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How far ahead of renewal should you start switching CRMs?

By Kevin Bluett, co-founder of Ahoy · Updated September 29, 2026

Start 90 days before the renewal date. The date that matters is the notice deadline, which comes first: Salesforce's standard agreement asks for written notice at least 30 days before the term ends, and HubSpot requires auto-renewal to be turned off before the current term ends. Work backward from that deadline. Choose the replacement by day 60, run both systems through day 30, then give notice and cut over.

Three teams brought a renewal date into their sales calls with us this summer. One was on Attio, renewing in August, and called it their most expensive piece of software. Another was on Salesforce with a fall renewal and wanted to migrate in August specifically to beat it. The third was on HubSpot, locked in until December. In all three, the contract date was setting the timetable, and in my experience the date decides more CRM switches than any comparison page does.

The contract terms quoted below were read on September 29, 2026 at each vendor's published terms, which are linked. Your own order form overrides the standard terms, so treat this as the default to check against, not as your contract.

What is your real deadline?

Not the renewal date. The renewal date is when the new term starts; the deadline is the last day you can stop it, and on most contracts that is weeks earlier.

Salesforce. The Main Services Agreement (the version dated September 1, 2026) says subscriptions renew automatically for additional one-year terms unless either party gives written notice, email accepted, at least 30 days before the end of the term. Two more clauses in the same section matter for switching. Promotional pricing renews at list price unless the order form says otherwise, and any renewal where you cut seats or shorten the term is re-priced without regard to the per-unit price you paid before. So "renew with fewer seats while we migrate" can cost more per seat than you expect.

HubSpot. Here the notice is a setting rather than a letter. HubSpot's customer terms (last modified September 16, 2026) renew each subscription for one year or the length of the previous term, whichever is shorter, and the way to stop that is to switch auto-renewal off in the account's billing settings while the current term is still running. You cannot cancel partway through a term and get prepaid fees back. If the price is going up at renewal, HubSpot says it will tell you at least 30 days ahead, which is a useful reminder but not a deadline you can plan around.

Everyone else. I have only quoted the two agreements I read today. For any other vendor, open the order form and search for "renew" and "notice." If the form is silent, the master terms on the vendor's legal page usually decide it.

What does a backward plan from renewal look like?

Here is the plan I would run for a contract with a 30-day notice period. If yours is 60 or 90 days, shift every row earlier by the difference.

The 60-day row is the one teams try to skip. If the new system is connected at day 60 but only switched on at day 30, you lose the month that tells you whether the migration worked.

What transfers, and what regenerates from email?

Records transfer. Contacts, companies, and deals, with their field values and owners, export from every major CRM as files and import into every other. They need cleaning on the way, but they move.

Structure does not. Pipelines, stage definitions, automations, reports, and dashboards have no portable format. You rebuild them, and this is a good moment to rebuild fewer. If you are leaving HubSpot specifically, what transfers when you leave HubSpot goes through its exports one object at a time.

Activity is the interesting case. Emails, meetings, and calls look like the hardest thing to move, because they sit on each record's timeline and rarely export cleanly. But most of that history also still exists in your mailboxes and calendars. A CRM that reads Gmail or Outlook and the calendar can rebuild the timeline from those sources, as far back as the mailbox goes, without a file ever changing hands. What it cannot rebuild are things that only ever lived in the old CRM: typed notes, call recordings stored there, and attachments added to records by hand. Those are what the day-14 export is for.

One thing people forget: after the term ends, the old vendor may not give you anything back. HubSpot's product-specific terms say that for the Smart CRM it will not provide any access to customer data after termination or expiration. Salesforce's agreement makes data available for export if you ask within 30 days, then deletes it. Neither is a plan. Take the export before day 0.

How do you run both until the cut-over?

Make the old system read-only for sellers as early as you can, and let a sync or a daily import keep it current for whoever still reports from it. Two systems that both accept edits drift apart within a week, and then the migration becomes a reconciliation project. If someone above the sales team needs the old CRM to stay accurate after the switch, that is a different setup, a permanent one, and we wrote it up separately as adding an AI CRM without leaving HubSpot.

What does this look like on a real calendar?

An illustrative example; the numbers are invented. A 15-seat team renews its CRM on December 31 and the order form has a 30-day notice clause, so the true deadline is December 1. Counting back 90 days from the renewal puts the start at October 2.

In the first two weeks of October they write down what they actually use: 4 of their 11 pipelines, 38 of 160 custom fields, and 5 automations out of 47. They trial two replacements on their own deals. On November 1 they pick one, connect all fifteen mailboxes and calendars, and import records exported that morning. By November 10 the 220 open deals carry email and meeting history going back about two years, rebuilt from the inboxes rather than exported, and the typed notes on the 40 late-stage deals are imported by hand. The notice goes out on November 28, three days early, because the person who signs contracts was traveling the following week. The final export runs on December 17.

If the same team had started in the middle of November, the honest outcome would have been a renewal for another year and a migration anyway, paid twice for the overlap.

What if you have already missed the date?

Then you have a year, and I would use it rather than rush. Run the replacement next to the old system, move the sellers across when it is ready, and set the next notice deadline in a calendar with two reminders. Before you ask to cut seats partway through, read the renewal clause: on the Salesforce terms above, a smaller renewal gets re-priced, and on HubSpot's terms there is no mid-term cancellation to fall back on.

What to look for in a tool

The replacement has to be live inside a fixed window, so the questions I would ask on a first call are about the migration more than the features:

• Can it import your records from the old CRM's export files with column mapping and de-duplication, and show you what it merged?
• Does it rebuild email and meeting history from connected mailboxes and calendars, and how far back does that go on the first day?
• Can it sync with the old CRM in both directions during the overlap, if someone still reports from it?
• Will a person from the vendor work through the migration with you, or is it a help-center article and a CSV template?

At Ahoy we built for this window. Records come in from the old CRM's export files, with columns mapped and duplicates merged as they land; connected Gmail or Outlook and calendar rebuild the activity timeline; two-way sync with HubSpot or Salesforce covers the overlap; and someone from our team does the migration alongside you as part of onboarding. If you want to see what your current system holds before committing to a date, the free CRM audit takes 45 minutes and needs nothing installed.

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