20+ upsells and two key accounts saved: how Channable made HubSpot proactive
Channable's CS team had all the data in HubSpot and too many places to look for it. Signals changed that in the first few months, without adding a new platform.
The challenge before ImpactPilot
Channable helps e-commerce businesses sell everywhere, with feed management and the tooling to scale across channels. Its CS team already ran on HubSpot. The problem was everything around it.
Io Michels, Head of Customer Success at Channable, describes a setup of dashboards on dashboards, plus Excel files, Google Sheets and regular logins into customer accounts. The information was all there. Finding the right piece at the right moment was the hard part. HubSpot handled marketing and sales well, but account management was a different story.
"Our seniors were okay with it because they were used to it. Everybody else joining had a rough time coming in."
Io Michels, Head of Customer Success, Channable
It also kept the team reactive. Upsell opportunities and early risk only surfaced when a CSM scanned an account by hand, usually at the quarterly review. For a company that wanted to grow without scaling the team at the same rate, that wasn't going to hold.
The search for a tool
The team tried a few routes. Dedicated churn tooling was too rigid, and letting AI do everything didn't give a big team metrics it could trust. Full CS platforms either sat next to HubSpot or replaced it, at a price the gains had to justify. HubSpot's own CS module was pricey and still rigid. Lightweight plugins often turned out to be a ChatGPT layer that wasn't secure enough or couldn't scale.
Every miss sharpened the criteria. It had to live inside HubSpot. It had to be light on the tool stack and the budget. It had to be built for CSMs, not for covering every gap everywhere. And it had to come with a team to build with, not a big corporate where everything is set in stone.
Why ImpactPilot
Io knew Pieter, ImpactPilot's CEO, from CS events. One demo later the fit was clear: a lightweight layer on top of what Channable already had.
For Leonie Wahl, Revenue Operations Manager, keeping HubSpot at the centre was non-negotiable.
"HubSpot is basically our single source of truth. All of our teams are working within HubSpot, so we really wanted to keep the customer success team there and not put all their work in another system."
Leonie Wahl, Revenue Operations Manager, Channable
ImpactPilot writes its data straight into HubSpot, so it shows up on the dashboards every team already uses. It also adds something HubSpot doesn't do natively: property data over time, instead of a single snapshot.
From the RevOps side
Setup took one meeting. Leonie's team walked ImpactPilot through their HubSpot environment and business logic, and ImpactPilot took it from there, much faster than previous integrations. RevOps reused all of its existing HubSpot work, and months in, maintenance is close to zero. As Leonie puts it: "For me it's at the moment just smooth sailing."
"With other platforms we had to change our way of working to adapt to them. In this case, ImpactPilot mostly adapts to us."
Io Michels, Head of Customer Success, Channable
The results
Channable built a set of signals on customer interactions and product usage: customers trying features outside their subscription, drops in usage, upgrades and downgrades. For Io, signals became the biggest change maker, delivering the quick overview the team had been trying to build in HubSpot dashboards.
20+ upsells triggered directly by a signal, worth €60k+ in new ARR. Each one started with a customer trying a part of the product they weren't paying for yet.
Two big at-risk accounts saved. Both flagged by ImpactPilot, both reached before they started looking elsewhere.
10 minutes from signal to outreach when a customer had an error in their setup.
"We can act when the moment's there, instead of when we choose to plan our impact review every quarter."
Io Michels, Head of Customer Success, Channable
The conversation inside the team shifted too. CSMs now talk about what they did to drive an outcome, not only the upsell or the churn itself. Adoption followed the wins: a few CSMs booked early successes, told everyone about it, and the rest of the team was in the system soon after.
The recommendation
Io's advice to other CS leaders: try it, because it's lightweight. Start with engagement signals, since that data already lives in HubSpot and it's close to plug and play. It's also a fast way to learn what good looks like for your own team. And lean on the ImpactPilot team, who were quick to help every step of the way.
