Industries · Software
Ask a software CEO what next year’s revenue looks like and the answer gets assembled from three places. The board deck, rebuilt in a spreadsheet the night before. The billing system, which knows who pays and how much. And the customer success team, who know which accounts stopped logging in last month. The CRM mostly knows about deals that closed last year.
What it's worth, when it renews, how it's doing
92
software and technology companies
41
on bespoke HubSpot implementations
19
on ongoing support with us today
7
moved off Salesforce
Periti Digital is a HubSpot Elite Solutions Partner and a Claude Certified Services Partner in Anthropic’s Claude Partner Network. We work with vertical SaaS businesses, data and AI platforms, horizontal business software, sports, gaming and media technology, cloud and infrastructure providers, and security and identity companies. Clients include BillingPlatform and Elliptic. Across every sector, we’ve delivered 2,000+ projects for 900+ customers from Dublin, London, Rotterdam, Munich, Lisbon, Boston and New York.
The biggest mistake
The pipeline gets all the attention because new logos are what the board asks about and what the sales team is paid on. So the CRM ends up as a tidy record of how customers were won, with almost nothing about what happened next. Renewal dates live in the billing system. Usage lives in the product database. Support history lives in Zendesk or Jira. Expansion gets tracked in a spreadsheet the head of customer success built in a weekend.
We build HubSpot as the revenue nerve center for a software company: where pipeline, contracts, product usage, support and billing meet, so sales, customer success, finance and leadership work from one view of every account. New business is one stage in that picture. Net revenue retention is the number the whole system should serve.
| Area | What the CRM assumes | How software works |
|---|---|---|
| Where revenue comes from | New logos the sales team closes | The first contract, then renewals and expansion |
| Where the record ends | Closed won | The third renewal, and beyond |
| Where renewals and usage live | Somewhere else | Billing, product and support, synced to the account |
| The number that matters | New bookings | Net revenue retention |
Structure
Structure it around the customer lifecycle, from first touch to the third renewal, with each stage owned by someone and measured. We usually design around:
Example: for BillingPlatform, a revenue lifecycle management software company, we’re running a full partnership program: CRM architecture, migration from Airtable, lifecycle and lead scoring frameworks, AI workflows built with Claude and HubSpot agents, 6sense integration and RevOps advisory. For a fund formation software company, we built the go-to-market infrastructure in HubSpot from scratch: a MEDDPICC pipeline with stage gating, ICP scoring, lead routing and tiering, forecast dashboards and documented business rules.
Three pipelines, each with its own stages, owner and win rate, on one account.
Most SaaS pipelines have stages that mean different things to every rep. “Demo complete” covers a 20-minute screen share and a three-hour technical evaluation with the buyer’s IT team. We write exit criteria for every stage and build them into HubSpot as required properties and gated transitions. A deal can’t move to commit without a named economic buyer, a confirmed timeline and a mutual plan. Sales leaders tend to resist this for a quarter and then refuse to forecast any other way.
Renewals and expansion
Create every renewal as a deal automatically, months before the contract ends, and give expansion its own pipeline with its own owner.
The common pitfall is leaving renewals to memory. An account manager spots the end date in the billing system, or finance sends a list at the start of each quarter, and the renewal conversation starts 30 days out when the customer has already had a competitor’s demo. Expansion is worse. It happens when a customer asks, which means it mostly doesn’t.
For an automotive software company, we rebuilt the renewals pipeline with AI-driven customer health scoring and automated playbooks, cleaned up a database of around 40,000 contacts, and moved forecasting out of Google Sheets and into HubSpot.
Decide before you build. In some software companies the account executive keeps the account for life. In others, customer success owns renewal and sales owns expansion. Both models work. A CRM configured for neither leaves renewals with nobody, and we raise the question in the first workshop because no workflow can answer it for you.
Product usage
Yes, as account-level signals, never as raw event data. Without usage data, customer success guesses which accounts are healthy and sales guesses which ones are ready to buy more. With too much of it, HubSpot fills up with millions of events nobody reads, and the portal slows down.
For a creative software company with two million contacts, we built a two-way integration between HubSpot and its application, so trials, in-app behavior and segmentation drive marketing workflows directly. We also set up the product catalog and multi-currency pricing for its markets.
The data usually comes from your product database or data warehouse rather than the application itself. We agree with your engineering team what gets summarized, how often it syncs and who owns the pipeline, so nobody wakes up to a broken sync after a release.
