When you decide to leave HubSpot, the platform makes it easy to hit Export—one button, done. But what actually lands in your new system is a fragmented shadow of what you had. Custom properties vanish mid-transfer, deal associations snap, email timelines get truncated, and entire workflows worth of context evaporate. You don't know until you're three weeks into onboarding and your rep asks, "Wait, where's the full email thread with this client?" The fix is not to export and hope. It's to audit your data architecture now, identify what HubSpot's export engine will break, and either fix it before you move or rebuild it afterward. This checklist walks you through both. HubSpot's Export Limits: The Four Data Breakpoints HubSpot's native export doesn't fail because the company is hostile. It fails because the export format was designed for offline spreadsheet work, not for seamless CRM-to-CRM handoff. Here's where it breaks. 1. Custom Field Encoding Corrupts on Export If you've built custom fields with specific data types—dropdowns, multi-select, currency, linked records—HubSpot's export flattens them all to text. A multi-select field that tracks "Email, Phone, In-person" as separate checkbox values becomes a single concatenated string. Import it into another CRM and you've lost the structured data. The field exists, but it's now a blob of text, not a queryable attribute. What to do: Before you export, audit every custom property in HubSpot. Run a report that shows field type (Properties > All properties) and cross-reference against your target CRM's field types. If Orin, for example, supports the same field type natively, you're safe—the migration tool will map it correctly. If not, you'll need to decide: keep the data as text and rebuild structure later, or manually re-categorize a subset of records now. 2. Deal Associations Don't Travel with the Export Your deals are linked to contacts, companies, line items, and notes. HubSpot's standard export gives you a deals table with contact and company ID columns—useless without a separate mapping table. But here's the real problem: deal-to-line-item associations and custom object links often don't export at all, or they export as IDs that have no meaning in the new system. You move 500 deals over. Three months in, your sales ops person realizes the deal-to-product associations never came through. Now you have deals with no associated revenue breakdown, and no easy way to reconstruct it from historical data. What to do: Before export, pull a report showing deal ID, associated contact ID, associated company ID, and any custom object associations. Count the rows where associations are missing or marked as null. Decide which associations are critical (usually contact and company—these you need to preserve) and which are nice-to-have (custom objects—these you might rebuild post-migration). Document any broken links now so you know what to fix in your new CRM. 3. Email History Truncates at 200–500 Records per Contact HubSpot stores email history in its Email tool or in a connected email integration. The export function does not reliably pull the full thread. Depending on your email sync integration and contact record size, you might get the last 50 emails, or the last 200, or a random sample. Longer conversations—the ones with the most context—often get cut. This is especially damaging if your deal cycle is long (90+ days) or your customer relationships are deep. You lose the negotiation thread, the original requirements discussion, the escalation emails. When your new CRM comes online, sales reps are looking at contacts with 3–4 recent emails and no history. What to do: Download your email history directly from your email provider (Gmail, Outlook) via API or Google Takeout, not through HubSpot's export. Store it as a reference archive. In your new CRM, you can either link to that archive or selectively re-import key threads. Doing this outside HubSpot gives you the complete record. 4. Custom Properties Don't Export if They're Not on the Default View This one catches teams off guard. HubSpot only exports properties that are part of your current CRM view or explicitly selected in the export dialog. If you have 200 custom properties but only 15 are visible in your "Daily Use" view, only those 15 get exported by default. The other 185 are dormant in HubSpot but invisible to the export tool. What to do: Go to Settings > Properties and generate a complete property list (not from your view—from the full property registry). Cross-reference this against what's in your export CSV. If you see properties missing, re-run the export with explicit property selection enabled, or use HubSpot's API to pull everything programmatically. The Pre-Migration Data Audit Checklist Before you hit Export, walk through this checklist. It takes 2–4 hours but saves weeks of post-migration cleanup. Inventory all custom fields by type. Run Settings > Properties and create a spreadsheet with Property Name