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  3. Provider Orders and Marketplace
  4. Marketplace (Partners)

Manage Provider Orders

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Overview

You can request and manage orders for services from 3rd party providers (agencies) from your partner portal, if your supplier is offering this solution. You can select which provider you want to help you with the activity and, initially, requests take the form of a fixed price order or a request for a quote. 

If applicable, you can choose how you want to pay for the services - use available MDF or fund it yourself.

For more information, see About Provider Orders.

Before You Begin

To use provider orders, you should already be familiar with navigating the campaigns menus and activating campaigns and marketing activities in the portal.

If your supplier is providing a Marketplace for you to access 3rd party providers and services, you can get an overview at About Marketplace.

If your supplier is providing MDF to fund your marketing activities, you may need to submit a pre-approval before ordering the activity, and a claim after the event to be reimbursed for the cost. For more information, see Get Started with Marketplace and MDF and About Marketing Transactions.

Contents

Click + to expand each section.

Find and Access Provider Services

There are three ways in which you can find and order provider services - availability depends on the portal setup your supplier provides:

  1. From Browse Campaigns, when you activate a campaign that includes a full service activity from a 3rd party provider
  2. From Marketplace, if enabled, when you to go Providers (the name of the page may be different in your setup - check with your supplier for information)
  3. From a Provider Locator, if available, when you browse the offerings available from a provider in a specific location

How to Request and Accept a Quote for Provider Services

Some provider orders ask you to request a quote for services, rather than agreeing to a fixed price.

To request a quote for provider services, follow these steps:

  1. Find the service you want to order, and pick the provider to carry it out. See Find and Access Provider Services for more information. An activity that requires a quote request, rather than a fixed price, is identified:

    portal_full service_activity_quote_required.png

  2. Select the activity.
  3. Click Continue to proceed with activating the activity.
  4. Provide the information requested - select a campaign (or create a new one) or a provider and provide order details. For more information, see the How to Order Services from a Provider section of this article.
  5. Click Activate. The quote request is sent to the relevant provider.

You will receive notifications when the provider responds with a quote. You can also monitor the status of your request in the portal. For more information, see the How to View Details of an Order section of this article.

When you receive quotes from the providers, review the quotes received and choose which one to use.

  1. Open the order in your partner portal - this will likely be in your Campaigns or Orders pages.

  2. Complete the Review Quotes task

    1. Click Review next to the task
    2. Review the details of the quote
    3. Click Accept to accept the quote and proceed with the work. You'll be taken to the Submit Order screen. Follow the steps in the How to Order Services from a Provider section of this article to proceed with the order.
    4. Click Change Status > Cancel Order if you want to reject the provided quote.

    portal_provider_order_accept_quote.png

  3. Complete the Specify Contacts task (if applicable) to add the contacts necessary for the provider to complete the work. For more information about adding a contact list to an order, see the How to Add Your Contacts to an Order section of this article.

How to Order Services from a Provider

You can order services provided by 3rd party providers in your partner portal. This process covers orders for both fixed price services and jobs that require an initial quote from the provider. 

  1. Find the 3rd party service you want to order. See the Find and Access Provider Services section of this article for more information. 
  2. Open or activate the activity that describes the service.
  3. Accept the quote from the supplier, if applicable. See the How to Request and Accept a Quote for Provider Services section of this article for information. If the service has a fixed price, you won't need to do this step.
  4. Provide this information:
    • Select a campaign - This will be required if you activated the activity outside of a campaign (for example buy picking a service in Marketplace). Here you can pick a campaign provided by your supplier (Browse Campaigns), pick a campaign you've already activated (My Campaigns) or create a completely new one (Create your Own Campaign).
    • Select a provider - Select the provider who will complete the activity. If there's only one available, the field is read only.
    • Select funds - Choose how to pay for the provider services:

      • MDF funds - If your supplier's using MDF funds, they're listed here for you to choose from. Your supplier will have decided what percentage of the cost can be reimbursed from MDF. To learn how to find out what MDF funds are available to you (if enabled by your supplier), see About Funding Details.

        Your supplier may require a pre-approval/claim process to use your MDF allocation. For more information, see Get Started with MDF, Orders, and Marketplace and About Marketing Transactions.

      • Self Pay - If there's no funds available, or MDF will only reimburse part of the cost, click Add Self Pay Option to add the payment type Partner Funded.
    • [Optional] Provide order details - Provide additional information requested in the form or any special instructions to the provider.
  5. Click Activate or Submit Order, depending on where you started your order. The order is submitted to the provider and is available in your My Orders (or equivalent) page for monitoring.

How to View Details of an Order

Once you've submitted an order, monitor its status and progress in the My Orders view.