Usage we bring in, and who acts on it
Salesforce or HubSpot
For most software companies with 200 to 2,000 employees, HubSpot is enough, and it costs far less to run. Salesforce suits organizations with a large admin team, heavily customized processes and the budget to maintain both. Many scale-ups adopt it because investors or a new CRO expect it, then spend years paying for admins, consultants and add-ons to do what HubSpot does out of the box.
We’ve moved seven software companies off Salesforce. Elliptic, the crypto compliance and blockchain analytics company, is one of them. After the migration, it kept us on for ongoing support and then brought in a full-time embedded HubSpot resource from Periti.
We don’t rip Salesforce out by reflex. For a WiFi-as-a-service company keeping Salesforce until its contract ends in 2027, we’re optimizing the sync between the two systems in the meantime.
For a computer vision AI company, the sales team stays on Salesforce and automations move leads between the two platforms. For an AI customer experience company, we audited Salesforce Sales Cloud and prepared the ground for a later migration, alongside a Marketing Hub rollout and a 12-month embedded engagement.
Migration
Decide what each record will do in the new system before moving any of it, and accept that the data is messier than anyone thinks.
Software companies underestimate migrations more than any other part of a CRM project. Years of product changes, pricing models, plan names and half-finished integrations leave the CRM full of fields that meant one thing in 2021 and another in 2024. Migrate that as-is and every report in the new system inherits the confusion.
We’ve moved software companies off Salesforce, Pardot, Pipedrive, SugarCRM, Monday.com, Microsoft Dynamics, Freshworks, Freshdesk, Zendesk, Airtable, Mailchimp and spreadsheets. For a data analytics company, we migrated sales, marketing and financial data from Salesforce, including about 5,000 leads, 1,450 accounts, 1,500 opportunities and 9,000 tasks along with custom objects.
For a content management software vendor moving off SugarCRM, the data model turned out far more tangled than the original plan allowed for, and we extended the scope three times as we found it. We’d rather tell you that story up front than have you live it.
System boundaries
HubSpot should run winning, keeping and growing customers. Your billing system or ERP should own invoices, subscriptions and revenue recognition, and your product should own usage. Software companies blur these lines all the time, and a year later finance doesn’t trust the ARR figure in HubSpot and the CRM is slow to load. We draw a hard line between systems and connect them.
HubSpot sees everything here.
| Job | System of record | What HubSpot sees |
|---|---|---|
| Quotes | HubSpot, or a CPQ tool for complex pricing | Everything, or the quote outcome |
| Subscriptions, invoicing and payments | Billing system or ERP: Oracle NetSuite, Younium, Xero and similar | Plan, contract value, start and end dates, payment status |
| Revenue recognition and board-reported ARR | Finance system | ARR or MRR by account, reconciled to finance |
| Product usage | Product database or data warehouse | Active users, seats used, key feature adoption |
| Customer support | HubSpot Service Hub, Zendesk or Freshdesk | Open tickets, severity, satisfaction scores |
| Bugs and feature requests | Jira | Linked issue status on the ticket or account |
One rule sits behind that table: data comes into HubSpot only if it drives an action or a decision. A payment failure tells customer success to call before the account lapses. A seat limit reached tells sales to call about expansion. Every click inside your product tells nobody anything on its own, so raw events stay where they are.
Billing
Sometimes. HubSpot handles quotes, payments, subscriptions and invoices well for simple pricing. For usage-based pricing, multi-entity finance or revenue recognition, a dedicated billing system or ERP should own it.
Integrations
Start with billing and finance, then the product, then support and engineering. Anything HubSpot can’t see, it can’t act on, and neither can your agents. See our integration approach.
Start here
This integration tells HubSpot what each customer is worth and when they renew. For a health and social care software group, we connected HubSpot to Oracle NetSuite for revenue recognition. For a field service management software company, we aligned HubSpot with a new NetSuite implementation running on Celigo: deal-to-subscription handoff, renewal pass-back and a redesigned order-to-cash process.
Start here
We’ve connected Younium subscription billing for a supply chain technology company, Xero for several smaller software businesses, and SAP C4C through SAP CPI for a cloud hosting provider. The hardest part is agreeing which system wins when a contract changes mid-term. We settle that in design, before anyone writes code.
Then
Usage signals, trial activity and account status come from your application or data warehouse. We build these integrations with your engineering team, using HubSpot’s APIs and middleware, so a product release doesn’t quietly break the sync.
Then
For a sports betting technology company, we built a HubSpot and Jira integration on AWS middleware. For the health and social care software group, we connected Zendesk, Jira, Trumpet and Jiminny natively. For a travel technology company, we migrated from Freshdesk to Service Hub Enterprise and built an Aircall integration. For a taxi dispatch software company, we replaced a legacy service desk and connected its IVR.
