“Furniture4u”* is a medium sized company selling high-end bespoke office furniture and operating throughout North America. They have 50 employees and 6 dedicated sales reps and account managers. When they decided to move from Pipedrive to HubSpot, the transition had already taken months of planning, internal persuasion, and data preparation. The sales team were confident that all contacts had been created in HubSpot and leadership had committed to the new CRM as the company’s future platform. But shortly after going live, they realised something critical was missing: years of historic email conversations were still sitting inside individual inboxes, including two accounts belonging to former employees. HubSpot was set up, but the customer’s contact timelines were incomplete.
The challenges of migration
Furniture4u faced several challenges before they could begin using their new CRM:
- Furniture4u uses Gmail as their email server however they later found there were some limitations regarding its integration with HubSpot
- HubSpot does not provide a native bulk historic email upload solution, meaning none of their past communications had transferred automatically.
- Some company contacts were either missing or incomplete, preventing email associations from working correctly.
- Two ex-employee inboxes required IT access before migration could begin.
- Several archived Gmail folders were not IMAP-enabled, so emails had to be reorganised before ingestion.
- There were concerns around security, permissions, and ensuring certain contacts or domains could be excluded from sync.
The team were excited to start using their new CRM however they still had the problem of needing to ingest all their historic emails and felt pressure to resolve the issue quickly to protect internal adoption.
Introducing Threads for HubSpot
Threads provided a structured solution to ensure a successful migration:
- They created a Threads account and connected their Gmail inboxes via IMAP for the sales and account reps whose email history they wanted to populate into the new CRM including two former employees’ accounts. Through IMAP all Gmail users created their own app-specific password for the Threads app.
- Furniture4u advised Threads that there were certain contacts for whom they did not want to attach emails in HubSpot and Threads was able to block these domains and email addresses
- Before syncing to HubSpot, Threads generated a CSV of missing contacts extracted from the specific date range for the historic email data, allowing the team to import and clean their records properly.
- The historic migration was then initiated to sync to HubSpot ensuring all emails ingested were captured to all contacts that had been created in HubSpot.
The result was a fully populated HubSpot CRM with complete customer timelines, preserved ex-employee history, and immediate improvement in user confidence and adoption.
Furniture4u were able to start fresh with a record of all the emails they wanted to track and none of the ones they didn’t. Because Threads only syncs with existing contacts none of the junk and spam messages that had accumulated in employee inboxes was transferred to their new CRM.
Furniture4u were able to move forward with a HubSpot set-up that reflected their true relationship history, turning what could have been a stalled migration into a successful transition.
*Furniture4u is a made up organization and our case study is for illustrative purposes only.