The Challenge
The SAP partner sought to formalise and streamline their Customer Success (CS) function using HubSpot, their existing CRM platform. The business was growing and wanted to ensure a structured, proactive approach to post-sales customer engagement and retention. With existing HubSpot Marketing Pro and Sales Enterprise subscriptions, the company wanted to define a scalable Customer Success process and understand the tools available within and outside HubSpot. They also wanted to explore automation opportunities for onboarding, ongoing customer engagement, and reporting, ensuring processes would integrate with existing workflows and systems. Crucially, the solution needed to be cost-effective, require minimal ongoing overhead, and work with tools the team was already using or open to adopting.
The Solution
AutomateNow proposed and demonstrated four potential approaches, each designed to align with the businesses current capabilities and future ambitions. The team built working demos, complete with pipelines, workflows, dashboards, and automation logic, to illustrate feasibility and value.
Solution 1: Ticket Pipeline
A lean and agile approach using HubSpot's Ticket pipeline. Each Customer Success initiative or milestone was represented as a ticket, triggering a tailored sequence of tasks.
Strengths: Fast to implement, minimal cost, enables task tracking and team ownership.
Limitations: Lacks visual tracking of customer journey stages; more limited reporting.
Solution 2: Custom Object + Ticket Pipeline
A custom “Customer” object is introduced to track all CS activities. Every new client generates a new Customer record via automation when a deal is marked as "Won". This record becomes the hub for tracking onboarding, stabilisation, and expansion efforts.
Strengths: Enables a visual Customer Success Journey, consolidated view of all associated data (deals, contacts, tickets).
Limitations: Slightly more complex to build than Solution 1, but still fully within HubSpot.
Solution 3: HubSpot + ClickUp Integration
Leverages ClickUp, a project management tool, alongside HubSpot. Each milestone is mirrored in ClickUp for detailed task tracking, timesheets, team capacity planning, and OKRs.
Strengths: Highly granular reporting, full visibility on performance and profitability.
Limitations: Requires managing two systems, additional training and licensing.
Solution 4: HubSpot Customer Success Workspace
A brand-new (at the time), dedicated Customer Success workspace launched by HubSpot in BETA mode. Offers a native environment for CS tracking and engagement scoring.
Strengths: Fully embedded in HubSpot, built specifically for CS functions.
Limitations: Still in beta, limited customisation and reporting compared to other options.
The Results
AutomateNow's recommendations provided the company with clear paths to enhance their Customer Success function. Solution 1 was designed in 1-2 days, Solution 2 in 2-3 days, Solution 3 in 5-6 days, and Solution 4 in 2-3 days, demonstrating the efficiency and feasibility of the solutions. They went with the customer success function within HubSpot and saw churn reduce after 3 months by 20% which lead to 5x ROI on investment with AutomateNow. The project lead at the SAP partner said - "AutomateNow’s expertise in HubSpot and their comprehensive approach to our Customer Success needs were invaluable. Their varied solutions gave us choices, and since we chose one and put it into place, we have significantly improved our post-sales engagement and reduced customer churn by 20%."
