Most HubSpot migrations fail quietly.
The data loads.
Records appear.
Dashboards technically work.
But reporting is wrong. Attribution is broken. Forecasts are unreliable. And leadership starts asking whether HubSpot was the right choice.
The problem is rarely HubSpot itself.
The problem is the data order.
HubSpot is a relationship-driven CRM. The order you load data matters just as much as what data you load. If you ignore that reality, you are setting yourself up for long-term reporting chaos.
Unlike legacy CRMs, HubSpot does not treat records as isolated rows of data. Every object is designed to connect to another object.
Companies connect to contacts.
Contacts connect to deals.
Deals connect to revenue.
When those relationships are missing or loaded out of order, HubSpot cannot infer intent or rebuild context later.
There is no magic fix after the fact.
That is why migrations must follow a strict hierarchy.
Companies are the foundation of your CRM. Everything else connects to them.
If company records are missing or incomplete, every downstream object suffers.
Company name
Company domain name (this is the primary association key)
Company owner
Lifecycle stage
Industry, company size, and region if available
The company domain name is especially important. HubSpot uses it as the default association logic for contacts.
No company record means weak or broken associations later.
Contacts should never be imported before companies.
If you do, HubSpot has nothing to associate them to, which leads to duplicate companies, incorrect ownership, and bad attribution.
Email address (primary unique identifier)
First name and last name
Associated company domain or company record ID
Contact owner
Lifecycle stage
Email is non-negotiable. If email is missing or duplicated, you should expect merge issues, routing failures, and unreliable marketing attribution.
Deals are where reporting either becomes trustworthy or completely unusable.
Deals must be associated to both companies and contacts to function properly in HubSpot reporting.
Deal name
Deal stage
Pipeline
Amount
Close date
Associated company record ID
Associated contact record ID
Deals without clean associations destroy forecasting, revenue reporting, and pipeline analysis.
A deal with no company is a red flag.
A deal with no contact is a bigger one.
Revenue objects should always be the final step.
Invoices and orders depend on everything upstream. Without proper relationships, they become disconnected numbers with no business context.
Invoice or order ID
Amount
Status
Issue date and due date
Associated company record ID
Associated contact record ID
Associated deal record ID if applicable
Revenue data without relationships is useless for attribution, LTV analysis, or customer reporting.
These are the relationships you must define explicitly during migration.
Contacts to Companies: email domain or company record ID
Deals to Companies: company record ID
Deals to Contacts: contact record ID
Invoices to Companies: company record ID
Invoices to Contacts: contact record ID
Invoices to Deals: deal record ID
If these keys are not mapped correctly, HubSpot will not fix it later.
Many teams try to load everything at once.
It feels efficient.
It feels faster.
It feels logical if you are coming from spreadsheets or older CRMs.
But HubSpot cannot magically infer relationships when records arrive out of order.
The result is orphaned records, broken attribution, and leadership questioning the CRM instead of the migration strategy.
Data order is not a technical detail.
It is a revenue decision.
If your migration plan does not explicitly define:
Load order
Association keys
Required identifiers
Validation checkpoints
Then your migration plan is incomplete.
Clean reporting starts before the first import ever runs.
If you are migrating to HubSpot and not thinking about data order, you are already behind.
Companies first.
Contacts second.
Deals third.
Revenue last.
Get that right, and HubSpot becomes a reliable growth system.
Get it wrong, and you will spend months cleaning up problems that never needed to exist.