July 10, 2022
This use-case from Events.com is a unique application that allowed their investors and partners to seamlessly reap the rewards of supporting the company's growth!
If you're a lean founding team (pre-seed, seed, Series A), you're undoubtedly working closely with investors and advisors to manage deal flow. In the past, most of this activity with investors has taken place in spreadsheets and Google Docs, however, by using PartnerPortal.io, early-stage customers also use the platform to create a secure virtual environment where they can securely manage deal flow, exchange lead lists, and sensitive resources - all while keeping their brand top of mind.
We've seen a lot of interest from companies taking this different approach to managing their investors and thought you might be able to take advantage of this as well.
One of our favorite examples comes from Events.com.
Stephen Partridge, founder of Events.com, came to PartnerPortal.io with a creative way to leverage our white labeling capabilities while automating a process his team had been doing manually. Not only could they send payouts to partners, Partridge thought, they could do the same for advisors and investors as well.
“We looked at the program as growth capital... PartnerPortal.io offered a way to reinvest in our network and pay them dividends for their contributions.”
With dozens of investors, clients, brand ambassadors, and advisors in the Events.com network, the team planned to launch a custom environment for their top influencers to get active in their business. “We looked at the program as growth capital,” said Partridge. “PartnerPortal.io offered a way to reinvest in our network and pay them dividends for their contributions.”
Starting with our Free Plan, Events.com launched their customized partner portal within a few days and tested their new strategy by inviting brand ambassadors to register. Quick success validated their idea, and they upgraded to our Plus Plan and synced their HubSpot, Stripe, and PayPal accounts.
Operating a referral program manually requires individual contracting and one-off payments, not to mention the bookkeeping needed to keep track of each payment. By integrating with Stripe and Quickbooks, our customers can now automate and attribute payments monthly, quarterly, or annually to support any type of referral program (even something unique like Events.com).
“We attribute our success to PartnerPortal.io as it reduced partner onboarding from 1 week to just one hour,” said Marc Caron, an analyst at Events.com., “Within a few minutes, we were exchanging contracts, onboarding, and pushing new leads into our CRM for our sales team.”
When PartnerPortal.io introduced a self-serve partner portal to the market, we immediately saw our customers come up with a variety of creative ways to use our platform - many of which we never conceived when we first hatched the concept of a modern partner management tool.
“Within a few minutes, we were exchanging contracts, onboarding, and pushing new leads into our CRM for our sales team.”
Since the implementation of PartnerPortal.io, the Events.com team is completely out of spreadsheets and avoided the need to purchase multiple software licenses to achieve overlapping solutions. Not only can Events.com manage their partners, but they've also introduced favorable workflows for their investors and internal teams. Whether it's a new lead coming from a partner or an investor, the deals flow right into their HubSpot instance ensuring all deal attribution, activity and final outcomes are logged properly.
If you have creative ways to use our platform, please don't hesitate to reach out. We would love to hear from you and include you in our next post!