Whether it’s connecting with your support team, placing bulk orders for products, taking training courses, or accessing co-branding marketing materials, web portals can be developed to allow for every person connected to your business securely get the information and tools they need.
Online web portals are how we connect with a lot of our online content. Any website you have an account for, be it email, social media, business applications, or online retail sites, gives you access to a portal for that service.
Portals are different from regular website pages, as they require login credentials to access. The login credentials protect secure information, whether that’s your own personal data, proprietary data for the companies you work for or with, or customer and client data.
Portals can also give you access to tools, like instant messaging, placing or tracking orders, scheduling for meetings, deliveries, and more, or project management capabilities like task lists.
More sophisticated portals can even help connect the different aspects of your business and insight collaboration. For example, a partner directory can help one of your customers find a certified support partner in their area and connect them through instant messaging in the portal, or portal forums give partners and employees a place to ask questions and collaborate on solutions and new strategies.
Different types of web portals need different levels of functionality and accessibility from a portal user perspective.
Vertical portals are designed to be a self-service interface between the creator and the user of the portal whereby the users are given access to certain functionality and can edit or change information that will the be reflected back to the creator or another user of the portal. Managing orders is an example of this kind of vertical portal.
Horizontal portals are a good option when your objective is to amalgamate information from various sources, like displaying key performance indicators from your CRM, PRM, and ERP all into a custom dashboard built on the horizontal portal.
How much does it cost to build a customer portal, for example? You can anticipate a basic portal development to cost between $15,000 and $100,000 on average, with the price depending primarily on the following factors:
We have developed various user based resource portals for companies like Reaco Battery. This kind of portal allows businesses that operate using the channel distribution and indirect sales models to share documents with specific partners and indirect sales representatives.
The goal with custom partner web portal development is to create a seamless partner experience from recruiting to onboarding to customer engagement so that partners see the true value of being a part of your value chain and feel rewarded (not just compensated) for partnering with you.
Mid America's HubSpot portal has been fully customized with Custom Objects and Workflow Extensions that allow for a more detailed view of their entire channel. Through the use of these objects Mid America is able to structure their data to fit their more specific business structure. For example they are able to use a Vendor object to better visualize the relationship between their partners and customers.
Sometimes the solution you need to sell more building materials better through channels and direct to consumers is less robust than developing a custom portal. Sometimes, you may simply need to develop a custom web application to deliver the right information to the right person at exactly the right moment in their purchase journey. We love helping with that too! Here are some examples:
Kenyon Glass, a subsidiary of ODL, needed a way to provide accurate pricing estimates for both their customers and for partners to use when calculating pricing for their customers. We worked with them to develop a number of online pricing calculators for internal use and partner use. The various versions of this calculator are calibrated to reflect VAR pricing escalations as the products are purchased wholesale and then sold retail throughout the value chain.
The pricing calculators were more of a complex and truly custom build, but sometimes simple builds can also make a world of difference in a team’s workflow. Oxford Lab Products, for example, is using ManoByte’s PDF Generator App to provide their dealers with customized Certificates of Analysis. By installing the app directly to an existing HubSpot Portal, a company is able to both generate PDF documents of partner form submissions as well as use the form module to immediately provide custom generated PDF documents for their partners and customers right on a web page.
Looking at another example, ManoByte’s Partner Deals Portal App was created to give HubSpot users the ability to leverage their existing HubSpot portal and features as a Partner Platform without having to build out an entire PRM to gain specific functionality. This gives users the ability to allow Partners some visibility and access to their Deals as a traditional PRM would.
Another custom web app development project ManoByte conducted was for Gerald R. Ford International Airport. They needed some custom web applications built to act as inbound marketing resources and customer experience enhancement opportunities including a real time flight tracker and a non stop routes map, which have become numbered among the top trafficked pages on their website.
Portals give your employees, partners, or customers access to vital functionality for your channel efforts to scale and direct revenues to grow. Whether it’s connecting with your support team, placing bulk orders for products, taking training courses, or accessing co-branding marketing materials, portals help every person connected to your business securely get the information and tools they need.