Why building inside your competitor is a better strategy | Pieter Boon @ImpactPilot

saas.unbound is a podcast for and about founders who are working on scaling inspiring products that people love, brought to you by https://saas.group/, a serial acquirer of B2B SaaS companies.

In episode #14 of season 6, Anna Nadeina talks with Pieter Boon, co-founder of ImpactPilot, a Customer Success (CS) platform designed specifically as an add-on for HubSpot.

Customer Success for SaaS: How to Reduce Churn, Improve Retention, and Build the Right CS Motion

Customer success helps SaaS companies keep customers, grow accounts, and reduce preventable churn. Unlike support, which responds to issues after they happen, customer success is proactive. Its job is to help customers reach outcomes before risk shows up at renewal time.

For B2B SaaS companies, especially in mid-market and enterprise, that distinction matters. If customers need onboarding, behavior change, process adoption, or internal alignment to get value from your product, customer success is not optional. It is part of revenue.

This guide explains what customer success is, when a SaaS company needs it, how to start a CS function, common hiring mistakes, how AI fits into post-sale work, and why many teams are rethinking standalone customer success platforms.

What is customer success?

Customer success is a proactive post-sale function focused on helping customers achieve value from your product.

That usually includes:

• Onboarding and implementation guidance
• Driving product adoption
• Identifying risk early
• Preparing for renewals well before contract end dates
• Expanding usage when customers are getting results

The core idea is simple: when customers succeed, retention improves and revenue grows more naturally.

Customer success vs customer support

This is one of the most common questions in SaaS.

Customer support is reactive

Support responds when a customer has a question, problem, or request. The customer initiates the interaction, and the team solves the issue.

Customer success is proactive

Customer success reaches out before a problem becomes a churn event. It looks for signals, usage patterns, business goals, or upcoming milestones and acts early.

A simple way to think about it:

• Support answers questions
• Success drives outcomes

Both matter, but they solve different problems.

Do all SaaS companies need a customer success team?

No. But most SaaS companies benefit from a customer success mindset.

Whether you need an actual CS team depends on a few factors.

You may not need a full CS team if:

• Your product is simple and self-explanatory
• Your pricing is low-touch and low-ticket
• You run a product-led growth model with minimal implementation needs
• Customers can get value without behavior change or internal rollout

In those cases, tech-touch success programs may be enough.

You likely do need customer success if:

• Your product is complex
• You sell to mid-market or enterprise accounts
• Implementation requires coordination across teams
• Customers must change workflows to realize value
• Retention depends on adoption, not just purchase

Once change management becomes part of the product experience, customer success becomes much more important.

Why customer success matters for retention and growth

Growth without retention is fragile. If customers leave as fast as new ones arrive, the business is not building durable revenue.

That is why retention is such a critical SaaS metric. Customer success affects:

• Gross revenue retention
• Net revenue retention
• Renewal rates
• Expansion opportunities
• Customer advocacy

Strong customer success is often the difference between a customer who buys once and a customer who expands over time.

How to start customer success in a SaaS company

If you are an early-stage founder or revenue leader, the best starting point is not software. It is pattern recognition.

Step 1: Identify what your most successful customers do differently

Look at the customers who renew, adopt quickly, and get measurable value. Then ask:

• What did they implement?
• Who was involved internally?
• What workflows changed?
• What milestones did they hit early?
• What behaviors correlate with stronger retention?

Your goal is to find the specific actions that lead to success.

Step 2: Turn those actions into a repeatable playbook

Once you know what works, make it repeatable across the customer base.

Examples of repeatable success motions include:

• Getting a technical integration completed early
• Ensuring executive stakeholders join key business reviews
• Driving adoption of a core feature tied to ROI
• Implementing a workflow that increases end-user usage

The goal is not to talk about vague outcomes. It is to guide customers toward concrete actions that improve their odds of success.

Step 3: Track whether customers actually complete those actions

Do not stop at advice. Measure execution.

For each customer, track whether the critical milestones happen. This creates early visibility into risk and lets the team intervene before renewal pressure starts building.

Step 4: Build a proactive operating rhythm

Customer success works best when the team does not wait for the customer to ask for help.

That means building routines around:

• Onboarding progress
• Adoption reviews
• Risk checks
• Renewal preparation
• Opportunity identification

If the first serious conversation about value happens near contract end, customer success started too late.

Examples of proactive customer success in practice

A strong CS program usually relies on leading indicators, not just lagging outcomes.