  1. Navigate to your My Orders page (note: the location and the name of the page may be different)
  2. Click View Order next to the order you want to review.
  3. In the Activity Dashboard view, you can do the following:
    • Check if the provider has provided a quote (if applicable) - see Order Status
    • Check the order status. For a full list of possible order statuses, see Provider Order Status Descriptions.
    • Click View Order Details to check pricing, completion date, and provider contact information.

How to Add Your Contacts to an Order

The provider of an order may need contacts from your organization to complete the service you're ordering. You can link existing contact lists and their contacts to the order, or create new ones. When you add or edit contact lists from within an order, they're linked to the order and added to the Contacts/Contact Lists areas of your portal.

For information about managing the contacts in your order (added as participants), see Working with Participants/Contacts in Provider Orders.

For general information about contacts and contact lists in the portal, see Contacts and Contact Lists.

How to Communicate with a Provider about an Order

Whilst status updates give a general idea of what's happening with an order, you may need to provide other information or updates to help it progress. You can have a two way conversation with the provider by using in-order comments.

  1. Navigate to your My Orders page (note: the location and the name of the page may be different)
  2. Click View Order next to the order you want to update.
  3. In the Activity Dashboard tab, click Add a comment to post a comment for your provider contact. You can add a note or upload a file (max size 5MB) to the order.
  4. Click Save Comment. The comment is posted to the order.

The provider (and, sometimes, your supplier) can also post comments here, such as invoices, receipts, or status updates. If the provider posts a comment, you will be notified via email. The whole communication thread is maintained in the Comments section.

How to Change an Order's Status

Your only option for manually changing the status of a live order is to cancel it. You can only do this if the order hasn't been started.

You can change the status of an order to Cancelled if it is in any of these states:

  • Draft
  • Pending Quotes
  • Pending Approval
  • Approved
  • Not Started by Provider

All other status changes are done automatically when you or the provider complete certain steps for the order.

  1. Navigate to your My Orders page (note: the location and the name of the page may be different)
  2. Click View Order next to the order you want to update.
  3. In the Activity Dashboard tab, click the Change Status button and choose Cancel Order.

How to Manage Leads from an Order

If leads have been generated from the activity/event you ordered, you can manually upload them to the order to maintain a record. The provider can do this too.

  1. Navigate to your My Orders page (note: the location and the name of the page may be different)
  2. Click View Order next to the order you want to update.
  3. Go to the Leads tab to see which leads already exist for the order.
  4. To upload a single lead:
    • Click the Add Lead button. The New Lead form opens.
    • Complete the details requested in the form and click Save. The contact is added to the linked contact list and the Contacts area of your portal.
    • The contact is displayed in the Leads list for the order.
  5. To upload multiple leads:
    • Click the Upload Leads button. The Upload Leads window opens.
    • Click Upload and choose the file of contacts to import. The file can be in XSLX, XLS, TXT, or CSV format. 
    • Specify if your file includes a header row.
    • Click Upload.
    • Map the header columns to contact record fields, to confirm which contact field in portal records should be populated with the values from each column in the upload file.
    • Click Upload Leads. The contacts are added to the linked contact list and the Contacts area of your portal. Note: if a contact is invalid, or already exists, the import of that contact will fail. The upload presents a failure message and a link from where you can view the failed rows from the import.
    • The contacts are displayed in the Leads list for the order.
  6. To export a CSV list of leads from an order:
    • Click the Export button.
    • Choose whether to export a single list now, or schedule a regular export - daily, weekly, or monthly.
    • Click Export Contacts. At the specified time, the list is added to your My Downloads area in the portal, and you receive an email notification to confirm when it's available.

How to Convert Participants in the Order into Leads

You may want to convert the contacts/participants from order/activity into leads to support your future marketing/sales efforts.

  1. Navigate to your My Orders page (note: the location and the name of the page may be different)
  2. Click View Order next to the order you want to update.
  3. Go to the Leads tab to see which leads already exist for the order.
  4. [Optional] Go to the Activity Dashboard tab and click Edit Partner Notifications to add email addresses for persons who will be notified when participants are converted into leads. Click Add then Save to complete the addition.
  5. In the Participants tab, click on the name of a participant to open their entry.
  6. Click Register as Lead.
  7. Complete the information requested in the Lead Registration form. 
  8. Click Register. The lead is registered against the participant/contact's timeline.

How to Cancel an Activity or Provider Order

If you have requested a provider service, you can still cancel the order as long as the activity has not started in the portal. You can cancel it provided it is still at one of the initial processing stages. For more information, see Provider Order Status Descriptions.

To cancel a provider order, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to your My Orders page (note: the location and the name of the page may be different)
  2. Click View Order next to the order you want to update.
  3. Click Order Details.
  4. Click Change Status > Cancel Order. This option is not available if the order has already been started.

You will receive notification that the order is canceled.

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