Managing partner leads and partnerships in Hubspot

[jjokinen]

Hi!

Does anyone have any examples of how to manage partnerships and partner generated leads in Hubspot? We are struggling with this a lot.

The lack of lookup fields makes it impossible to related incoming partner leads (Contacts) to the partner (Company) who has given us these leads.

Our current solution is something like this:

- We are using a Hubspot form that partners fill with the lead's details to collect the leads.

- We have a Channel Partner property on the Contact as well as Deal objects. It's a dropdown list of all our partners but we have to manually update both properties whenever there's a new partner (as opposed to just creating a new Company record for the partner). We use this property to indicate on the Contact/Deal object whom of our partners has given us the lead (that has potentially ended up as a deal).

- On the Company object we have a property called Channel Partner too which is just a checkbox, indicating if that Company is a partner or not.

- Paying commissions to partners based on their leads is a cumbersome manual process, involving data sheets. This is something we'd like to solve too.

Any help is much appreciated!

Thanks,

Joel

[TiphaineCuisset]

Hi @jjokinen 

Thank you for reaching out

I want to tag some of our experts on this - @JonPayne @Mike_Eastwood @DanielAudio19 @darynsmith any insight to share with @jjokinen on this? 

Best, 

Tiphaine

[darynsmith · Accepted solution]

Hi @jjokinen 

The way we have solved this for other customers who have partner and channel programs:

1. For each partner we setup a HubSpot Free CRM account which includes 1 deal pipeline.

2. We deploy a script that keeps the main HubSpot account in sync with the HubSpot Free accounts. 

This way leads can be shared with partners and your channel managers can keep track on the status of the lead, what deal stage it is, they can share notes between each other, and work the deal together. If the deal moves to won, then commission can be calculated using a calculated field and a deal stage can be used for when it is paid.

[jjokinen]

Hi @darynsmith!

Thanks for sharing how you have solved this for other customers! Really helpful and interesting!

So in essence you use the Partner Deal Pipeline(s) to manage both Leads and Deals? E.g. a partner gives us a Lead by creating a Deal record for them which is then in the Deal Pipeline and this Lead progresses to an actual Deal the same pipeline is still used and the record just moved forward in the (custom) stages?

Have your customers found this solution easy to maintain?

Again, many thanks,

Joel

[darynsmith · Accepted solution]

Yes - so the first deal stage is "new lead", and then move onto something like "lead contacted/qualified", and then into the usual deal stages you already have. 

We created an administrative interface for the customer we have done this for, so that every time they have a new reseller, they enter the HubID of the new portal and it automatically connects the free portal and sets up the deal stages.

They have found this easy, and the partner account managers have found this useful as they can have their regular status meetings with their customers and can easily visualise deals they are co-selling on.

[jjokinen]

Thanks @darynsmith! Your solution does sound like a very viable option.