Example 1: Incentivizing the right customer behaviors

If certain customer behaviors consistently lead to higher retention, customer success should push those behaviors intentionally.

For example, if customers who complete a key integration and involve executive sponsors during quarterly reviews retain better, those become strategic milestones.

The CS team can then:

• Promote those milestones during onboarding
• Track who has and has not completed them
• Raise them in customer conversations
• Use them to prioritize outreach

Example 2: Changing the workflow that blocks adoption

Sometimes success depends on changing how the customer operates.

If the most successful customers use a self-serve booking flow, intake form, or automated process that drives product usage, that pattern should be rolled out across similar accounts.

This is a key point: customer success is often about selling a better way of working, not just explaining product features.

What great customer success managers actually do

A common misconception is that great CSMs are simply friendly, responsive, and well liked.

Those qualities help, but they are not enough.

Strong CSMs lead customers. They do not just agree with them.

That means they can:

• Recommend the next best action clearly
• Push for the implementation steps that matter
• Hold customers accountable respectfully
• Focus on outcomes instead of just relationships

In many SaaS environments, customers do not want endless open-ended check-ins. They want clear guidance on how to succeed with the product.

The biggest early-stage customer success hiring mistake

One of the most common SaaS mistakes is promoting the first person handling customers into the customer success leader role too early.

Why this happens

At first, almost any customer attention improves the experience if there was nothing before. Customers are happier, communication improves, and churn may temporarily drop.

That can make the first CS hire look like an obvious leader.

Why it often goes wrong

Being a good individual contributor is not the same as building a scalable CS function.

Without experience, support, and a clear strategy, first-time leaders often struggle to:

• Design repeatable processes
• Segment accounts properly
• Define playbooks
• Build documentation
• Hire the right team profile

The result is often a pleasant but mediocre CS organization.

What to do instead

Before hiring, define:

• Your customer success strategy
• Your account coverage model
• Whether onboarding needs a dedicated role
• How technical the motion is
• What type of CSM profile can scale the function

Then hire for the future model, not just today’s pain.

Also, avoid making implicit promises that the first CSM will automatically become the team leader. That only works if the person truly has the right background for that next stage.

When founders should handle customer success themselves

In the earliest stages, founders often need to own customer success directly.

That is not just because headcount is limited. It is because the company still needs to learn what makes customers successful.

If a founder cannot clearly answer this question, it may be too early to hire a CSM:

What specific 4 to 5 actions make a customer likely to renew?

Until that is clear, the work is still discovery, not delegation.

Do you need a standalone customer success platform?

Not always.

Many SaaS teams use dedicated customer success platforms, but there is a growing argument for running customer success inside the CRM rather than in a separate tool.

The problem with standalone CS tools

When customer success lives in a second platform, teams often create duplicate records, duplicate workflows, and duplicate reporting. Over time, that can lead to:

• Stale data
• Manual updates
• Poor adoption internally
• Executive teams ignoring the system
• Misalignment between sales, success, and account management

In practice, some standalone CS platforms become underused systems that only the CS team touches.

Why building customer success inside the CRM can work better

If the CRM already contains most customer data, building on top of it can reduce implementation time and improve cross-functional visibility.

That approach can help with:

• Faster rollout
• Less duplicate data entry
• Better adoption by CSMs
• Shared visibility across go-to-market teams
• Stronger foundations for AI

The broader benefit is organizational. If marketing, sales, account management, and customer success all need customer context, keeping that data front and center in one core system is often more practical than spreading it across disconnected tools.

What are the tradeoffs of building on top of one platform?

There are clear downsides.

1. You narrow your ideal customer profile

If your solution depends on one CRM, you cannot serve companies on other systems unless you expand later.

2. You depend on that platform’s roadmap

If the platform adds similar features, you may face overlap or direct competition.

3. Your product strategy must stay complementary

To succeed, you need to fit into the platform ecosystem rather than fight against it.

That said, some founders prefer this model because platform investment can also expand the market. When a major CRM puts more emphasis on post-sale workflows, it can make more companies take customer success infrastructure seriously.

Why unified customer data matters even more with AI

AI works better when customer data is in one place.

For customer success, that means combining signals such as:

• Product usage
• Communication history
• Support tickets
• Contract timing
• Adoption trends
• Commercial context

When that data is fragmented, AI has an incomplete picture. That reduces accuracy and makes automation riskier.

