B2B portals: what dealer, franchisee and partner portals taught us

A B2B portal is the place where a business partner does their work with you. A dealer orders parts and finds the sales sheet. A franchisee checks this week's bulletin and pays an invoice. An insurance agent looks up a quote. When the portal is hard to use, the partner still has to get the job done, so they call, email, print, or spend their time with a competitor whose portal is easier.

We have designed, built and run portals like these since 2009. These are the lessons that held across four of them.

Your portal shares a desk with your competitors'

In 2019 we interviewed a CNH Industrial dealer whose parts, service and warranty lead logged into about 20 manufacturer portals. CNH's was one of them. Search rarely found what he needed, and he could lose 15 to 20 minutes hunting for a single document.

That is the frame for any B2B portal. Your partners are not comparing it with your old portal. They are comparing it with the other portals open on the same desk, and a dealer who carries several manufacturers' lines feels the difference first. For CNH the dealer portal is the sales channel to its dealers, so usability was a commercial question.

Model the people, not the stores

CNH's old portal issued one user ID per dealership. As dealers consolidated into groups, one person could need nine IDs for nine dealerships across four brands. The portal's data model described how the business had been organized years earlier.

Before designing screens, check whose account model the portal assumes. A partner is usually a person with a role, working for one or more organizations that change over time. If the portal only knows locations, every merger becomes a support ticket.

Deliver content by account and role

A&W's Xchange serves franchisees and restaurant managers across Canada. We rebuilt it so content is tagged and delivered by restaurant number and role, in English and French, with a governance model that tells each publisher what they own. CNH's new portal gave each brand its own personalized view; by CNH's 2023 figures it spans 11 brands. For Aspirus Arise, a new Wisconsin health plan, we designed the portal as four modules, one each for providers, agents, employers and members.

The pattern is the same in each case. A partner should open the portal and see what applies to their business first.

Design for where the work happens

The A&W restaurant manager we visited in 2016 opened Xchange two or three times a day, mostly on his phone, and printed the week's forms every Monday. CNH's dealer team wanted to use the portal on phones and tablets in the field. At Aspirus, many calls came from people who were not sure where to find things.

Printing, phoning and emailing are evidence. They show where the portal stops fitting the work. Watch what partners do around the portal, not only inside it.

Ask partners, then build their top requests first

We tested the new Xchange prototype in six sessions with franchisees running one, four and six restaurants, an area manager and managers from Quebec. Two requests came from more than two of them, and both went into the first release: a section with everything needed to train a new hire, and a promotions calendar that shows last year's promotions to help forecast sales.

For Aspirus, brokers and employers' HR staff walked through the clickable prototype. They asked for clearer contact information and valued a "What would you like to do…" starting point. Every feature was then classed as must-have or nice-to-have, and the roadmap followed that list.

Roll out in steps, and switch off the old portal last

CNH's redesigned portal launched in North America in 2020. Australia went next, then South America, whose language setup later regions reused, then Europe, with dealer administration adapted to European rules, then Asia-Pacific. We migrated dealer and staff records market by market, and by September 2022 every dealer had moved. Only then did CNH shut the old portal down.

A global portal rarely has one launch day. Plan for the old and new portals to run side by side, and treat the shutdown of the old one as the final milestone.

Give every operator one model to follow

CEMEX's country websites had each been built by a different IT provider. When CEMEX moved them to Liferay DXP, we built one global theme, page templates and rules that every country and provider could follow, migrated Mexico, the UK, Germany and Poland ourselves, and advised the providers who moved the rest. The customer tools, from the ready-mix concrete calculator to the location finder, became the same across countries.

When many teams will build on your portal, the shared model is the product. It is what keeps the tenth country's site consistent with the first.

Expect the work to continue after launch

The single sign-on A&W's restaurant manager asked for in 2016 was still guiding the work in 2022, when Xchange moved sign-in to Okta, a group of stores at a time. We supported and extended Xchange from 2017 to 2024 and kept CNH's portal running for nine years. A partner portal is an ongoing relationship with your partners, and its roadmap should be written with them.

Related case studies: CNH Industrial dealer portal · A&W Canada Xchange · Aspirus Arise · CEMEX country websites