Emeric Ernoult, CEO of Agorapulse, recounts his company's back-and-forth between HubSpot CRM and Salesforce. The first migration, carried out in 2022, reportedly took at least nine months and cost nearly €100,000. A few years later, Agorapulse is making the reverse journey, with a new concern: having more consistent data to make it easier to use with AI.
“The migration from HubSpot to Salesforce CRM cost me close to €100,000 and took no less than nine months. And now, brace yourself, we're doing the same thing to go back to full HubSpot.”
The features of the two CRMs only explain part of this back-and-forth. The first change was heavily influenced by the arrival of a VP Sales used to Salesforce. The second is being driven by a new head of Revenue with a different vision. In between, a new constraint emerged: Agorapulse wants to make its data consistent enough to be able to use it with tools like Claude.
Why did Agorapulse move from Pipedrive to HubSpot and then Salesforce?
Agorapulse did not start with HubSpot. In its early years, the company used 
Pipedrive as its CRM. The sales function was still relatively underdeveloped and the sales processes remained simple. “We were really marketing-driven,” Emeric explains.
HubSpot came later, when Agorapulse had, by his account, about a hundred people. The company started using it for both marketing and sales.
Things changed when a new Canadian VP Sales joined Agorapulse. Emeric recounts that he “didn't like HubSpot because he didn't know it.”
“When you hire people who don't know your stack and are used to another one, they'll do everything they can to get you to change your stack.”
In his experience, many salespeople and sales leaders already know 
Salesforce, know how to build their reports in the tool and have a network of consultants able to support them.
“Salespeople like Salesforce because they know Salesforce. Not that Salesforce is necessarily better, but they know it and know how to use it.”
Emeric admits he found it hard to push back against a leader he had just recruited himself to structure the sales function. Several executives hired over time have thus pushed him to change tools, with migrations that were sometimes long and costly.
What did Salesforce bring to Agorapulse's salespeople?
Emeric adds an important nuance: he is not himself a hands-on user of Salesforce or HubSpot CRM.
“Careful, I'm not a user of the tools. I'm telling you what I understood from what I was told and from the reasons why I was made to switch both times.”
Salesforce's first advantage was adoption. The salespeople already knew the tool.
“They were at home. They were comfortable, they knew where to go, they knew how to use it, they knew where to click.”
A specific functional need also weighed in the 2022 migration: cohort reporting.
Emeric wanted to be able to track different cohorts of leads over time and compare their conversion and retention in order to measure the effect of changes in lead generation. At the time, he says he could not get this reporting in HubSpot, while his VP Sales presented Salesforce to him as able to produce it.
“Since it was really important to me, it was one of the pivot points.”
This feedback concerns the situation Agorapulse faced in 2022 and is not a comparison of the current reporting capabilities of HubSpot and Salesforce.
A migration costing nearly €100,000 and taking nine months
Emeric estimates the migration from HubSpot to Salesforce at nearly €100,000, over a period of at least nine months.
This experience led him to look differently at the tools a future executive has mastered when recruiting.
“I think it should even be a selection criterion in hiring. Because a hire who makes you change tools can cost a lot.”
Because changing CRMs is not just a matter of replacing one license with another. You have to migrate the data, rebuild the reports and reconnect the different building blocks of the stack.
Why is Agorapulse now going back to HubSpot?
At the time of the interview, Agorapulse is moving back to a stack Emeric describes as “full 
HubSpot.”
Leadership plays a role once again.
“Now, our new Revenue leader has the opposite view of the previous one.”
But this time, another argument weighs in the decision. Agorapulse kept HubSpot Marketing throughout all its years on Salesforce CRM. Marketing and sales therefore rely on two different systems, each with its own representation of the data.
This coexistence becomes more problematic with the rise of AI use cases.
Emeric gives a concrete example: industry categorization. The way HubSpot defines industries and the way used in Agorapulse's Salesforce environment are not identical. For the same prospect or customer, the data lake can therefore receive two different classifications that then have to be reconciled.
On top of that, according to Emeric, there are connections that can break and force the data to be rebuilt.
Tools in this section
How does AI change the choice of CRM?
Emeric's argument is not that HubSpot inherently has better AI than Salesforce. His reasoning is first and foremost about data.
Agorapulse wants to be able to ask 
Claude to retrieve or analyze information in its data lake. The more heterogeneous the data coming from the source systems, the harder this becomes.
“In the age of AI, the cleanliness of this data has become so crucial that it's now really becoming a selection criterion.”
The return to HubSpot should therefore notably provide a more uniform base across marketing and CRM. For Agorapulse, a piece of software's ability to integrate cleanly into the data architecture is becoming a selection criterion on a par with user experience or reporting.
How does Claude make it possible to bring the migration in-house?
The other difference between the two migrations lies in how they were carried out.
To go back from Salesforce to HubSpot, Agorapulse did not bring in any outside agency this time. Emeric attributes this capability in part to Claude.
“For the Salesforce to HubSpot migration this time, we didn't hire any outside agency. So we've already saved €50,000 to €80,000, which isn't bad, thanks to AI, thanks to Claude.”
He immediately points out that the internal cost is not zero: “the time spent on the migrations isn't zero.”
AI therefore does not eliminate the migration work. In Agorapulse's case, it mainly makes it possible to bring in-house part of the work that would previously have required a service provider.
Despite the salespeople's familiarity with Salesforce, Emeric does not see strong resistance to the return to HubSpot at the time of the interview. He attributes this notably to the support provided and to explaining the change.
Summary of the software this article mentions in Agorapulse's stack
| Status | Workflow | Tool | Usage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Replaced | CRM | PipedriveReplaced | First sales CRM mentioned |
| In use | Marketing / CRM | HubSpot | Target of the Revenue consolidation |
| Replaced | CRM |  SalesforceReplaced | CRM adopted in 2022 |
| In use | AI | Anthropic | Use of data and help with the migration |
| In use | Prospecting |  Apollo.io | Enrichment and email sequences |
| Dropped | Enrichment |  FullEnrichDropped | Solution considered by Agorapulse |
| Dropped | Prospecting |  lemlistDropped | Solution considered by Agorapulse |
| In use | Conversation intelligence |  Gong | Sales conversations |
