Our partnerships team would like a pipeline view with stages to have an overview of where they are at with partner engagement. Should we create ‘partner’ as a custom object eventhough these partners are currently ‘companies’ and ‘contacts’.
Hi @ARosmolen
Personally, I don’t think this requires a custom object.
At it’s core a partner will be a company with contacts, so not sure adding another object makes sense.
HubSpot also has a default company property called “Type” which can be used to classify companies in appropriate segments, such as partner, reseller, etc.
Using that, in combination with a separate “partner pipeline” should be sufficient. Different pipelines are a great way of tracking different sales processes. Normally they are used for things like net new sales, renewals, up/cross-sell - as these have different stages. So having a separte pipeline for your partner engagement does make sense.
I hope that helps.
Frank
Thanks, appreciate the input!
Thank you! I’ve searched for a simple solution that didn’t involve custom objects for 15 minutes.
Hi @ARosmolen,
If you have an Enterprise subscription and access to custom object creation, this can definitely be useful. I would say that this heavily depends on how exactly you’d like to manage relationships.
For example, I am a HubSpot consultant and I work with both HubSpot customers and HubSpot agencies. I need to be able to map the associations between all three and currently* HubSpot does not allow same-object associations. Without the custom object for agencies, I would not be able to associate agencies with customers, as both would be within the company object.
So if this is a core requirement, then yes, the custom object would be a good solution.
If the relationship aspect is secondary, the a custom object might not be needed and a Company type dropdown on the company object might do. This would help you distinguish between non-partners and partners.
Lastly, and that’s what the asterisk is for, HubSpot are inviting more and more customers into a private beta for same object associations. This will shortly allow you to associate companies with companies. The knowledge base article is still private so you’ll have to be a bit patient but I’d suggest maybe waiting a few more weeks until you can review everything against your requirements.
Best regards!
Thank you both - appreciate your pov on this. We had it as a drop down under company type already but wasn’t sufficient so will create a custom object to link partners with companies and deals as well.
Hi @ARosmolen ,
First of all wanted to let you know that we always advise to attribute revenue (deals) to partners.
We actually made a blogpost (https://www.introw.io/resource-hub/the-3-ways-to-manage-your-b2b-partners-in-hubspot-and-attribute-r…) on the 3 ways how you can manage your B2B partners in HubSpot.
There are 3 options:
Let me know if that’s usefull. 
Andreas Geamanu
Co-founder at introw.io
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