Separation of Customers and Partners

Smart CRM & Sales Hub Tips, Tricks & Best Practices
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1

I would like hubspot to segrate our customers/clients from our partners but I am unsure if it’s a natural thing to do with hubspot.

Customer is a traditional customer following a traditional sales cycle/process.

Partner is like a vendor/supplier but a very specific type of supplier (shipping carrier). We actively pursue these partners, manage their relationships, the funnel into our organization, and it has some measureable amount of dicipline and volume. This is assigned a different skillset/individual than the customer/account management. These partners, and the process into our system look/feel a lot like customers, but they aren’t.

Both Customers and partners might have a very similar support process/ticketing system in hubspot as well.

Right now they are co-mingled and reporting and navigation is less than desirable.

These accounts will have no association with each other. I don’t need relationships between a customer and partner.

The stages of the process would be labled differently. I don’t like just a company ‘type’ to segrate. I feel some fields would be uniquely associated with either custoemer or partner.

How is this typically achieved? Is this a separate custom object?

2

Hi @Justin7,

The simplest solution would be to use a type property on each object:

  • Contact type
  • Company type
  • Deal type

In each of these, you would differentiate between customer and partner.

Once you do (either manually or automatically via workflows), you can easily exclude or include either group from reports.

Unless there’s a core requirement that you’re not meeting by going with simple properties, I wouldn’t bother with a custom object – especially since you won’t get automatically populating last / next activity date properties on a custom object.

Best regards

3

Forgive the delay in response. If I keep partner and customer as same ‘deal’ object, don’t I end up with one large combined list of deal stages (they are different for each)? A customer deal has a set of status’ and stages and a partner deal will have something separate. Is this still smart to keep both of these deals combined in one object?

4

@Justin7 you can use one and the same deal object for all these an simply create two pipelines: Set up and manage object pipelines

Your create partner deals in a partner pipeline, customer deals in a customer pipeline. Each pipeline can have different stages.