CRM

TMendl
Participant

Managing clients and partners (and those that are both) in the CRM

SOLVE

Hey HubSpot power users,

 

We need advice on managing strategic partners and clients in our CRM. We use MarketingHub and SalesHub with teams focused on marketing, sales, and business development (BD). Currently, most leads that sales nurtures come from either marketing, or strategic partners that were generated by BD. The goal is to optimize sales for self-generated leads, leads that came to us through our strategic partners, and encourage sales reps to source their own strategic partners. Additionally, we want to nurture prospects qualified by marketing or sales, wether they showed initial interest or were initially unresponsive. 

 

We're also integrating our client system into HubSpot to streamline client communications so need to easily identify Active Clients. 

 

Currently, we use a custom "Company Type" property to track client prospects, clients, partner prospects, and partners, but it's become convoluted. We're considering reverting to lifecycle stages for client prospects, but face issues for partner prospects and when strategic partners are also clients. Should we track both roles on a single record or create separate records?

 

We've also tried using different deal pipelines to indicate lifecycle stages, but this approach shifts focus away from generating new prospects. 

 

Any suggestions?

1 Accepted solution
DSharma02
Solution
Top Contributor | Gold Partner
Top Contributor | Gold Partner

Managing clients and partners (and those that are both) in the CRM

SOLVE

Hi @TMendl ,
My suggestions are:

  • Use Lifecycle Stages for Client Prospects as it will help in tracking the progress of leads through the sales funnel and create custom Properties for Partners.
  • In my opinion, if a strategic partner is also a client, maintaining separate records can help avoid confusion.
  • Using different deal pipelines will help to manage the various processes. For example, one pipeline can be for new client acquisition, another you can create to manage partner engagement.
  • Also, create dashboards and reports to track the performance of self-generated leads, leads from strategic partners, and overall sales activities for the teams like marketing, sales and BD.
    And also for strategic partners like number of leads generated, conversion rates, and revenue attributed to each partner.
  • For active client identification, use custom properties or tags to mark active clients and ensure that this information is easily accessible and visible in the client records.
  • Create workflows to follow up with prospects at different stages, ensuring consistent and timely communication.

Hope this helps!
Thanks

View solution in original post

2 Replies 2
DSharma02
Solution
Top Contributor | Gold Partner
Top Contributor | Gold Partner

Managing clients and partners (and those that are both) in the CRM

SOLVE

Hi @TMendl ,
My suggestions are:

  • Use Lifecycle Stages for Client Prospects as it will help in tracking the progress of leads through the sales funnel and create custom Properties for Partners.
  • In my opinion, if a strategic partner is also a client, maintaining separate records can help avoid confusion.
  • Using different deal pipelines will help to manage the various processes. For example, one pipeline can be for new client acquisition, another you can create to manage partner engagement.
  • Also, create dashboards and reports to track the performance of self-generated leads, leads from strategic partners, and overall sales activities for the teams like marketing, sales and BD.
    And also for strategic partners like number of leads generated, conversion rates, and revenue attributed to each partner.
  • For active client identification, use custom properties or tags to mark active clients and ensure that this information is easily accessible and visible in the client records.
  • Create workflows to follow up with prospects at different stages, ensuring consistent and timely communication.

Hope this helps!
Thanks

TMendl
Participant

Managing clients and partners (and those that are both) in the CRM

SOLVE

Hello! Thank you so much for your input - we are implementing your suggestions and it is proving to be the most effective use of the system in this case 🙂 Thank you again!

0 Upvotes