Configure HubSpot company records for customer success

One downside of trying to use HubSpot for customer success is you need to do some configuration to get set up to enable your team.

The good news…it’s not as hard as you might think to give your team a complete picture of their accounts and the data they need to make their customers successful.

Out of the box, your company records in HubSpot will help you keep track of the associated contacts, deals, and tickets for each company along with the activity being logged against them.

So, let’s talk about how to centralize all your account data in one place by being intentional about how you use HubSpot company records:

Step 1: Create the specific properties we need for customer success

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. You might have additional specific fields you’d like to add but below you’ll find the 10 properties I’d recommend as a starting point.

To improve organization, we’ll add our new properties to 2 new groups.

First, we’ll add 2 new groups to categorize our properties.

Group 1: Customer Success

→ Renewal Date - Date

→ Renewal Amount -→ Next QBR Date - Date→ Health Score - Dropdown Select→ CSM - User

→ Customer Segment - Dropdown Select

Group 2: Onboarding

→ Onboarding Specialist (who was responsible) - User→ Onboarding Plan URL - Single Line Text→ Onboarding Status (Complete, In Progress, Failed)

Step 2. Highlight important properties in saved sidebar sections

Once we have our customer success specific properties created and ready to use, we can increase the visibility of the most important customer success information for each account by adding them to saved sections in the left sidebar.  These sections will correspond to the property groups we just created in step 1.

Section 1: Customer success information:→ Renewal Date

→ Renewal Amount→ Next QBR Date→ Customer Health Score→ CSM

Section 2: Onboarding information:→ Onboarding Specialist (who was responsible)→ Onboarding Plan URL→ Onboarding Status (Complete, In Progress, Failed)

Step 3. Add an account overview using a pinned note

As different teams get introduced and work with each customer throughout their lifecycle it can become increasingly difficult to stay up to date and get a quick high-level summary of what’s most important for this account.

We can create a saved snippet and use it to quickly create a consistent pinned note for each account that provides a high-level summary and answers these 3 questions:

→ What do they do?→ What are their goals/success metrics?→ What notable context must everyone know?

Step 4. Configure association settings

Finally we want to make sure our 360-degree view of an account is complete by associating all other records related to this account. HubSpot can be configured to automatically associate contacts with the same email domain to companies and each new deal or ticket can also be manually associated with the company record. In lesson 4 we’ll cover how to update company properties when important information is added to an associated deal or ticket.

For now we will:

Associate “contacts” who have been engaged from this account.

Associate “deals” for each commercial activity in the lifecycle.→ Initial sales→ Renewals→ Upgrades, expansions, contractions

Associate “tickets” that have been created for this account.→ Onboarding→ Support

And that’s our day 1 setup - a 360-degree account view using HubSpot company records.

Bringing all your account data together in one place not only makes it easier for everyone who interacts with the customer to quickly gain context and be better prepared to make them successful…

…but it also enables improvements to internal workflows and reporting that allow your team to focus their time on their highest leverage work.

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