must survive—emails, calls, meetings, tasks, notes—and what time window is required to keep dashboards and management reporting consistent. For many Benelux SMEs, keeping the last 12–24 months fully intact is enough to preserve the operational view, while older history can be archived externally if needed.

Step 2 – Clean Up HubSpot Associations Before Touching Any Data

Before you export anything, fix broken links and messy associations in HubSpot. Conversation history only stays meaningful if it stays attached to the right objects. Duplicated contacts, deals linked to the wrong company, and activities logged only on a contact but not the deal are common problems. If you move that mess as-is, you will import confusion into Pipedrive, and you won’t be able to reconstruct accurate timelines later.

Step 3 – API vs CSV: Choosing the Right Export Method for Reliable History

CSV exports are useful for static CRM objects such as contacts, companies, and deals. But conversation history often requires API-based extraction to be complete and reliably linked. If you care about preserving email and activity timelines, you need an export that captures the activity content, timestamps, and the associations that connect each activity to the correct contact, deal, and company. This is where many migrations silently lose fidelity because the export method simply doesn’t include all the relationships you need to rebuild the story.

Step 4 – Build a Staging Layer: One Place to Reconstruct Deals, Contacts and Activities

Once you have the data out of HubSpot, treat the migration like an engineering project, not a file upload. The safest approach is a staging layer: one place where you store raw exports, normalize them into a consistent structure (people, organisations, deals, activities, files), and build mapping between HubSpot IDs and the new Pipedrive IDs. That mapping is what lets you import conversation history into Pipedrive and still connect each email, call, meeting, or note to the right deal and the right person.

Step 5 – Import into Pipedrive with Full Links: Deals, People, Organisations and Activities

Importing into Pipedrive should follow a simple logic: create the objects first, then bring in the timeline. Organisations and people come first, then deals linked to them, and only then activities and notes, so the links can be created correctly. If you import activities too early, you’ll either lose the linkages or spend time manually repairing them after go-live.

Step 6 – Don’t Forget Files and Attachments: Contracts, Proposals and Key Documents

Files and attachments deserve special attention. Contracts, proposals, and key documents are often attached inside CRM timelines rather than stored in a separate document system. If you forget these, your team will feel it immediately after go-live—especially when they need to reference a signed agreement, confirm what version of a proposal was sent, or review key details in a handover.

Step 7 – Quality Assurance: How to Prove Your Sales History Is Intact

Quality assurance is where you prove the migration worked. Don’t rely on a couple of spot checks. Compare activity counts for a sample set of deals, verify that activities appear in the right timelines, and check that reporting still behaves as expected. If your dashboard previously showed average time-to-first-response or average stage duration, those numbers should not suddenly change because of the migration. If they do, the data may be present but the links or timestamps are not preserved in a way your reporting can use.

How Preserved Conversation History Strengthens Operational Reporting Dashboards in the Benelux

When conversation history is migrated and linked correctly, Benelux operational dashboards stay reliable. You retain continuity in trend reporting, analyze pipeline velocity and conversion by segment, and track SLAs and team performance without the migration cliff that makes year-over-year comparisons impossible. More importantly, your sales team keeps the context they need to run deals and hand over accounts smoothly.

How Sigli Can Help: A Practical HubSpot → Pipedrive Migration Checklist for Benelux SMEs

Sigli can help you run a HubSpot to Pipedrive data migration with reporting continuity as a primary requirement, not an afterthought. In practice, that means scoping the history that matters, cleaning up HubSpot associations before extraction, choosing the right export method for activities, using a staging layer to reconstruct links, importing into Pipedrive in the correct order, and validating the outcome with measurable QA checks tied to your dashboards. If your team relies on operational reporting for pipeline management across the Benelux, preserving conversation history is not optional. It’s the difference between a clean cutover and a CRM reset.