Arrows is a customer onboarding platform built specifically for HubSpot. The business started because CEO Daniel Zarick and his team saw how painful it was for customers to onboard to new products and services, as well as how challenging it was for customer success teams to stay on top of that process.
A successful onboarding experience sets the foundation for long term growth and can reduce the likelihood of churn.
The Arrows motto is “I Love Happy Customers” and the Arrows team brings that to life through their product. Arrows enables HubSpot customers to create a seamless post-sales process for their customers.
The journey for the Arrows team to becoming a HubSpot-first app required strategic decision making and listening to their own customers.
Arrows shifted their focus and how their product interacts with HubSpot because they realized it would make their customers even more successful. In turn, they were able to deliver a best in class integration.
Arrows Deletes 1/3 of their Product
While first figuring out the best path for the Arrows product, CEO Daniel Zarick recalls customers asking for a lot of features to be added to Arrows.
"Our customers had a lot of 'red herring' feature requests -- features that customers ask for which won't move the needle. We knew we needed to focus on adding unique value to Arrows."
Daniel Zarick, CEO, Arrows
Listening to the pain points behind the feature requests, Daniel realized that instead of adding more features to the Arrows UI, the customers' objectives could actually be better accomplished by focusing on building in the HubSpot UI. Daniel said to his co-founder, "I think we should delete our dashboard," which was a core part of the Arrows product at the time.
Customers would benefit from seeing the progress of what was going on with their customers from within the system that contains all the information related to the go-to-market motion - their CRM.
The reporting in the Arrows dashboard could be better visualized and operationalized inside HubSpot. In April 2022, Arrows decided to delete 1/3 of their product and replaced it with a deeper HubSpot integration.
This customer-centric approach led to the Arrows team fully investing in building for HubSpot.
Understanding the HubSpot Product
The Arrows team made sure to understand where the HubSpot product was today and how it might evolve over time.
They spoke directly with HubSpot's Product Team to better learn how HubSpot prioritizes features and how Arrows can share feedback about different use cases related to both the core HubSpot product and the Arrows app.
Arrows believes that showing off the unique value and features of HubSpot as a platform enables them to sell and deliver a holistic solution to customers. Keeping informed on the HubSpot roadmap and the platform's evolving feature set helps ensure that Arrows evolved with HubSpot.
Arrows has continued to focus on pushing as much valuable data into HubSpot as possible. With Arrows, users can create and share customer-facing success plans without ever leaving HubSpot, use data from their HubSpot account in Arrows plans, and sync customer activity and status changes to their HubSpot deals and tickets.
Arrows is a best-in-class integration that does not require customers to leave HubSpot. As CEO Daniel Zarick notes, "Nobody wants yet another tool or inbox to log into."
Go-to-Market Collaboration and Success
Arrows has collaborated with HubSpot from a go-to-market perspective in a number of ways. Stuart Balcombe, Head of Growth at Arrows, explains, "You don't just go all in on HubSpot as a product, you have to go all in on HubSpot as a go-to-market motion too."
Arrows has pursued a content-first approach to going to market. Daniel and Stuart both post regularly on LinkedIn to engage the HubSpot community.
You'll find members of the Arrows team posting most days with content related to how to get the most out of their integration, HubSpot product tips and tricks, or Arrows updates. These highly engaged posts contain helpful and useful content.
They often post about how to build out processes using HubSpot's customer success tools, for example. One such post detailed how to create a report demonstrating the time between deal closed and onboarding kick-off in HubSpot.
In addition to social posts, Arrows also created other forms of valuable content, like their guide to using HubSpot as a customer success software. By establishing themselves as helpful, informative voices in the HubSpot community, Arrows is able to organically attract new customers while also furthering their relationships with HubSpotters and HubSpot partners.
HubSpot's go-to-market teams see the value in the content that Arrows publishes. Mid-Market Account Executive, Daniel Huang, shares, "One of my customers brought up how they loved Arrows's YouTube videos on using HubSpot for onboarding."
"HubSpot had already built an incredible community of raving fans: We built our entire go-to-market engine around meeting those fans where they are and solving problems they already had. By focusing on adding value to the channel, investing without immediately measuring ROI, and building trust before selling, we've learned more and got further together than we ever expected."
Stuart Balcombe, Head of Growth, Arrows
This level of investment in the HubSpot community contributes to why Arrows continues to grow in HubSpot's ecosystem. They boast more than 4x revenue growth in less than a year since launching the Arrows + HubSpot app and are the #1 most installed app in the customer success category.
The investment is certainly mutual. In March 2023, HubSpot Ventures announced its investment in Arrows.
The HubSpot Ventures investment reflects how both companies care deeply about customer relationships. The shared goal of delivering exceptional customer experiences will continue to fuel the growth of the HubSpot + Arrows partnership.
Read more partner stories to discover other ways that partners have found success in the HubSpot ecosystem. Check out how Aircall and RollWorks grew with HubSpot.