Growth
Software companies collect GTM tools quickly. We connect the ones that earn their place. For BillingPlatform we supported the 6sense integration. For the fund formation software company, we built account enrichment with Perplexity and a Clay waterfall feeding ICP scoring and routing. Call recording tools like Jiminny log straight to the account.
A Zapier connection that creates renewal deals from your billing system will pass testing. Then the end of a quarter arrives, a few hundred annual contracts renew in the same week, the zap hits a task limit, and a batch of renewals never appears in HubSpot. Customer success finds out when one of those customers churns.
For business-critical connections we build on Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services, with error handling, retries, monitoring and the security controls your own customers will ask about in their next vendor review.
Go-to-market data
Track the signals that come from customers and users you already have. They produce your expansion revenue and your best referrals, and most software companies leave them untouched.
01
When a power user or champion moves to a new company, you have the warmest lead in your market. When one leaves a customer, that account is at risk. We track job changes and route the follow-up to the right owner.
02
Trial users who invite colleagues, connect an integration or hit a usage limit. Sales should call those first.
03
Accounts at their seat limit are expansion conversations. Accounts using a third of what they bought are renewal risks. Both belong on the account record.
04
Intent data from tools like 6sense, website visits from target accounts and pricing page views, tied to accounts in your ICP rather than sprayed across the database.
05
A target account hiring for the team your product serves is buying soon. We bring job postings and team growth in through enrichment tools and Claude-based research agents.
06
Funding rounds, acquisitions and leadership changes. Each one changes budget and priorities, and each one is a reason to call.
07
A competitor removed from an account’s stack, or a complementary tool added. Both point to a conversation worth having.
Our GTM Engineering team builds outreach, enrichment and AI agents on your customer context.
Customer data and permissions
As little personal data as the job needs, with permissions designed around who uses it.
Your enterprise customers will send security questionnaires asking where their data goes. If your CRM holds raw product data about their employees, you’ll be answering awkward questions. We design HubSpot so it holds account-level signals, not personal browsing history inside your product, and we build GDPR consent and retention rules in from the start. Permissions and record visibility follow roles, so a reseller or partner team sees what it needs and nothing more.
AI with Claude
They catch churn risk early, find expansion and prepare every customer conversation, provided the context underneath them is sound. That context is spread across the CRM, the billing system, the product, support tickets and call recordings. Through our Anthropic partnership, we build Claude automations that bring it into HubSpot in a structured form your teams can trust:
For BillingPlatform, AI workflows using Claude and HubSpot agents are part of the 12-month program from the start. Put any of these agents on a CRM with stale contacts, missing contract dates and no usage data and they’ll give your team bad answers with total confidence, so we build the context layer first.
Groups and roll-ups
Private equity buy-and-build strategies are reshaping vertical software. Every acquisition brings another CRM, another billing system, another set of plan names and a sales team convinced their way is right.
We help groups build one CRM across the portfolio, with a repeatable playbook for bringing each acquired product or company into it. Shared definitions, a shared data model and consolidated reporting let leadership see ARR, customer overlap and cross-sell opportunity across the group. For a health and social care software group, we consolidated several acquired entities into one HubSpot instance with a shared customer lifecycle framework and NetSuite revenue recognition. For a managed workplace technology company, we consolidated three business units onto one HubSpot CRM, migrating data from Exact and Sultan.
1,200 users
The largest HubSpot implementation in EMEA.
Some software companies come to us for an enterprise go-to-market stack before they’ve found product-market fit. They have two salespeople, no agreed ICP and a pricing model that changes every quarter, and they want lead scoring, intent data and a six-stage MEDDPICC pipeline. Software won’t find them customers. When that’s the case, we say so. Sometimes the right first project is a few weeks of design work, a defined ICP and a simple pipeline the founders will use. Sometimes the problem is the product, and no CRM fixes that. We’d rather sell you the smaller project that works than the bigger one that doesn’t.
Who works on your project
Every Periti project is run by a lead consultant who has delivered at least 50 projects. They own the design, run the workshops with your sales, customer success and finance leaders, and make the hard calls. Consultants handle configuration, migration and testing.
When a project needs integration with your billing system, ERP or product, we assign dedicated engineers rather than stretching consultants into developer roles. Our directors review the work and hold every project to the same standard.
