There’s an awkward stage that many SaaS companies are stuck in:

Your Customer Success team is big enough to have its own processes, yet it doesn’t have a dedicated Customer Success Tool like Planhat or Gainsight.

The reality is that a lot of Customer Success managers have to make due with the CRM software that the Sales and Marketing teams are using. Often enough, that’s Hubspot.

So if you’re stuck in that situation, but you want to get more out of Hubspot (or another CRM), I have 4 tips for you that will make your life as a CSM in Hubspot easier.

Tip #1: Create a “Contract end date” property

Hubspot automatically assigns a “close date” when a deal is won. But that’s often not the actual contract end date. You can require a sales rep to assign a “contract end date” to a contact, company, or deal (see how).

Now, you can simply filter your companies/contacts based on who fill have expiring contracts in, for example, 3 months.

You can then even build workflow automations that will, for example, create automatic follow-up tasks for this soon-to-expire contracts.

Tip #2: Use pipelines for onboarding

It’s hard to track your customer onboarding in Hubspot. But there’s an easy fix: Create a new deal pipeline and call it “onboarding”. Your deal stages can then be the different stages of onboarding that you need to lead your clients through. Onboarding is very similar to the winning of a deal, and this flow has worked well for me.

Tip #3: Create your own lifecycle stages

Hubspot’s native lifecycle stages don’t go beyond “Customer” and “Evangelist”. But you probably have your own additions to that (e.g. in which cycle the customer is right now).

My solution for that is to create a custom property for the “Customer Stage” and assign the stages based on your CS flow.

Bonus: Group your custom properties in a group you call “Customer success” so you can find them easier.

Tip #4: Assign Tier 1/2/3 to clients

Similar to tip #1, you can force your Sales team to assign an importance to a client, for instance on recurring revenue or upsell potential. Categorizing your clients like this early on will massively make your life easier at a later stage.

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