Internal Comms & Meetings

How to write an exec brief as Small Customer Success Teams

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small Customer Success Teams3 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Your team of three covers 250 accounts. Every quarter you need to hand leadership a clear picture of where the book stands — which accounts are healthy, which are at risk, what the renewal number looks like, and what CS is doing about the gaps. Right now that brief lives in a Google Doc that one person assembles manually: pulling deal stages from HubSpot, copying ticket volume from Zendesk or Intercom, screenshotting a usage chart from your analytics tool, and writing a narrative that connects it all. It takes three to five hours you don't have, and by the time it's done, some of the numbers are already stale. Leadership reads it once and asks why it doesn't match the number the AE quoted.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small Customer Success Teams3 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

An automated exec brief that pulls live account health, ticket volume, and renewal pipeline data from HubSpot, Intercom, and Gmail — so you can run it in five minutes instead of five hours

A structured template with the sections leadership actually wants: book health summary, top churn risks with mitigation status, expansion pipeline, and renewal forecast — pre-populated from your connected data

A recurring automation that drafts a fresh brief every Monday morning and drops it in your inbox, so the quarterly version is just a polished version of a rhythm you've already built

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Presentation Agent Email Agent CRM

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your HubSpot data (contacts, companies, deals) on a schedule and syncs your Gmail threads on a schedule — both refresh automatically so the brief always reflects current pipeline state. Intercom and Zendesk are connected from Starch's integration catalog; the agent queries them live when the brief runs to pull ticket volume and open issue counts. PostHog or your product analytics tool can be connected from Starch's integration catalog for usage signals if your team uses it.

Prompts to copy

Build me a weekly exec brief template for a 3-person CS team covering 250 B2B accounts. Sections should be: (1) Book Health Summary — number of accounts by health tier, (2) Top 5 Churn Risks — account name, ARR, risk signal, mitigation owner, (3) Expansion Pipeline — accounts with open expansion plays and estimated ARR, (4) Renewal Forecast — renewals due in next 60 days with probability and owner, (5) CS Team Throughput — tickets closed, QBRs completed, onboardings in flight. Pull deal and contact data from HubSpot and thread history from Gmail.

Every Monday at 7am, draft this week's exec brief using the template above. Pull renewal deals from HubSpot, flag any account where last customer email is more than 21 days old, and include a one-paragraph narrative I can edit before sending to leadership.

Summarize this month's Intercom ticket volume by account, flag the three accounts with the highest open ticket counts, and add them to the Churn Risk section of this week's exec brief draft.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect HubSpot to Starch — Starch syncs your contacts, companies, and deals on a schedule so the agent always has a current view of your renewal pipeline and account ownership.

2 Connect Gmail to Starch — Starch syncs your inbox on a schedule, giving the agent visibility into which accounts have gone quiet and which threads are overdue for a response.

3 Connect Intercom from Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live when the brief runs to pull open ticket counts and recent volume by account.

4 Tell Starch what your exec brief needs to look like — describe the five sections you want, the data sources for each, and the tone (one paragraph of narrative, then a table, then bullet risks). Starch builds the template.

5 Run the brief manually the first time and review the output — check that HubSpot deal stages map correctly to your renewal forecast logic, and that ticket volume from Intercom is aggregating at the account level the way you expect.

6 Adjust the churn risk criteria — tell Starch which signals define a risky account for your book (no login in 30 days, open P1 ticket, NPS below 6, last email over 21 days ago) and it updates the logic.

7 Set up the weekly automation — 'Every Monday at 7am, draft this week's exec brief and send it to my Gmail as a draft I can review before forwarding to the CEO.' Now you have a rhythm, not a quarterly scramble.

8 Use Presentation Agent to generate the quarterly version — take the brief content and tell Starch: 'Turn this week's exec brief into a 10-slide QBR deck for leadership. Include a book health summary slide, a churn risk table, an expansion pipeline slide, and a renewal forecast slide.' Starch builds the deck.

9 Wire in an email alert for high-priority churn signals — 'If any account in HubSpot moves to Renewal At Risk stage, draft me an email with the account's ticket history from Intercom and last touch date from Gmail, and flag it in the next exec brief.'

