Companies Ditch CSPs for Salesforce

A growing number of companies are turning away from dedicated Customer Success Platforms (CSPs) and instead using Salesforce as their central hub for customer success management. According to various leaders in the field, this shift is driven by several key factors.

One major reason is that CSPs often replicate data already available on Salesforce, requiring additional licenses and maintenance costs. As John Choi, Director of Customer Operations at Apollo.io, put it, 'I am not a big fan of layering a CSP onto Salesforce.' He noted the latency issues and extra management costs associated with using multiple platforms.

Another factor is that Salesforce is designed to provide a unified view of customer interactions across sales, marketing, and support teams. This enables companies to create a more cohesive customer experience and better track customer health. As Cameron Whitman, Senior Manager, RevOps, Post Sales & CS at Superhuman, said, 'I would rather just have it all in Salesforce because then I can actually give reps the view that they need to have to do their workflow within the place that they’re actually working.'

Companies are also looking for ways to reduce costs and eliminate redundant technology. As Ryan Stiskin, GTM Analyst at Sensor Tower, noted, 'We were grossly overpaying for our [CSP] contract with… zero utilization or nearly zero.' By consolidating on Salesforce, companies can streamline their operations and focus on driving customer success.

To make the transition to Salesforce as a CSP, companies are leveraging various features such as product usage data, list views, dashboards, and reporting. As Paul Wilson, tech industry advisor at Coastal, said, 'Standing up a pipeline to get product usage data in front of your CS team used to be the price of admission… Data 360 changes the math.' By integrating product usage data into Salesforce, companies can gain valuable insights into customer adoption and value realization.