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b'In the early 2000s we saw the rise of multiple CRM solutions. Most of them were on-premise, but some were cloud-based, even though at that time \\u201ccloud\\u201d was not the buzz word it is now. Over the past couple of decades, Salesforce stayed focused as a cloud CRM provider, and evolved into a massive SaaS ecosystem featuring a variety of business applications. Over the years, others like Microsoft and SAP followed suit, either through organic (built in-house) or inorganic (acquired) offerings. Some of these direct sales automation tools\\u2014for example, SAP\\u2014also introduced a bare-bones application for partner relationship management (PRM). Eventually, Oracle and Salesforce did as well, but none of these PRM applications could fully address automation requirements for the entire partner lifecycle.\\xa0\\n\\n\\n\\nNow, while this was going on in the market space, HubSpot came into existence about a decade ago as an alternative platform for marketing automation, and over the past five years has evolved into a complete marketing and sales automation platform. HubSpot\\u2019s superior ease of use and its much-needed native integrations between marketing and sales have allowed it to capture a significant portion of the SMB and mid-market customer base. Many of these SMB and mid-market organizations are now looking for a full-featured PRM application. In this article, we will focus on how you can integrate your HubSpot with your partner relationship management application to create a seamless business process automation platform.\\n\\n\\n\\nIn this age of working remotely\\u2014but also for the business folks on the go\\u2014sales operations move at the speed of digital. The days of keeping tabs on a sales pipeline in an Excel spreadsheet and updating those cells one at a time to create a report are gone. Today, customer relationship management (CRM) applications are table stakes for sales organizations. The scope of CRM has expanded into marketing (pre-sales) and services (post-sales). The goal of this category now is to provide a wholistic view of a buyer from engagement (prospect) to close (customer) to renewal (advocate). While there are many patchworks of tools that are available in the marketplace to slap onto a CRM platform, it requires significant process and interdisciplinary knowledge, integration of resources and, of course, additional money for different app subscriptions to extend a CRM like Salesforce into a multi-app business environment. This is why HubSpot is thriving as a single integrated platform that provides marketing and sales automation in an end-to-end fashion. I would not be surprised if their next offering is in the service management space\\u2014it simply makes sense.\\n\\n\\n\\nPartner relationship management (PRM) platforms today have a similar scope\\u2014a complete end-to-end management of the partner lifecycle. ZINFI\\u2019s PRM platform not only focuses on providing a bare-bones partner portal for organizations that are starting up their channel program, but also enables highly advanced and complex channel organizations to deploy a wide range of programs and workflows. Large, complex Fortune 1000 enterprises not only need sophisticated workflow capabilities, but also content personalization and program deployment across various sales and language territories around the world. A state-of-the-art PRM like ZINFI\\u2019s solution is able to handle simple yet complex deployments using a configurable and modular architecture. However, the scope of a PRM or a CRM remain quite separate, as both are purpose-built. We have written other articles on why PRMs are different from CRMs, and won\\u2019t get into those details here; however, there is a set of natural points of intersection between CRMs and PRMs. We will now explore how to integrate HubSpot CRM with a PRM that is similar to the state-of-the-art solution that ZINFI provides.\\n\\n\\n\\nIf we consider for a moment the core elements that are common between PRM and CRM systems, we realize that both address one simple thing\\u2014how to generate more ...'