tracking deals sold through a reseller

[ddwolf2]

We have just started to use Hub Spot for tracking business. Our business has agents that need to register opportunities in Hub Spot. We would like to tie all the deals to the agents but still have the individual companies in the deal forecast. Can someone please recommend training material best to help me get the sysytem configure correctly.

[jennysowyrda]

Hey @ddwolf2, 

@KyleJepson may have some suggestions for which HubSpot trainings will best help you with this process. I'd also recommend checking out the Academy for trainings and user guides for all of HubSpot's products.

Jenny

[KyleJepson · Accepted solution]

 Hey @ddwolf2,

Sales opportunities in HubSpot CRM are tracked with deals. When you create a deal, you can associate it to the contacts and/or companies it relates to. There's also a HubSpot Owner property that labels who the deal belongs to. HubSpot Owner contains a dropdown with all of the users in your portal.

If your resellers aren't users in your portal, or if you're looking to have the agency tagged in addition to the user, you might want to create a custom property with all of your resellers in it so you can track that separately. Here's a doc with some information about that:https://knowledge.hubspot.com/contacts/manage-your-properties

I hope that helps. Let me know if you have additional questions.

[Siddall]

@KyleJepson

Slight error on this comment I believe:

"you can associate [a deal] to the contacts and/or companies it relates to."

You can only associate a Deal with ONE company.  This becomes the problem.

Associating with the end-prospect CONTACT and the reseller CONTACT is fine, but they you have difficulty easily reporting, forecasting, measuring losses BY RESELLER.

Any other suggestions?

[KyleJepson]

You are correct. That's a typo. Sorry about that!

In that case, the custom property is probably the best bet.

[Arne]

The link doesn’t work. Is there a new one available? http://sales.hubspot.com/knowledge/contacts-companies/article/how-do-i-create-a-property-in-the-crm

[KyleJepson]

Good catch! Try this: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/contacts/how-can-i-create-a-custom-property 

[Arne]

Hi Kyle,
I read the recommended page and interprete it that way:

"Partner Information" is a custom field we add to companies during our data migration, i.e. customers are assigned to business partners or direct customers.

In order to get the Partner information added to a deal, we will have to generate a custom field in deals, too. This field shall then be populated with the name of the partner that the customer is assigned to.

Now, partners of different levels, eg reseller, business partner and premium partners have different discounts on new licenses and maintenance renewals.

Such discounts shall be added to each deal since they change the expected net volume. Would you do that with further custom fields and then change the calculation of totals to take that extra step into account or is there a best practice? There must be tons of companies that are selling direct and through partners which probably have absimilar question.

[mbrennan]

Did you ever get a reply on managing different partner levels? We are looking at Hubspot but this would be a deal-breaker for us if we could not manage partners with different discount levels.

[gmockett]

Would love to visit the linked resource in the first response, but the link appears invalid. A little help?

Thanks.

[jennysowyrda]

Hi @gmockett,

I just updated the link, so it should work now.

Thank you,
Jenny

[BagMan]

Kyle wrote,  "you might want to create a custom property with all of your resellers in it "

So is a picklist the only option on the custom property?   Can I create a look up field that allows users to select a Company?   (assuming the Partners exist as Companies in HubSpot)      This saves the work of maintaining a "Partner list".

[KyleJepson]

@BagMan -- I think a picklist is the way to go right now. Hopefully we'll have a better solution soon!

[Arne]

Hi @KyleJepson 

I fully agree with @BagMan that a lookup will be the much better solution.

We have a worldwide partner network with hundreds of partners and resellers. Keeping such a picklist up2date is like herding cats AND what´s of much higher importance, such a picklist is just adding a value at the customer or deal level BUT isn´t connecting the two company profiles (reseller&customer). In our previous CRM system that connection was extremely helpful since it allowed for lots of automation and e.g. automatically added the individual discount levels to new deals + deals got shown in both profiles, i.e. the reseller and the end customer.

[KyleJepson]

@Arne @BagMan -- I just talked to the engineering team, and they are actively working on the ability to associate multiple companies to a deal and to label those associations. So you would be able to associate one company as the customer/client, and another as the reseller. This would remove the need for a picklist property. They hope to have this release an early beta of this feature sometime in the first quarter of 2021.

[BagMan]

@KyleJepson  Thanks for letting us know.   Allowing the Deal entity to be associated w/ companies will be huge!    Creating an object (not just a field) unlocks even greater reporting...?  No matter, very much looking forward to this new functionality.

The two must-have reports are:

Report #1 -  "Show all Deals that have Partners supporting the sales process"

Report #2 - "Show me all Deals with Partner X" 

Getting this pivot reporting will be useful for companies selling through a network of Partners.  (also enables tracking Suppliers/Vendors)    Thanks again.

[spatrizi]

Newbie to HubSpot but trying to figure this out too. Since deals can have multiple Contacts, what if you created a dummy contact record for the reseller e.g. first name = "Reseller XYZ" and associate that dummy contact with appropriate deals? Doesn't feel as clean as being able to have more than one Company associated to a deal (something which Pipedrive supports btw) but seems like you'd be able to do some decent reporting and not have to deal with a custom property...but I'm sure I'm missing an obvious reason why that wouldn't work...