How Advisor Growth Strategies Built a Structured HubSpot Pipeline From 15,750 Migrated Highrise Records

What Highrise Couldn't Support

1. No deal pipeline.

Highrise had no structured deal or opportunity object, so the sales team tracked deal stages using contact-record tags. That made pipeline reporting and forecasting depend on manually reading tags, not a real sales pipeline view.

2. A large, aging data set.

The CRM held 15,750 records across 11 object types, including nearly a decade of contacts, notes, and email history. Moving that volume without a structured migration plan risked losing or misattributing records the firm still relied on.

3. Ownership tied to former employees.

Several Highrise user accounts belonged to staff who no longer worked at the firm, and the records they owned needed a new, active owner. Left unaddressed, those records would have landed in HubSpot with no accountable owner, cutting off follow-up on live relationships.

4. No industry-specific segmentation.

Highrise's contact fields were generic, with no way to flag a contact as a Center of Influence, referral source, or M&A-stage lead. That made it difficult to route outreach or reporting by the relationship categories the RIA M&A business runs on.

5. Marketing compliance settings not configured.

Subscription and opt-out handling had never been set up, which meant migrated contacts would default to a subscribed status regardless of their actual preferences. Left that way, the firm risked emailing contacts who had already opted out under its prior system.

Solution: How Campaign Creators Rebuilt Advisor Growth Strategies' CRM Foundation Around a Full Highrise Migration

Campaign Creators sequenced the project around the migration itself: map the Highrise data model first, resolve ownership questions before moving a single record, then layer the new pipeline and segmentation structure on top of clean data.

One Pipeline for Core Consulting and M&A Advisory

Highrise had no deal or pipeline object at all, so there was no existing structure to carry forward; the pipeline had to be designed against how Advisor Growth Strategies actually sells and advises. Campaign Creators built a HubSpot deal pipeline with a custom Project Type property distinguishing Core consulting engagements from M&A advisory engagements. Deals now move through a single, reportable pipeline, and the firm can separate its two business lines without separate systems.

Highrise Records Mapped Field by Field Through Trujay

An 11-object, 15,750-record Highrise export had to move into HubSpot's data model with no live integration in place to catch errors after the fact. Campaign Creators used the Trujay migration platform, with field-level mapping built and documented object by object, covering Companies, Contacts, Notes, Emails, Attachments, Tags, Tasks, Deals, Users, Comments, and Cases, before a single record moved. The documented, object-by-object mapping gives Advisor Growth Strategies a record of exactly how every Highrise field landed in HubSpot, not a black-box import.

Matching Deactivated Highrise Owners to Active HubSpot Users

Several of the records being migrated were owned, in Highrise, by user accounts that had already been deactivated, which a standard automated mapping would have left orphaned. Campaign Creators manually ID-matched each deactivated account's records to an active HubSpot user, closing that ownership gap before the migration was considered complete. Every migrated record kept a live, accountable owner inside HubSpot, so follow-up on existing relationships didn't depend on tracking down which former employee used to hold the account.

Contact Types Built Around Centers of Influence and Acquirers

HubSpot's default contact and deal properties don't reflect how an RIA M&A advisory firm segments its network. Campaign Creators built a custom multi-select Contact Type property covering the firm's real relationship categories, including Centers of Influence, Top 100 COI, referral sources, and M&A Next Gen, Private Equity, and acquirer contacts, alongside Company Type, AUM, and an AGS Interaction property tracking engagement such as Deal Room downloads and webinar attendance. Advisor Growth Strategies can now filter and report on its network by the categories the business runs on, not generic CRM defaults that don't distinguish a referral source from an acquirer.

Three Access Levels for Sales, Services, and Leadership

Advisor Growth Strategies' eleven users span sales, client services, and firm leadership, each needing a different level of access to client records. Campaign Creators provisioned role-based permissions across named users: Super Admin access for firm leadership, standard access for sales, and restricted CRM-only access for client services staff who need record visibility without broader admin controls. Each team member sees and can act on the records relevant to their role, without over-provisioning administrative access across the firm.

Filterable Fields Ready for Lists and Reports

A rebuilt property set is only useful if records can actually be filtered and routed by it, not checked field by field manually. The Contact Type and Project Type properties were structured as filterable, multi-select fields from the outset, so Advisor Growth Strategies' team can build list segments and reports directly off them, separating Centers of Influence from referral sources, and Core deals from M&A deals, without custom code. The categorization work is reusable across whatever reporting or list-building the firm does next, not a one-time labeling exercise.

Highrise Opt-Outs Carried Into HubSpot

Default HubSpot subscription settings would have marked every migrated contact as subscribed, regardless of that contact's actual opt-out history under Highrise. Campaign Creators imported the firm's existing opt-out list from the prior system as part of onboarding, so contacts with a known opt-out under Highrise did not default to subscribed under HubSpot. That import addressed the default-subscription risk; it is a separate step from the firm's own broader compliance review of its marketing settings.

Impact: A CRM Foundation Built Around Referral Relationships

Advisor Growth Strategies’ relationship history now lives in HubSpot with an active team member on every record. Follow-up on a referral source or Center of Influence no longer depends on a former employee’s account. Deals move through one pipeline, and the Project Type property separates Core consulting from M&A advisory. A firm that runs 12 to 18 M&A mandates and over 50 consulting projects a year can now report on both lines from one system. 

The Contact Type and AGS Interaction properties give the firm a place to record who each contact is and how they engage, from Centers of Influence and acquirers to Deal Room downloads and webinar attendance. Both are filterable, multi-select fields, so the team can build new lists and reports on them without custom code. The documented field mapping from Highrise lets any future administrator trace how each field landed in HubSpot.

Solve CRM Migration and Data Governance With Campaign Creators

Firms that grow on a legacy CRM often reach a point where the system holds their history but can't structure their business, forcing deals, relationships, and compliance status into fields never built for them. Closing that gap takes more than moving records: it means treating ownership, segmentation, and compliance as core parts of the migration, not cleanup work for later. Campaign Creators builds HubSpot environments around the categories a business actually runs on, migrating what came before without losing who owns it.

Talk to a HubSpot expert to see how Campaign Creators can build a migration and CRM foundation around your legacy systems.