HubSpot is great for what it does. If you have a sales team, inbound lead volume, and a deal pipeline to manage, it earns every penny. But if you are using it to maintain personal relationships with past clients and warm contacts, you are using the wrong tool for that job — and probably not doing either thing particularly well. Here is how to set up the right system without losing what works.
Key Takeaways
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What HubSpot Does Well (And Where It Falls Short)
HubSpot is excellent at tracking deal stages, automating marketing sequences to large prospect lists, and giving sales teams a shared view of pipeline. These are genuine strengths.
Where it falls short for relationship nurturing: it does not tell you proactively who to reach out to. It does not surface conversation starters from someone's LinkedIn activity. It does not give you a simple daily prompt to maintain your warm contacts. It is a reactive tool — you have to remember to go to it. A networking CRM is proactive — it comes to you.
Most professionals using HubSpot for networking find themselves either ignoring the relationship maintenance side entirely, or doing elaborate workarounds — custom properties, manual task creation, and reminder sequences that feel like they were designed for a sales team, not a solo operator.
What to Export and What to Leave Behind
You do not need to migrate everything. Active deals and prospects in your pipeline can stay in HubSpot — that is what it is for. What you are moving is the relationship layer: past clients, referral sources, warm professional contacts, strategic relationships.
Export from HubSpot: filter for closed-won contacts from the past three years, your top referral sources, and any contact tagged as a 'warm relationship' in your current system. That is your migration list. Everyone else stays in HubSpot or is not worth importing at all.
Most networking CRMs support CSV import. HubSpot's export is clean and straightforward. The import takes 20–30 minutes, including cleanup.
Setting Up Your Networking CRM After Import
After importing, do three things: categorise contacts into relationship tiers (close, active, dormant), note the last meaningful touchpoint for each, and set your initial outreach cadences.
Regards makes this straightforward — you can add voice notes and context to each contact, set reminders, and immediately see who is overdue for outreach based on their relationship tier. Within a week, your networking CRM is working and your warm contacts are being managed properly for the first time.
Keep HubSpot for active deals and pipeline management. Use Regards for the relationship layer. The two tools serve different jobs, and running both costs less than the referrals you were losing by using only one.
Why we built Regards
I’m bad at staying in touch. Not because I don’t value people. Its a lot of work, and I didn’t have a system. This started as my fix. A quiet assistant that helped me nurture relationships thoughtfully. When people noticed the difference and asked what I was doing, it slowly evolved into a product. And the love has been incredible. Regards, Khuze
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I have to choose between HubSpot and a networking CRM?
No. Most professionals who make the switch keep both. HubSpot manages deals; the networking CRM manages relationships. They complement each other rather than compete.
How long does the migration take?
For most people, the actual data migration takes 30–60 minutes. The real time investment is categorising your contacts and setting cadences — allow 2–3 hours for that initial setup, which pays off immediately.
Will I lose any important contact data in the migration?
Export a full backup of your HubSpot contacts before making any changes. Standard CSV exports from HubSpot are comprehensive — you will have all fields available for import.
What if my team uses HubSpot and I want to use a networking CRM for my personal relationships?
Run them in parallel. Your personal networking CRM manages your individual relationship layer. HubSpot manages the team's shared pipeline. Many senior professionals in firms with shared CRMs maintain a personal tool alongside it for exactly this reason.
