Arrows Embeds Onboarding in CRM
Daniel Zarick, CEO of Arrows, on the problem with customer success platforms
This move turned Arrows from another place the team had to visit into infrastructure that makes the CRM itself more useful. Instead of copying CRM data into a separate app and asking success teams to live there, Arrows narrowed its product to the customer facing onboarding plan, then pushed onboarding status, overdue tasks, and completion data back into HubSpot so teams could run reports, workflows, and handoffs where sales and success already work every day.
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The practical gain is adoption. Arrows found that if onboarding starts when a deal hits closed won, reps want to launch the plan, track progress, and trigger automations from inside HubSpot, not by opening a second tool. That makes onboarding part of the same pipeline the rest of the company already manages.
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The product gain is leverage. Arrows syncs more than 40 onboarding data points into HubSpot, which lets customers use HubSpot reporting and automation for things like overdue task alerts, slow onboarding reports, and sales to implementation handoffs, without Arrows rebuilding a full reporting layer of its own.
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The market gain is a much bigger wedge. Arrows concluded the standalone customer success platform category was relatively small and heavy to deploy, while CRM users number in the hundreds of thousands to millions. Dock and other onboarding tools also push activity data into Salesforce or HubSpot, which shows the category is converging on CRM native workflows.
The next step is that more post sale work gets absorbed into the CRM stack, with specialized apps supplying the customer facing layer and unique data. As HubSpot expands upmarket and deepens its platform motion, products like Arrows can become the default way to add onboarding functionality without forcing companies to buy a full standalone success system.