Client, associate and alumni sites for consulting, accounting and advisory firms, connected to the account and engagement records your partners already rely on.
Experience Cloud gives professional services firms secure sites for the people around an engagement who are not on the firm's payroll. Clients complete onboarding, sign engagement letters, submit new service requests and receive status updates. Independent associates and subcontractors register skills and availability for staffing. Former employees stay connected through an alumni site that often becomes a source of referrals and hires. Because each site is built on Salesforce, account teams see client activity, and resource managers see associate availability, without chasing information across inboxes and spreadsheets.
Professional services firms differ from product companies because the relationship is the product, and much of it runs on partner email and personal contact. Firms also tend to have strong collaboration tools for delivery work, so a portal that tries to host deliverables often competes with tools clients already prefer. Experience Cloud fits best at the edges of the engagement: onboarding and acceptance, recurring service requests, extended talent networks and alumni relationships, where the CRM already holds the data. It adapts through account-based sharing so each client sees only its own matters, and through audience-specific sites for clients, associates and alumni. Where a firm's engagements are bespoke and handled entirely by a partner, a client site adds little, and we say so.
New clients provide entity details, beneficial ownership, billing contacts and signed engagement letters before work begins. A guided onboarding site collects each item, tracks what is missing and hands a complete file to risk and finance. Partners see acceptance status in Salesforce, and engagement teams stop starting work before paperwork, independence checks or credit approval are finished. Finance also receives billing details correctly the first time.
Firms with ongoing relationships, such as outsourced accounting, benefits consulting or managed advisory, receive a steady flow of smaller requests. A client site gives each request a form, a record and a named owner, with status visible to the client. Account leaders see volume by client, which informs renewal pricing and staffing discussions, and clients no longer wonder whether a request reached the right person.
Many firms extend capacity with independent consultants and specialist subcontractors. An associate site lets them maintain profiles, credentials, rates and availability, accept assignment offers and submit required compliance documents. Resource managers search that network alongside employees, and the firm keeps a consistent record of who has worked on which clients and under which agreement, which matters when a client asks who touched its data.
Former consultants frequently become clients, referral sources or returning hires. An alumni site offers job postings, events, publications and a directory, while tracking where alumni now work. Business development teams can see when an alumnus joins a target account, and recruiting can reach former colleagues who left on good terms when a role opens, instead of relying on individual memories.
Clients should be accounts with engagement or matter records beneath them, and portal users tied to the client contact so sharing follows the account relationship. Independence and conflicts results need structured fields, not attachments, if onboarding depends on them. Associates are usually modeled as contacts on a supplier or individual account, with skills, certifications and availability as related records that resource searches can filter. Alumni require a separate audience and a record of current employer that updates over time. Keep each audience in its own site or clearly separated pages, since clients, associates and alumni should never see one another's content.
Receives accepted engagements and associate assignments, and returns project status and milestones that clients see on their service request pages.
Handles engagement letters, associate agreements and statements of work, writing completed documents and signature dates back to the onboarding record automatically.
Stores final deliverables and working papers under the firm's retention policies, with the client site linking to approved items rather than duplicating files.
Accounting and advisory firms must clear independence and conflicts before accepting work. Build those checks into the onboarding flow as gating steps, and confirm with your risk team which results can be recorded in Salesforce and which must stay in dedicated compliance systems.
If engagement teams collaborate with clients in a document workspace or project tool, keep that there. A client site that duplicates deliverable sharing splits conversations and confuses version control. Focus the site on requests, onboarding and status instead of daily working files.
Independent associates raise worker classification and contracting questions. Keep their onboarding clearly separate from employee processes, collect the agreements your counsel requires, and avoid site features that imply employment, such as internal training mandates, firm email addresses or employee-only communications.
Client names are anonymized.
Many are skeptical, and with reason, because personal contact is central to the relationship. We position client sites around tasks clients find tedious, such as onboarding documents, recurring requests and status checks, rather than replacing conversations with partners. When partners see less administrative email and faster onboarding, adoption usually follows without mandating the site, and partners start recommending it themselves.
Yes. Experience Cloud supports multiple sites in one org, each with its own branding, login method and sharing model. Clients, associates and alumni can each have a separate site drawing on the same underlying accounts and contacts, while permissions ensure each audience sees only what belongs to it. That also avoids maintaining three separate contact databases.
An associate site keeps external talent profiles current, because associates update their own skills and availability. Resource managers can then search employees and associates together when staffing an engagement. The quality of that search depends on consistent skill taxonomies, so we define those with practice leaders before building profiles or matching logic, and revisit them as services change.
It can be if alumni regularly become clients or referral sources and the firm is willing to publish useful content and events. Without someone owning the program, alumni sites go quiet. We usually suggest starting with a simple directory, job board and news page, then adding features as engagement grows and the firm sees results.
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