Many Customer Success (CS) leaders are at an inflection point: Can we build what we need for Customer Success inside Salesforce—or is it time to invest in something purpose-built?
It’s a classic debate. CRMs are already in place and familiar with go-to-market (GTM) teams. But as Customer Success (CS) becomes more strategic, more teams are realizing that a CRM isn’t enough to support the post-sales journey.
Reconfiguring a CRM for CS—Is It Worth It?
For many organizations, their first instinct is to stick with the familiar: Salesforce. After all, it’s widely used, deeply embedded in workflows, and highly customizable.
But while Salesforce is a powerful foundation for growing revenue, it isn’t purpose-built for CS. CRMs are great at managing customer data and tracking pipeline, but they aren’t built for tracking onboarding milestones, measuring health trends, or proactively surfacing churn risk … at least not out of the box.
Sure, Salesforce is well-known for its flexibility, and with enough internal resources, you can build some CS workflows into it. Unfortunately, that often means reinventing the wheel by creating custom fields, managing complex automation, and relying heavily on Salesforce admins to maintain it all. Again, it’s not impossible, but it’s also far from plug-and-play.
Building can be right for some teams, but it is important to understand the tradeoffs. For organizations with deep internal Salesforce expertise, strong development support, and highly specific workflows, creating a customer solution might make sense. That said, for most teams, the tradeoffs are too big to ignore: longer implementation timelines, significant admin overhead, and less agility as CS needs to evolve.
Why Purpose-Built Matters
Salesforce plays a critical role in your revenue tech stack. But when it comes to driving post-sale outcomes, even the most customized CRM often falls short.
This is where purpose-built Customer Success Platforms (CSPs) like Gainsight come into play. Designed for post-sales teams, CSPs are the smarter, faster, and more scalable choice, especially for teams under pressure to show ROI quickly. While CRMs are designed to track relationships, Gainsight is designed to manage what happens after the deal closes—so CS teams can deliver outcomes, not just manage accounts.
With out-of-the-box features like Customer Success Qualified Leads (CSQLs), Renewal Center, and Executive Dashboards, Gainsight gives teams what they need to operationalize their CS strategy faster, take proactive action, and drive growth (without relying on manual processes or months of customization).
Let’s take a closer look at exactly how Gainsight does that:
Tracking Customer Health in Real Time
While a CRM can track customer interactions, only a CSP like Gainsight can analyze customer behavior holistically.
- Assessing sentiment using surveys and AI-driven behavioral analysis
- Analyzing customer usage and engagement patterns to track onboarding, adoption, engagement, and other important customer outcomes
- Identifying churn risk signals and expansion “green flags”
Gainsight also enables CS to track health trends according to customer segments, business lines, or products, and industry verticals, or across the entire customer base. These are powerful tools that are hard to replicate in a CRM.
Mapping Complex Customer Relationships
In the post-sales environment, customer relationships can quickly become quite complex.
- With multiple executive sponsors, multiple teams, and sometimes thousands of end users using multiple products, a relationship with a single customer often becomes a maze of conflicting signals and potential blind spots.
- While a CRM can handle parent–child hierarchies quite well, these lateral relationships are simply not in its wheelhouse.
- Gainsight helps CS teams achieve onboarding and adoption milestones for multiple stakeholders, identify hidden churn risks, and suss out expansion opportunities.
For a CS team, the advantages of a dedicated CSP over a modified CRM are clear. But does that mean that you necessarily have to choose one or the other?
Why Gainsight + Salesforce Is the Real Power Move
The good news? You don’t have to choose.
CRMs and CSPs are complementary tools that work well together. Many companies use Salesforce data as their “source of truth” for customer information, and then port that information into Gainsight to drive action and insight for post-sales motions.
In fact, Gainsight integrates directly with Salesforce, making it easy for CS teams to get the best of both worlds.
- Salesforce provides a history of every sales and marketing interaction.
- Gainsight is the system of action, surfacing insights and driving workflows across onboarding, adoption, renewals, and expansion.
By integrating directly with Salesforce, Gainsight puts that rich CRM data to work, which enables CS teams to answer questions like:
- Which accounts are showing signs of risk?
- Where is product adoption stalling?
- Which customers are ready for expansion or advocacy?
And the value flows both ways.
Customer success insights from Gainsight can also flow the other way. They give Sales a better idea of which customers are likely to renew and provide higher lifetime value to the company. And they can help Marketing identify product and brand champions who can become a key component of a customer advocacy strategy.
Working together, Salesforce and Gainsight can bring an abundance of data-driven insights to companies looking to deliver an amazing customer experience. Each platform plays a different role, but together they make the whole show a dramatic success.
Want to learn more? Try Gainsight Customer Success today.
