AllianceHub: A HubSpot-Based Partner Portal

When we first stepped in to run marketing and generate growth for data management company Panzura, the company needed a partner portal to replace the out-dated, awkward and very pricy option it had in place. We'd gone all-in on HubSpot as our customer relationship, marketing, sales and service management system, so we needed to find options that were either native to HubSpot, or had a HubSpot integration with two-way communication.

Time was tight, as we were facing an expensive renewal, and we knew the incumbent software couldn't take us where we planned to go. We chose Allbound, a WordPress-based SaaS portal with built-in connectivity to HubSpot.

It was the ideal choice at the time. A huge step forward, easy to customize to our brand look and feel, and for our team to add content to. Partners found it intuitive to register accounts (access could be restricted to authorized partners), and they could easily register and monitor their deals.

During the next couple of years, we continued to grow and become more sophisticated. In particular, our approach became ever more personalized to what our customers and channel partners needed. Over the same period, HubSpot pace of acceleration increased impressively, delivering new login-based capabilities and becoming ever more intuitive to use.

Taking control of our own destiny

We stepped in to help our operations team build out Panzura's customer self-service portal, as the HubSpot-recommended consultants they'd hired wrestled to achieve what we wanted, and we realized two things.

• We could figure out how to achieve the seemingly impossible in HubSpot, and
• Services and operations teams are not experts in user interfaces and experience.

Once we'd completed and launched the customer ticketing and service portal, we tackled a learning management system for customers to put their IT team through certified training, using Impulse Creative's excellent HubLMS. 

Using HubSpot for these portals gave us more, and deeper insight into actions our customers were taking, letting us understand what was working for them, and what wasn't. Whenever they signed in to a portal, raised a support ticket, enrolled in training, or achieved a certification, it was captured within their contact record.

This showed us that not only was HubSpot capable of supporting user-friendly customer portals, but the insights they made possible allowed us to deliver the best possible customer experience.

As a result, we committed to finding a partner portal that operated in HubSpot, or to building our own.

A HubSpot-based channel partner portal

Fast forward to now, and AllianceHub is a partner portal built entirely in HubSpot.

We've done the hard work using HubSpot APIs to display deal pipelines and detail right out of HubSpot, with view access restricted to authorized partners, allowing partner reps to see their pipeline at a glance, and letting partner admins see their whole company's pipeline.

We've made it easy for partners to register deals, with deals assigned to their pipeline.

We've virtually eliminated double handling by allowing sales content using all kinds of media to be added, categorized and elegantly presented, while leveraging content already loaded into your HubSpot instance.

We included all the things we wanted, and couldn't find, such as a completely modular, customizable dashboard, real-time updates of user details, and one-click contact requests.

In short, organizations that are 'all in' on HubSpot can now bring their partner portal into their existing CMS eco-system, using the sales, marketing and tracking tools they're already familiar with.

AllianceHub has been built to be extensible, using HubSpot functionality so that as HubSpot continues to iterate, this partner portal will only become more powerful.

Find out more about AllianceHub — take the tour.