The Hubspot Partner Program recognizes excellence in the HubSpot ecosystem.
Working with a certified HubSpot partner agency will supercharge your growth with efficient marketing automation, smart lead scoring, ready-made resources, custom integrations, and more.
We all know what it’s like to come up against that metaphorical wall. You’re growing, clients and customers are happy, things are looking up... but there’s just not enough hours in the day anymore. Things that worked when you were smaller are getting cumbersome. What’s it gonna take to get to that next level?
An investment in top-flight inbound marketing and sales software like HubSpot could be that spark. We’re all living in the digital age, and inbound is king. Research has shown that inbound channels cost 62% less than traditional channels, while each dollar spent on inbound generates 3x as many leads. That’s growth on a budget.
But what’s the best approach? Expanding your internal team for a robust digital marketing strategy is one route. Many companies opt to outsource to an agency, adding versatile and specialized capacity that’s more or less plug-and-play.
Not all agencies are the same, though. Businesses that leverage the HubSpot Partner Program have the inside track to some of the best growth hacks in your industry. Here’s why:
What Is the HubSpot Partner Program and Why It Matter
The HubSpot Agency Partner program is a way to increase your skills and service offerings to more holistically help your customers. The program is built around consulting, tech implementation, and hands-on services offerings of HubSpot's industry-leading platform. HubSpot provides agencies with the tools and training that they can combine with their current expertise in marketing, design, strategy, content creation, and sales in order to provide their clients with well-rounded solutions offerings.
The Partner program isn’t something you can just do; it has to be earned. This gives your potential clients a certain level of trust that not only do you know what you’re talking about, but you have the skills and experience to deliver on it.
Why should we become a HubSpot Marketing Partner?
The importance of the HubSpot Partner program can be summed up in two words: confidence and accessibility. It gives your team access to a number of HubSpot’s tools that can improve the success rate of your strategy and campaigns. And because there is a certification process that goes into becoming a Partner, it gives your clients a new level of confidence in your strategies and abilities to enact them successfully. (The “If HubSpot says you’re ok, you must be ok” benefit.)
Becoming a HubSpot partner also enables you to be listed in HubSpot’s directories. It’s a way to attract new business with a limited amount of effort.
Overall, the HubSpot Partner program is ideal for agencies that want to:
- Expand their service offerings
- Grow their new client base
- Expand the solutions they currently offer to existing clients
- Increase client retention
The 4 Growth Hacks That Come With a HubSpot Partner
1. Become a Natural at Internal Automation
HubSpot gives you plenty of nifty tools to make outreach and lead conversion smooth and swift. Not all automation is contact-facing, though. Some of the greatest potential for efficiency gains are actually internal—if you have the know-how to take advantage. Consider how much time you could save on manual record-keeping, delegation, and updating contact records by automating common internal tasks with tools like HubSpot Workflows. For example, you can leverage HubSpot to:
- Automatically assign sales reps based on location
- Auto-schedule a string of follow-up tasks in the HubSpot CRM
- Calculate and assign lead scores based on custom criteria
- Set, update, and delete internal contact properties
A HubSpot partner directory that lives and breathes the software every day is in their element with both internal and external facing automation tools. The HubSpot Partner Program can lead you to an agency that has efficient, all-around use of the platform down to a science. A tried-and-true process for internal workflows could streamline your handoff from marketing to sales to service.
2. Enjoy Speedy Native & Custom Integrations
The open HubSpot API is a huge draw to the platform. A cohesive, unified tech stack is a well-oiled growth machine. Use a certified HubSpot Partner to put this limitless ecosystem to good use. You can’t go wrong with hundreds of native HubSpot integrations and the freedom to construct the custom ones you need. As Heather and Michael from RentBridge explain, “If you’re asking if HubSpot can integrate with something, the answer is always yes.”
For example, you can use your HubSpot partner’s expertise to leverage native Salesforce integration for either one-way and two-way exchanges of contact data. You might use the HubSpot-Salesforce integration to:
- Create reports in HubSpot that showcase both sales revenue figures and marketing KPIs
- Give your sales reps visibility into the opens and clicks on marketing emails
- Smoothly hand off contact records from the marketing funnel to the sales pipeline
Shopify is another standout native integration. Perhaps you run an e-commerce business that’s entirely built on a Shopify website. This works great for product pages, but Shopify isn’t best suited for back-end record-keeping and other marketing functions. HubSpot integrations can help you:
- Take abandoned Shopify cart data and deploy timely emails to re-engage teetering leads (before they go cold)
- Distribute personalized follow-up message after a purchase
- Segment contacts from the Shopify database by your preferred criteria for engagement through HubSpot drip campaigns
Even if there isn’t a native integration, you’ll be able to use HubSpot’s open API to pull in data from all relevant software with the help of a skilled HubSpot partner agency.