How to use AI in customer success without damaging customer relationships

AI can add a lot of value in customer success, but it should be used carefully.

Best use case: risk and opportunity detection

One of the strongest AI use cases in CS is scanning data for patterns and surfacing the next best action.

Examples include:

• A customer mentions bugs frequently in recent conversations
• Adoption is falling compared to the previous period
• A contract end date is approaching but no renewal plan is in motion
• A re-onboarding workshop may be needed
• An expansion opportunity is emerging based on usage patterns

This saves CSMs from manually piecing together signals from multiple systems.

Where to be careful: customer-facing automation

Automating direct communication in customer success is more sensitive than automating support replies.

Why?

• CS often involves persuasion, not just information delivery
• Enterprise and mid-market relationships are personal
• Missing context creates awkward or risky outreach
• Customers may expect a human judgment call

For now, many teams are better off using AI to draft, suggest, and prioritize, while keeping a human in the loop for actual communication.

A practical AI guardrail for CS

Use AI to:

• Summarize account activity
• Flag risk and opportunity signals
• Recommend outreach
• Draft emails or messages

Keep humans responsible for:

• Final customer communication
• High-stakes renewal conversations
• Behavior change requests
• Strategic account guidance

That balance gives teams leverage without weakening trust.

How to make customer success scalable

As customer count grows, a founder-led, high-touch motion becomes hard to sustain.

Scalable customer success usually requires:

• Clear documentation
• Defined milestones
• Segmented account strategies
• Automated alerts and campaigns
• Human touch points at key moments

The goal is not to remove the human element. It is to make sure human effort is spent where it matters most.

What works for early SaaS growth when selling a CS product

For companies selling into customer success or revenue teams, early traction often comes from focused, relationship-driven channels rather than broad paid acquisition.

Practical early channels can include:

• Existing network outreach
• Beta customers willing to give deep feedback
• Niche communities
• LinkedIn posting and commenting
• Relevant industry forums

A useful early approach is to work closely with a small number of customers, almost like a consulting engagement, to refine the product and playbooks before trying to scale demand generation.

How to be active on LinkedIn in a way that actually helps B2B growth

For some SaaS categories, LinkedIn can be a meaningful source of leads. But “being active” usually means more than just posting occasionally.

Two useful components:

1. Publish useful ideas consistently
   Share relevant lessons, observations, and practical insights that matter to your target audience.
2. Turn engagement into conversations
   Connect with people who engage, follow up, and build relationships over time.

This works best when your target buyers are already active on the platform.

A simple customer success tactic that improves retention

One underrated tactic is telling customers when they are succeeding.

Many SaaS teams work hard to create value but fail to make that value visible.

When a customer hits a goal, saves an account, improves retention, completes a rollout, or reaches an important milestone, say so clearly.

This matters for two reasons:

• It reinforces progress and keeps momentum high
• It helps the customer connect that success to your product

You can do this through:

• Email updates
• Business reviews
• Automated milestone messages
• Executive recap notes

Customers do not always notice their own progress. Good customer success makes wins visible.

Common customer success mistakes to avoid

• Treating CS like support
  If the team only reacts to requests, risk is already building.
• Buying software before defining the process
  Tools help scale a motion. They do not create one.
• Measuring only lagging indicators
  By the time churn shows up, it is often too late.
• Hiring for friendliness instead of leadership
  Customers need guidance, not just pleasant check-ins.
• Promoting too early into CS leadership
  The first CSM is not automatically the right team builder.
• Splitting customer data across too many systems
  That weakens execution and limits AI usefulness.
• Over-automating customer communication
  Especially in higher-value accounts, trust still depends on human judgment.

How to know your customer success motion is working

Look for signs such as:

• Customers complete key milestones earlier
• Renewal conversations become less reactive
• Risk accounts are identified sooner
• Adoption improves across similar customer segments
• Retention strengthens as the success playbook spreads

Most importantly, the team should be able to explain why certain customers are more successful than others and what action should happen next.

Customer success is not just a department. It is the operating system behind retention.

For simple, low-touch SaaS products, that may mean lightweight, automated guidance. For mid-market and enterprise SaaS, it usually means a proactive function that leads customers to value, uses data to spot risk early, and keeps post-sale work tightly connected to the rest of the go-to-market team.

If there is one practical starting point, it is this: study your best customers, identify the behaviors that make them successful, and make those behaviors repeatable for everyone else.