Okay, you're gearing up to start running your customer success operations in HubSpot. Before diving into the more complex aspects for sales handoffs, customer onboarding, and renewals, we've got to establish a solid foundation by ensuring all the basic configurations are correctly in place.

We'll go over the initial setup steps like choosing the right Hubs and HubSpot tiers, configuring your company records, and creating separate pipelines for each customer lifecycle stage.

With these foundations set, you'll be well-equipped to start building out your post-sales processes in HubSpot!

If you're thinking about using HubSpot for customer success and want to make sure you have the right foundation in place first, this quick blog post is for you.

We'll explore which Hubs are most effective for customer success and suggest which HubSpot pricing tiers are necessary to make the most of their automations for your post-sale processes.

Let’s face it: HubSpot is more commonly used for sales and marketing than customer success, so we’ll want to add some new data to the company record for our purposes.

We'll outline the most critical properties to add to your initial setup, create sidebars on the company records to highlight and organize those new properties, and create an account overview pinned note so everyone in your HubSpot account has easy access to the same high-level company details.

When you're setting up your pipelines in HubSpot, we're almost always going to recommend creating a separate pipeline for each unique part of the customer lifecycle. We'll cover the reasons why you need distinct pipelines and go over the basics for setting up a separate pipeline for sales and onboarding to start.

Heads up - we're just setting up the basics here, so you'll find steps to set up your separate renewals pipeline in part 4.

Your company record (configured in an earlier step) will house all your high-level account data, but your individual deal and ticket records can get more specific depending on which lifecycle stage you're managing in each pipeline.

In this example, we'll show a setup for a customer onboarding record. You can use this as inspiration for the different types of data you can pull into each pipeline for customer success.