AS HUBSPOT EXPLAINS, “THE PARTNER TIER PROGRAM IS DESIGNED TO ACKNOWLEDGE THOSE AGENCY PARTNERS WHO HAVE NOT ONLY BROUGHT THE INBOUND MESSAGE TO THE MOST CLIENTS, BUT ALSO THOSE WHO EXECUTED INBOUND MARKETING SERVICES TO THE HIGHEST STANDARDS.”
THAT HIGH STANDARD OF PERFORMANCE IS WHAT WILL SET YOU UP FOR SUCCESS.
3. Plunder a Treasure Trove of Ready-Made Resources
All HubSpot customers get free access to HubSpot content downloads via the Marketing Library. Search by lifecycle stage, topic, content genre, and more for the perfect time-saving PowerPoint templates, free stock photos, customizable CTAs, and more. However, these free HubSpot resources aren’t the only thing you’ll have at your disposal with a HubSpot Partner agency at your side.
HubSpot partners have a direct line to HubSpot HQ, which they can use to get you the support, training, or fixes you need, right when you need them. Partners will also do much more for you than a traditional onboarding process. Lean on your partner to facilitate the creation of personalized and branded templates for web pages, landers, fillable web forms, and much more. Your HubSpot onboarding agency can waive the traditional HubSpot onboarding fee and help you hit the ground running fast with every resource you need.
4. Make Your Funnel Smart With Lead Scoring
The rich data collected by HubSpot is only as useful as your ability to interpret it. You’ll find no better guide than a member of the HubSpot Partner Program.
Many businesses discuss their prospects in terms of traditional “funnel” stages, but it’s rarer for businesses to quantify those stages with data. Not so with a HubSpot partner. You’ll be able to tell strangers from visitors, leads, customers, brand promoters, and more with customization of the HubSpot lead scoring tools.
Your partner will work with you to assign positive and negative values to different actions that your contacts take (say, opening an email, bouncing from a webpage within 5 seconds, or clicking a CTA). These values paint a picture of the lead’s level of sales-ready-qualification. When the contact hits the right indicator, you can have HubSpot automatically notify your sales team that they’re hot and ready for direct outreach. You might even assign contact values through invisible fields in your Forms tool. If the contact fills out a bottom-of-funnel form, the hidden field could automatically label them a Sales Qualified Lead and update their profile in your CRM.
Successful businesses will take time to carefully update the HubSpot default lifecycle stages to reflect the journey of customers for their own business or industry. That’s where your HubSpot partner’s expertise will combine with your lived experience selling your product or service to land on the right lead scoring strategy.
Requirements to Become a HubSpot Certified Partner
Becoming a HubSpot Certified Partner is not something that just happens. And this is by design. These are just some of the things to consider and that you’ll need to have in place to become a HubSpot Partner.
Team Readiness
Do you have a team with some HubSpot experience? If not, that’s ok as long as they are willing to learn.
Budgetary Readiness
Becoming a HubSpot Partner will help your business grow. But not overnight. You’ll need to consider if your monthly budget can absorb the startup and then the monthly fees as you get your business under the Partner program into place.
Having the right platform
The first requirement is probably the easiest one to meet - having the right HubSpot platform tier. Certified Partners must be using the HubSpot Professional or Enterprise level version of the system.
Completing the application
The application process to join the HubSpot Partner program will be a deep exploration of your business. As much as you want to make sure that you can benefit from being a HubSpot Partner, they want to make sure that you will be a good HubSpot marketing partner.
Get trained
This is the fun part of joining the HubSpot agency partner program. It’s when you have an opportunity to get into the platform and learn from the experts the how-tos of the various platform components. This is not going to tell you everything about HubSpot, there’s additional training for that, but the available courses will allow you to achieve the certifications you need for the HubSpot agency partner program.
How to Become a HubSpot Partner: Step-by-Step Guide
If you are interested in growing your business by becoming a HubSpot marketing partner, you have two options. You can become a Certified Partner or an Agency Partner. Each gives you the opportunity to partner with HubSpot but just in two unique ways. (It is important to note that these are not the only two Partner programs offered by HubSpot; they are just the two that are market agency-focused.)
