Sunsetting Salesforce Tech Debt via Multi-Entity HubSpot Migration under a Private Equity Deadline
A rigid private equity deadline forced a global real estate software provider to consolidate disparate CRMs.
We engineered a clean-slate HubSpot Enterprise architecture. A multi-entity ID matching protocol migrated active FY23+ records and sunset their legacy Salesforce instance without operational downtime.
Executive Summary
Context
A $100M+ global residential software provider with 800 employees and operations across UKI, South Africa, Canada, and ANZ.
What We Built
A unified HubSpot Enterprise environment with a multi-key ID matching protocol to reconcile data from Salesforce and legacy HubSpot instances.
Tech Stack
- HubSpot (Sales & Marketing Hub Enterprise), Salesforce (Legacy UK Instance), Pardot & Mailchimp (Legacy MAPs), Microsoft Entra ID.
Not a fit when the migration is simple and single-source, with no risk of record duplication across business units and no hard sunset deadline.
The Challenge
The migration carried an immovable May 2025 deadline. Missing it meant renewing expensive, redundant licenses for the Salesforce UK instance. The data itself was messy. Salesforce records prior to FY23 were unreliable, and marketing leads sat scattered across Pardot and Mailchimp with no clear ownership. Every record had to reconcile against an existing, active HubSpot portal used by the PayProp business unit, without corrupting PayProp's live reporting.
Our Approach
An "in-place" migration into the acquired company's existing portal was off the table. The risk of disrupting daily operations for 250+ users was too high. Instead, we architected a "To-Be" portal as a neutral staging and production environment. The build ran at two speeds. The first track carried the hard-stop migration of active data (FY23+) and essential sales tools. The second handled the long-tail optimization of custom objects. The parent company sunset the legacy stack on time while we validated the data model in isolation.
Impact
Decommissioned Legacy Tech Debt
The UK-based Salesforce instance sunset before the May deadline. Six-figure redundant licensing fees disappeared, and the tech stack consolidated.
Unified Multi-Entity Data Model
A multi-key matching protocol resolved data collisions between two global business units. Every account across UKI, SA, and ANZ carries a clean record.
Clean Slate Portal Health
Filtering out archival data prior to FY23 prevented portal bloat. Marketing and sales teams now have clear ownership over active prospects in a high-integrity database.
100% Uptime Through the Migration
The existing PayProp business unit kept 100% uptime. An isolated migration architecture avoided the downtime that traditional portal merges bring.
We built a new HubSpot Enterprise portal rather than merging directly into a live environment. The portal acted as a "clean room" for mapping Salesforce objects and legacy HubSpot data. Sync logic and deduplication got thorough testing before the global 250-user rollout.
A hard filter at the migration layer solved the unreliable data problem. Only records with verified activity or active contracts from FY23 onwards migrated. Older records went to an external archive, preserving HubSpot portal performance.
The matching protocol paired Salesforce IDs with unique email/domain identifiers to prevent duplicate records when the two companies' databases merged. Global accounts resolved to a consolidated view.
The migration split into a "Critical Path" (CRM and MAP sunset) and an "Optimization Path." The technical architecture for core sales operations went live before the contract deadline. Complex custom-object work waited for the later track.
Disjointed data across Salesforce and legacy HubSpot instances creates attribution blind spots and reporting failures. To resolve this, a clean-slate migration architecture standardizes data structures. Consolidating records into a unified HubSpot portal ensures global sales teams operate from a single source of truth, establishing pipeline integrity.
FAQ
Risk isolation. Merging two global entities into a live, active portal invites data corruption and reporting downtime. A clean-slate portal let us build a unified architecture from scratch and validate it. The existing business unit then migrated in with zero disruption to their daily sales motion.
We enforced an activity-based cutoff. Only records from FY23 onwards migrated, so the new portal wasn't born with technical debt. Records that missed the "active" criteria became archival. That kept the sales team from wasting cycles on low-intent, stale leads.
