Blog
Shauntle Barley
July 2, 2024
•
8 minutes
Where net new business growth once reigned supreme, modern SaaS companies have shifted their focus to net revenue retention (NRR). It used to be possible to skate by with less than 100% NRR, but in today's economic and funding climate, it's no longer sufficient.
Securing expansion revenue is much easier with happy customers, and customers are happy when they are successful.
The key insight of the Happy Customers Festival is that it's easier to service, support, and ensure customer success when using a unified tool for the full GTM function: marketing, sales and success.
When your entire go-to-market team shares the same source of truth and integrates their various tools into it, you truly enhance the customer experience.
Marketing Hub tools attract visitors and generate leads, while Sales Hub tools facilitate deal creation and closure. We heavily invest in acquiring and closing customers, but what happens next? Often, nothing until a problem arises. This is where customer success tools and integrations are vital. They manage the handoff, reduce friction in onboarding, and track the customer experience throughout the lifecycle.
Without effective onboarding to ensure their success using tools like Arrows and Service Hub, you risk losing customers and wasting all the time and resources spent to secure their business in the first place.
Recently, Arrows hosted the first (of many!) Happy Customers Festival–in which we demoed the integration of Arrows and HubSpot for managing the sales handoff, customer onboarding, and monitoring customer health.
Let’s dive into what we covered:
By integrating Arrows with HubSpot, companies can create a seamless onboarding experience that benefits both customers and internal teams.
The automations that we'll share not only enhance efficiency but also ensure a higher quality of service, ultimately reducing churn and boosting overall success.
When a deal is marked as closed won, a workflow is triggered to create an onboarding record, ensuring that all relevant information gathered in the sales process is passed seamlessly into the new customer onboarding phase.
This automation reduces the manual back-and-forth between sales and CS, and guarantees that no information is lost between sales and success.
Depending on the customer tier, an Arrows onboarding plan is automatically created and attached to the record. This eliminates manual work for the customer success team, allowing them to focus on more critical tasks.
Arrows is the customer facing task list–where customers can see which tasks are assigned to them and check the tasks off the list. As customers complete tasks, the activities are automatically updated in HubSpot, so your success team can easily see how far a customer has gotten in their onboarding work.
Arrows task assignments can be customized, and dynamically presented to customers based on information stored in HubSpot. For example–a customer that purchased a specific level of your software can be presented with the onboarding tasks that are only relevant for customers using that product tier.
And onboarding managers don't need to manually edit plans for each individual customer.
Arrows provides around 50 data points about customer activity which all pipe back into HubSpot via the integration, allowing for detailed reporting and analysis.
Integrating Arrows with HubSpot significantly enhances the onboarding experience by automating processes, reducing manual work, and ensuring seamless communication between teams.
This setup not only improves efficiency but also helps in maintaining high customer satisfaction and reducing churn.
With larger books of business, CSMs often struggle to identify which accounts need attention. That's why HubSpot built the new customer success workspace, including customer health scores.
Health scores track customers throughout their lifecycle. CS teams can create health scores on the company record in HubSpot, powered by all the data they've pulled into their CRM. (As of the release of this article, the feature is currently in private beta, with plans for public beta in late July '24).
Lists can be used to determine which companies should be evaluated. Think: a certain segment of customers, or a specific CSM’s book of business.
Customize the score by including any data from HubSpot, such as company properties, contact properties, deal properties, ticket properties, and soon, custom object properties.
Once you have your health score set up to categorize customer accounts into healthy, neutral, or at-risk statuses, then the real power of the connected customer platform can be leveraged: you can create workflows to automate tasks such as reminding CSMs to update sentiment properties, or to alert managers of at-risk statuses.
If it's your first attempt at a health score, don't overcomplicate it. It’s understandable to want every metric incorporated into the score–but that can make it hard to use and apply the data in the beginning.
We recommend starting simply, and start putting the score into action, then build on it as needed.
When marketing, sales, and success teams use the same platform, and integrations bring data from various tools into the CRM, both companies and customers benefit.
Running the customer journey in HubSpot and integrating data from your favorite apps connects the dots for your GTM team, providing full insight into the customer journey, enabling better personalization, and leveraging HubSpot's automation.
Arrows and HubSpot streamline work for customer success teams and improve the customer experience through automation:
HubSpot's customer success workspace and health scores help manage large books of business by identifying at-risk accounts and automating processes.
When set up well, success teams can focus on proactive activities to help customers succeed, rather than reactive tactics.
Successful customers are happy customers, and happy customers mean a happy business.
Join 6,000+ subscribers who read the Happy Customers newsletter—it's jam-packed with tips-and-tricks about onboarding, HubSpot, and making happy customers at scale.
Learn how other companies have scaled with Arrows, so their teams can help customers be successful at every stage of their journey.
Read customer stories