How to Become a HubSpot Certified Partner
For your marketing company to become a HubSpot Certified Partner, you need to meet a number of “markers” as set by HubSpot. More than just knowledge, though, a HubSpot Certified Partner needs to hold a level of expertise and experience that few others have. HubSpot wants its customers to know that when they get a Certified Partner agenc,y they are getting the “best of the best.”
One of the benefits to being certified as a HubSpot marketing partner is that you will have insider access to tools, training, systems, and support that a “regular” company working with HubSpot will not.
How to Become a HubSpot Agency Partner
If you are using HubSpot but perhaps don’t have the time, experience, or resources in place to obtain certification you might want to consider just becoming an agency partner. This provides you with access to HubSpot experts and “insider services” so that you can build up your confidence and skills on the platform. These will be necessary to have should you want to make the move to become certified.
One of the biggest benefits of becoming a HubSpot Partner agency is an increase in your HubSpot access. You’ll be able to “try out” many of the services and tools in HubSpot to build up your level of comfort and assess your client’s level of need.
Tips to Grow Within the HubSpot Partner Program
Becoming a HubSpot Partner is not the end of a process but the beginning of one. As a Partner you have a unique opportunity to tap into the power and versatility of HubSpot to grow. Where other agencies may focus on one area, you’ll have the capabilities and backing to expand your service offerings to clients, which can in turn fuel your growth potential.
Marketing
Connecting companies with their customers, it’s what you do, and you do it well. HubSpot gives you an opportunity to refine your marketing offerings even in the HubSpot partner program. With greater insight into client characteristics and actions, you’ll be able to plan stronger, more effective campaigns for your clients.
Take advantage of HubSpot's ability to integrate with hundreds of existing applications. This collects all of your key data and metrics in one location which means you can spend less time looking for information and more time developing strategies because of what you have.
Implementation
A general estimate is that it takes five days, and hundreds of deep breaths, to set up a HubSpot CRM. As a HubSpot implementation partner, you can help make that process easier and smoother for your clients.
The result is that your client will be up and running campaigns faster, and their trust levels in your abilities will increase even more. Plus, a successful HubSpot implementation provides a stronger base for the success of your marketing campaigns.
Support
When you’re involved in the HubSpot agency partner program, you are not just invested in one area of your client’s HubSpot experience; you want to see them successful and happy across the board. Providing them with support and service can help. They may have struggled importing an email list, need to clean up customer records, or have a misaligned email template. Your team can help in all of those areas and more.
Common Mistakes to Avoid as a New HubSpot Partner
So, after doing your research, you’ve decided to become a HubSpot marketing partner. Congratulations! As with any new venture, there are going to be some mistakes made. While some of those are going to be unavoidable, there are some pretty common mistakes that new HubSpot Partners tend to make again and again. And again. Let’s look at what three of the more common mistakes are so you can avoid them.
- An undertrained team
HubSpot is an amazing platform and there’s so much you can do with it. But to unlock its full potential you need a trained and dedicated team. And that training can’t stop. HubSpot has a number of strong tutorials and reference resources, but don’t leave it up to “when you have time.” Providing dedicated, scheduled time each week for training reinforces the importance of the effort and lets team members know it’s ok to not have a couple of billable hours because what they are learning will strengthen client relationships in the long run. - An outdated strategy
Marketing is difficult because the landscape is always shifting. With new technologies and communication channels coming online on a seemingly weekly basis along with changing end-customer needs, a strategy that you used last year may not be as effective today. That’s why it’s important to evaluate your strategies on a regular basis and not be afraid to adjust. - Having a client tell you about a new technology or trend
Clients come to you because, as a HubSpot Partner you are seen to have a certain level of expertise. When they are educating you on the latest and greatest trends and technology their perception of you as an expert quickly changes. Not setting aside dedicated time to continue to learn and evolve your knowledge and skills can be a big mistake.
The HubSpot Partner Program Makes Growth Simple
Most companies use at least three service providers to manage their day-to-day business, according to HubSpot research. Options are good, but the multiple needs of today’s companies make it hard to find the right-fit partner for your needs (and your software).
This makes the HubSpot Partner Program the best deal on the market: a full database of thousands of filterable agencies and service providers that range from full-service to specialties like web design, content marketing, or sales support. Your team can feel confident that your certified HubSpot partner will make onboarding, migrations, and integrations efficient drivers of growth — not frustrating cost sinks. The Partner Program recognizes masters of HubSpot, a true platform solution that solves broad go-to-market needs.
