The SaaS Customer Success Nightmare: Why HubSpot Custom Events Matter

The Silent Revenue Leak in SaaS Customer Success

How much revenue is slipping through the cracks because your Customer Success team is operating reactively?

Without real-time visibility into product usage, customer engagement, and risk signals, even the best CS teams are left chasing spreadsheets instead of driving expansion.

• Customers hit usage limits and churn instead of upgrading.

• Key accounts disengage, but no one notices until renewal time.

• Support tickets spike, but CS isn’t looped in until the customer is already frustrated.

Without connected, automated insights, Customer Success becomes a firefighting team, not a growth engine. That’s where HubSpot Custom Events change the game.

Meet Tom, The Overloaded CSM

Tom is an Enterprise Customer Success Manager at a fast-growing SaaS company that provides project management software for agencies. Tom is good at his job. Really good.

He knows exactly what keeps customers happy, engaged, and renewing. But with a growing customer base and increasing expectations, the old way of managing accounts isn't cutting it anymore.

Instead of spending time actually helping customers, he’s stuck exporting spreadsheets, building pivot tables, and manually crunching data—just to figure out who needs attention.

• If he finds something urgent? He jumps on it.

• If not? That’s wasted time, and onto the next account.

Tom manages 10 key accounts, and 50 mid-tier accounts.

He wants to be proactive, but his tools aren’t working for him.

His project management software does track customer activity - but it’s siloed.

His helpdesk software contains his clients support interactions.

His HubSpot CRM has sales interactions from upstream of his involvement.

His client's revenue and usage reports are in Excel, from the billing team.

So Tom does what he can - he focuses on his biggest accounts, and crosses his fingers in hope that the rest are doing fine.

Spoiler alert: They’re not. And Tom’s boss is putting pressure on the team to prevent churn this quarter.

Tom is getting exhausted. The longer hours, the endless reports, the constant pressure - it’s all starting to wear him down. He wants to do great work, but the tools and processes aren’t supporting him.

Instead, they’re dragging him under. He’s staying late, waking up stressed, and, for the first time, he’s wondering if the company is the right place for him. He doesn’t want to leave - but this way of working isn't sustainable.

Enter HubSpot Custom Events: The Game-Changer

Tom knows there’s a better way, but getting leadership on board isn’t easy. He tracks the inefficiencies—how much time is wasted on manual tracking, siloed data, and reactive firefighting—and presents it to leadership. After losing key renewals and missing expansion opportunities, leadership finally agrees.

A HubSpot expert steps in to assess the data problem and build a plan for integration. The HubSpot expert works with Tom's development team, focusing on integrating key customer activity from their SaaS platform directly into HubSpot. Now, when something important happens, Tom sees it—without digging through five different tools.

Now flowing into HubSpot:

✅ New employee added (Great! Time to offer an onboarding call.)
✅ New project created (Engagement is happening—keep it going.)
✅ Project completed (Perfect moment for a case study ask.)
✅ Integration set up (Adoption is expanding—time to check in.)
✅ Automation created (Power user alert!)
✅ Dashboard or report built (This team is invested.)
✅ First invoice created (New paying customer—let’s make sure they stick.)
✅ Usage limits approaching (Upsell opportunity—don’t miss it.)
✅ No login for 30 days (Red flag—time to act.)
✅ New feature activated (Let’s follow up to see if they like it.)
✅ Support ticket opened (Time to check in before frustration builds.)

All of this now appears inside contact, company, and customer records in HubSpot. No manual work. No guesswork. Just clear, real-time visibility into customer health.

What Tom Can Now Do (Without Losing His Mind):

✅ See customer activity in a single timeline—No more chasing data.
✅ Create automated reports—A summary lands in his inbox every morning.
✅ Set alerts for key events—So he knows when to take action.
✅ Automate follow-ups—Because manual outreach is not scalable.
✅ Trigger relevant customer engagement—The right message, at the right time.

3 Real-World Scenarios: How HubSpot Custom Events Transform Customer Success

1. Preventing Silent Churn Before It’s Too Late

A key account hasn't logged into the platform for 30 days. Previously, this would go unnoticed until renewal time—when it’s already too late.

With HubSpot Custom Events:

🚨 An automated alert notifies Tom of the inactivity.

📩 HubSpot triggers an automated email from Tom: “Hey, noticed your team hasn’t been active lately. Is there anything I can help with?”

📞 If there’s no response, HubSpot schedules a follow-up call task for Tom.

Outcome: The customer replies—turns out their main user left the company, and they need retraining. Tom organises a quick onboarding session, saving the account from churning.

A renewal saved with zero manual tracking.

2. Identifying Power Users & Turning Them into Advocates

A customer’s usage has skyrocketed—more projects, more automations, more engagement. But without tracking, Tom wouldn’t know who these superusers are.

With HubSpot Custom Events:

🚀 HubSpot flags customers hitting certain adoption milestones (e.g., “100 projects completed”).

📩 Tom sends an automated message: “Wow! Your team is one of our most active users. Would you be open to sharing your experience in a case study?”

🌟 The customer agrees—Tom now has a new advocate, testimonial, and social proof for the company.

Outcome: The customer gets recognised, and Tom’s company gets a free marketing asset—win-win.

3. Upselling Without the Hard Sell

A customer is actively using the platform and nearing their project limit, but without tracking, Tom wouldn’t know when to step in with an expansion offer.

With HubSpot Custom Events:

🚀 HubSpot detects when a customer approaches their usage limit.

📩 Tom sends an automated message: “Congrats! Your team is growing fast! Most customers at this stage upgrade to unlock extra features. Let’s chat—I’d love to walk you through what’s next.”

📆 A meeting link is included, making it easy for the customer to book time with Tom.

Outcome: The customer books a call, upgrades their plan, and continues scaling—all without a hard sell or an awkward upsell conversation. Tom doesn’t have to sift through reports or manually reach out—it just happens.

The Honest Truth About Implementation

This isn’t a one-click setup. If it were, everyone would already be doing it.

Here’s what it actually takes:

🛠️ Defining your key customer signals (What actually matters?)
🛠️ Development time (Expect 2-3 days of engineering work.)
🛠️ Workflow design in HubSpot (Because just having data isn’t enough—you need automation.)
🛠️ Training the Customer Success team (They need to know how to access, interpret, and act on these insights.)

Biggest mistake? Trying to track everything at once.

Start small—focus on 5-7 key events that actually drive renewals, retention, and expansion.

The Bottom Line: Why This Actually Matters

If your CS team is reactive instead of proactive, you’re already losing customers.

❌ Wasting time chasing data? Customers feel ignored.
❌ Missing churn signals? Revenue walks out the door.
❌ Slow to spot expansion opportunities? You’re leaving money on the table.

But with HubSpot Custom Events, everything changes:

✅ CSMs get real-time insights (without data detective work).
✅ Red flags are spotted early (not when it’s too late).
✅ Upsells happen naturally (without pushy sales tactics).

Companies serious about protecting customer experience, revenue, and retention are already integrating SaaS product data into their HubSpot CRM.

So the real question is: Why aren’t you?

If this sounds like the missing piece in your CS strategy, let’s talk.