Stop 'Swivel Chairing': One AI Platform for All Your Product Data
Oct 22, 2024
I still remember the early days of building our first product. We were a small team, completely obsessed with understanding how people used what we built. Every morning, it was like a treasure hunt, but instead of a map, we had a dozen different tabs open: our analytics tool for user behavior, our CRM for customer conversations, a spreadsheet our sales team swore by, and then Slack, where customer success might have dropped a critical note. Honestly, it felt like I was in a swivel chair all day, literally spinning between screens trying to piece together one single story about our users. Watching me must have been hilarious. Even more so, incredibly unproductive. My neck hurt. No one enjoys the "swivel chair" dance, especially when you're just trying to figure out what's actually happening with your product. You know the routine: jumping from your product analytics tool to your CRM, maybe a messy spreadsheet, even a few support tickets. Then, you try to piece together a coherent story about your users. It's not just a huge time drain; it's almost guaranteed to make you miss important insights. For way too long, this crazy juggle was just accepted as normal. Product teams, customer success pros, and even marketing folks were constantly bouncing between disconnected systems, each holding a precious piece of the puzzle. We were all doing our best, of course, but the sheer effort of getting all that data to play nice often overshadowed any real analysis. That's no way to build a great product.
The Headache of Disconnected Product Data
Think about it: your product data is pure gold. It tells you who is using your product, how they're using it, what's really clicking, and what's not. But if that data is stuck in different platforms, its value just plummets. It’s like having a treasure map ripped into a dozen pieces and scattered across different rooms. Good luck finding the X now, right? This "swivel chairing" doesn't just give you a headache; it actually creates some serious business problems:
Missed opportunities: You can't jump in and help users who are on the brink of churning if you can't see their dropping usage and their support history all in one go.
Slower decisions: Every "what if we tried this?" question demands another data pull, another export. By the time you finally have an answer, the perfect moment might have passed.
An incomplete user picture: You might be excited about high engagement in one area but totally miss that those same users are flooding your support channels with bug reports elsewhere. You're only seeing half the story.
Bringing Product Data Home to One Platform
So, what if you could pull all that vital product usage data—your activation rates, feature adoption, time spent in the app, health scores—directly into the same platform where all your customer relationships already live? For a ton of B2B SaaS companies, that platform is HubSpot. HubSpot, which many of us still think of as just for marketing and sales, has quietly become so much more. With the right approach, it can honestly become the central nervous system for your entire customer journey, even after the sale. When you use it for more than just tracking MQLs and sending email sequences, you'll find it offers a surprisingly robust framework for customer success.
But here's the real magic: HubSpot's true power for customer success isn't just about creating custom properties or fancy pipelines. It's about integrating product usage data right there, sitting next to all your commercial and communication data. This means your customer success managers, product teams, and even sales can finally see the full picture—without ever having to leave HubSpot.
Life After Swivel Chairing: One AI Platform
Picture this:
A customer success manager logs in and immediately sees not only the last contact from sales but also their recent product engagement, how they've adopted key features, and any early signs of dropping activity—all neatly laid out on one company record. No more guessing games.
Your product team can segment users not just by their subscription tier (which comes from the CRM) but also by their actual feature usage (straight from product analytics), making feature prioritization genuinely data-driven.
Automated workflows can trigger personalized outreach when a user hits a big milestone, or, even more crucially, when they haven't engaged with a key feature after onboarding. It's proactive customer care at its best.
This isn't some futuristic fantasy. Tools exist right now that seamlessly connect your product analytics with HubSpot, transforming it into that comprehensive, single source of truth you've always wanted. When your product usage data flows directly into your CRM, every single team gains a much deeper understanding of customer health. This opens the door for proactive retention, smarter expansion, and truly aligned growth across the board. So, let's stop the "swivel." Consolidate your data. See the whole picture, and finally, start making smarter, faster decisions that truly push your business forward. Your users (and your brain) will absolutely thank you for it.