How a project runs
01
Map your revenue motion across new business, onboarding, renewal and expansion. Design the lifecycle model, pipelines, system-of-record boundaries, integrations, health scoring and where AI fits.
02
Configure in sprints and demo regularly, so your teams see progress early and can correct course while changes are cheap.
03
Bring in the data that serves a purpose, connect billing, product and support systems, and test against your most complicated real accounts.
04
Train sales, customer success, marketing and finance by role, using your own customers and data.
05
Agree a roadmap so the system keeps pace as you add products, markets, pricing models and acquisitions.
Where to start
Most companies
Most of our software engagements start here. You leave with a design your leadership team agrees on, whoever builds it.
Fast start
Our industry-specific HubSpot onboarding package. A low-risk way to go live quickly on a proven setup, suited to earlier-stage software companies with a clear motion.
Ongoing
Ongoing support from a team that knows your portal. 19 of our software and technology clients are on it today.
Ongoing
An experienced Periti operator runs your revenue operations as part of your team, without a full-time hire. Elliptic brought in a full-time embedded HubSpot resource from Periti after its Salesforce migration.
Growth
Outreach, enrichment and AI agents built on your customer context, for software companies ready to scale pipeline beyond inbound.
Companies we work with
Vertical SaaS is our largest segment, covering health and social care, construction, field service, legal, hospitality, travel, automotive, manufacturing and more. Horizontal business software follows: sales, marketing, HR, payroll, finance, operations, content and communications.
We also work with 73 IT services, telecoms and cybersecurity companies, many of which sell recurring contracts the same way.
Questions
Yes. HubSpot handles marketing, sales, customer success and support for most software companies with 200 to 2,000 employees, and it costs less to run than Salesforce. The software companies that get the most from it connect billing and product usage, so renewals and expansion run from the same system as new business.
Often, yes, especially if you have no dedicated Salesforce admin and pay for customization you don't use. If you have more than a year left on your contract or depend heavily on Salesforce CPQ, we integrate the two first and plan the migration for later. We've moved seven software companies off Salesforce, including Elliptic.
We create renewal deals automatically from contract dates synced from your billing system, months before each contract ends. Health scores and playbooks flag risk early, and renewals sit in their own pipeline with a clear owner and their own forecast.
Yes, at account level, synced from your billing system or ERP. Your finance system stays the source of truth for board-reported ARR, and HubSpot reconciles to it so sales and finance stop arguing about the number.
Yes, as account-level signals such as active users, seats used and adoption of key features. Raw event data stays in your product database or warehouse. Bring in only what triggers an action from sales or customer success.
Yes. We've connected HubSpot to Oracle NetSuite for revenue recognition and aligned HubSpot with a NetSuite rollout running on Celigo middleware, covering deal-to-subscription and renewal pass-back. For business-critical ERP integrations we build on Azure or AWS.
Yes. Native integrations work for simple setups. For a sports betting technology company, we built a HubSpot and Jira integration on AWS middleware so support and customer success could see engineering status on every account.
If you sell a few fixed plans in one entity, often yes. If you have usage-based pricing, ramped contracts, multiple entities or revenue recognition under audit, keep billing in a dedicated billing system or ERP and sync the results into HubSpot.
A product-qualified lead is a trial or freemium user whose behavior shows they're ready to buy, such as inviting colleagues or hitting a usage limit. HubSpot can score them once usage signals sync from your product, and route them to sales ahead of everyone else.
It depends on the data, the integrations and how much customization you're leaving behind. The biggest variable is data quality, which software companies tend to underestimate. We scope it in Design and Strategy after reviewing your objects, fields and integrations.
The most useful ones flag renewal risk, spot expansion, prepare account research, triage trials and inbound leads, and analyze why deals and customers were lost. They depend on clean context in the CRM, so we build that first. BillingPlatform runs Claude and HubSpot agent workflows as part of its program with us.
Yes, with a shared data model, consistent definitions and permissions designed for each business unit. We've consolidated several acquired software entities into one HubSpot instance with NetSuite revenue recognition. Our largest rollout, for Franchise Brands, brought 1,200 users across multiple brands and countries into one environment.
With a Design and Strategy project. We map your revenue motion from first touch to renewal and design the lifecycle model, integrations and reporting before anything is built. Earlier-stage companies that want a faster start can use LaunchRight, our industry-specific onboarding package.
You might be moving off Salesforce, connecting HubSpot to your billing system and product, bringing acquired companies onto one platform, or trying to get renewals and expansion out of spreadsheets. Tell us where you are. We’ll tell you how we’d get you there, including the parts you might not want to hear.