CRM First Customer Success Strategy
Daniel Zarick, CEO of Arrows, on the problem with customer success platforms
This points to a common SaaS mistake, teams buy a second system to escape bad process, then end up with worse visibility because the same customer data now lives in two places. In smaller companies, the CRM is usually where sales leadership, finance, and post sale teams already check pipeline, handoffs, and reports. If onboarding and success move into a separate platform too early, the company adds another login, another workflow, and another sync that someone has to maintain.
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Arrows is built around the opposite assumption. It keeps the customer facing onboarding plan in Arrows, but pushes more than 40 onboarding data points back into HubSpot so teams can run reports and automations where they already work. That setup is meant to fix the handoff after closed won without creating a second source of truth.
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The alternative for many smaller teams is not a mature success platform at all, it is spreadsheets, project tools, and light automations glued to the CRM. Arrows argues the real failure mode is not missing software, it is that these workarounds never write meaningful post sale data back to the CRM, so executives lose the full customer journey in one reporting system.
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Purpose built success platforms still have real value, but usually later, when a company has enough complexity to justify a dedicated operating layer. Gainsight itself positions its product as a central hub for customer success and highlights integrations with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, HubSpot, and other systems, which shows the category is designed to sit on top of existing systems, not replace the need for a clean CRM foundation.
The market is moving toward CRM native post sale software, not more stand alone systems for SMBs. HubSpot ended 2024 with 247,939 customers and nearly $2.9 billion in ARR, which makes its installed base large enough for products like Arrows to grow by extending the CRM instead of competing with it. As more teams run onboarding and service inside the CRM, the winning tools will generate new data and actions, then feed them back into the system the rest of the company already trusts.