10 Share the brief format with leadership and get feedback once — then iterate the template prompt so future drafts require less editing. The goal is a brief you send with one review, not one you rewrite from scratch.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Q2 2026 CS Exec Brief — Week of April 14

Sample numbers from a real run

Renewals due in 60 days (18 accounts)	412,000
At-risk ARR flagged in brief	87,000
Expansion pipeline (3 open plays)	55,000
Tickets closed this week across book	143
Accounts with no email touch in 21+ days	12

On Monday morning, the Starch automation fires. It pulls 18 upcoming renewals from HubSpot — $412k in ARR due in the next 60 days. It queries Intercom live and finds that Meridian Logistics has 9 open tickets including two P1s sitting unresolved for six days; that account's $34k renewal is in 38 days. Gmail sync shows the last outbound email to their admin was 24 days ago. Starch flags Meridian in the Churn Risk section automatically and surfaces it at the top of the brief. The narrative paragraph it drafts reads: 'Meridian Logistics ($34k, renewal April 22) has elevated ticket volume and no account touch in three weeks. Recommend CSM outreach before EOD Tuesday and a check-in call before the 22nd.' You edit two sentences, add a note that their CSM is out sick this week, and forward it to the CEO by 8am. Total time: 12 minutes. The quarterly version of this brief, pulled into Presentation Agent as a 10-slide deck, took 40 minutes including one round of slide edits — versus the four hours it took last quarter.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

At-risk ARR ($) flagged per brief cycle and mitigation rate within 14 days

Renewal forecast accuracy: brief prediction vs. actual closed ARR at end of quarter

Account touch coverage: % of book with CSM contact in past 21 days

Time to produce exec brief: from data pull to delivered draft

Expansion pipeline value surfaced per quarter and conversion rate to closed-won

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Gainsight or ChurnZero

Purpose-built CS platforms with health scoring and renewal workflows, but they start at six figures, require a CS-ops person to configure, and still produce static reports you'd export and paste into a doc for leadership.

Manual Google Docs brief (HubSpot export + Zendesk screenshot + spreadsheet)

No cost, full control, but takes 3-5 hours per cycle, goes stale before it's read, and breaks when the person who built the tab leaves the team.

HubSpot reporting + dashboards

HubSpot's native reports are good for pipeline data but can't pull in ticket volume from Intercom, usage signals from your product analytics tool, or Gmail thread recency — so the brief is always missing context.

Notion + manual template

Starch can actually connect to Notion from its integration catalog and write data into it, so this isn't either-or — but Notion alone doesn't pull live data or automate the draft.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — presentation agent, email agent, crm all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

We use Zendesk, not Intercom. Does this still work?

Yes. Zendesk is available in Starch's integration catalog — the agent queries it live when the brief runs to pull ticket counts and open issue data by account. The setup is the same; you just connect Zendesk instead of Intercom.

Our product analytics tool is PostHog. Can Starch pull usage data into the brief?

PostHog is one of the primary connections in Starch's Growth Analyst app. You can connect it from Starch's integration catalog and tell the agent to include a usage column in your churn risk table — for example, 'flag any account where PostHog shows fewer than 5 active users in the last 30 days.'

How fresh is the data in the brief? Our HubSpot sometimes lags behind the AE's notes.

Starch syncs HubSpot data on a schedule — contacts, companies, and deals refresh automatically. If an AE updates a deal stage or note, it'll be reflected the next time the sync runs. For the exec brief automation, you control when it fires, so you can time it to run after the AE team's Monday morning pipeline reviews if that gives you cleaner data.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? Our customers' data is going to flow through this.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your security review requires it, that's worth knowing upfront. For teams where the primary data flowing through the brief is deal pipeline and ticket metadata — not customer PII — it's often a workable tradeoff, but that's your call to make.

What does the Presentation Agent output actually look like? Can I use it for the board deck?

Presentation Agent is currently in development — you can request beta access to get notified when it launches. In the meantime, the exec brief itself (the text doc Starch drafts) can be used as a source you paste into your existing deck template. The structured sections and pre-populated tables do most of the heavy lifting even without the slide generation.

Our renewal forecast lives partly in HubSpot and partly in a spreadsheet our ops person owns. Can Starch pull from both?

Yes. You can connect Google Sheets from Starch's integration catalog and the agent queries it live alongside HubSpot. Tell Starch: 'Pull renewal deals from HubSpot and cross-reference the forecast probability column in this Google Sheet — use whichever is more recent.' It won't be perfect on the first run, but you tune the logic once and it holds.