Customer success moving inside CRMs

The shift toward fewer UIs means the winning post sales tools are becoming infrastructure inside the CRM, not separate destinations beside it. Arrows made that trade on purpose. Instead of asking a success manager to live in one tool and then copy outcomes back to HubSpot, it keeps the customer facing onboarding plan in Arrows and pushes the resulting task, timing, and status data into the CRM where sales, success, and leadership already run reports and workflows.

• This is partly a reaction to how customer success software evolved. Dedicated platforms like Gainsight can be powerful, but they often require a full operating model change and a meaningful implementation. Arrows positioned around the opposite motion, fast setup, CRM native workflow, and no new daily inbox for the team.
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• The same pattern showed up across adjacent tools. Dock described customer onboarding and sales work as getting fragmented across email, docs, project tools, and portals, then needing an aggregation point. Arrows reaches a similar conclusion, but uses the CRM as that center of gravity instead of building a separate workspace for every internal user.
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• The bet also gets stronger as HubSpot gets bigger. HubSpot ended 2024 with 247,939 customers, up from 205,091 at the end of 2023, which expands the market for apps that deepen the CRM rather than replace it. In Arrows' 2024 interview, the company said it had reached about 850 installs in the HubSpot ecosystem and kept delaying a Salesforce move because the HubSpot opportunity remained large.
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Going forward, more workflow software will look like a thin layer on top of system of record data, with the warehouse feeding the CRM and specialized products generating signals inside it. That favors products that own a narrow but critical workflow, then write their value back into the place where the rest of the company already works.