Do you believe the product usage data should live in HubSpot, yes or no? There are plenty of use cases I know, and it is crucial, but still getting your views.
Data Team believes (which is right from their perspective) that product usage data should only be living in Data Warehouse and Tableau, but from marketing, CS and sales perspective, that won’t make their life easier.
Hi @NPradhan0,
That depends entirely on whether the data would be used by functions working in HubSpot or not, I would argue. If not, then there’s no reason to make it available there.
If however you have a freemium product, for example, and need product activity as triggers and filters for journey design, or if customer success should be able to have product usage information at a glance in HubSpot, then yes, it should be made available there.
There is no answer that applies to all companies, it’s a case by case evaluation.
Best regards
Customer Success team currently constantly need to switch between Tableau and HubSpot to find out churn warning, and product marketing team would eventually need product usage data to segment the customers. We have trial users and 3 more tiers for upgrade. The data team believes that customer success team should look at Tableau while they also believe trigger should come directly from Snowflake which would create a task in HubSpot about churn risk, but CS team should again look at Tableau to know the business context.
@NPradhan0 reading between the lines, what you’re describing sounds less like a HubSpot configuration question and more like an internal alignment conversation that needs to happen first.
Before optimizing the tech stack, it might be worth getting the relevant stakeholders in a room to align on: who owns churn signals, what action is expected from CS when a task is created, and whether Tableau is a complement to HubSpot or a replacement for it in the CS workflow.
Yes, actually I as a CRM person believe that computation should be done in Snowflake but aggregate data should live in both Snowflake and HubSpot. Data and Product team believes it should only be in Tableau and Snowflake, while Product Team and CS team agrees with me. CS team needs to not only look at churn, but also support the questions that come in the HubSpot and also do the onboarding. There is an upgrade/expansion that is also there. They live inside CRM, not Tableau, which is the reason why I strongly believe product usage aggregate data should live in HubSpot too, while computation can happen in Snowflake.
@NPradhan0 if CS lives in HubSpot for support, onboarding, and expansion, making them context-switch to Tableau is a real operational risk.
The data team’s pushback is a governance concern, not a technical one. Frame it around revenue risk (missed expansions, slower onboarding) and escalate to leadership - that’s the only way this gets resolved.
Definitely, that is what I was thinking too. Thanks for taking time for a productive discussion, Karsten.
This is a great discussion. In my experience, having product usage data in CRM really helps sales teams prioritize outreach based on actual user behavior rather than just firmographics. The key is making sure your data pipeline is clean before syncing — garbage in, garbage out as they say. On a side note, when I need a mental break from data and CRM work I find doing daily word puzzles really helps reset focus, specifically checking spelling bee hints every morning keeps the brain sharp!