Allbound Reviews

I'm working on partner operations for our company and we have Allbound for the direct presentation of our partner program to our partners. The partners can navigate to Allbound, learn about our company, and submit referrals via the tool. That's how we have been using it.

It's in place to help us source partner referrals and to help partners learn about us and our partner program, and ultimately, also certify to become an extension of the sales team, and refer their customers to our service.

It's difficult to say how it has improved our organization. As long as I've been a part of this company, we've always used Allbound. I honestly wonder, if we were to use a different tool, would we be more successful? I don't know. That's a question that's always on my mind. For what Allbound does right now for us, it matches our expectations, but we're restructuring the partner organization, and we're making some changes to the strategy. I wonder if, in the future, the tool is going to be able to keep up with what our demands will be.

It has made us successful, but we're at a point where we're really evaluating how we want to grow, and what more we need from the tool, and what it can deliver. There are also some functionalities that we haven't explored in Allbound, so this may be an opportunity for us to do that now.

Channel Insights is a really useful functionality. We can see the overall performance and engagement that partners have with the tool. There is a variety of reporting that we can activate as well. Over time, Channel Insights allows us to see what is happening with the tool, such as whether there is an increase or a decrease in new partners registering, or an increase or decrease in engagement, meaning what partners do in the tool, including how often they log in and how often they interact with the content in the tool.

The insights help us plan ahead. Let's say we're adding some additional content or we are making some adjustments. We can see how that impacts the partner activity. If we see that one thing performs better than another, or a change that we make triggers an increase in activity, we may potentially build on that or add similar content.

The referral functionality has been the most valuable for us, meaning our partners can submit leads to us via Allbound. That is really critical for us because that is how we generate new business. When a partner submits a lead to us via Allbound, it's a really hot lead for us to work on and convert.

It's very easy to onboard a partner using Allbound. It's very easy to set up an account for the partner and activate it for them. And it is also easy for partner contacts to gain access to their account. Given that we have whitelisted the partner's email domain in Allbound, all the contacts from the partner company can join the account. They just need to sign up with a password that they have to come up with.

We have an "enablement" process in place, where representatives connect with our partner contacts and let them know how to navigate the tool, what they need to look out for, where they can find information about relevant things that they want to consume, and how they can register a deal. If you log in to Allbound as a partner or partner contact, it's fairly straightforward to navigate the tool. It says, "Register a deal," or "Learn more about XYZ." It's really easy to navigate, but we still do have some enablement sessions that we organize with our partners to take them through the tool.

It is also easy to customize the content that different partners see when they log in. You segment your partner accounts and, based on that segmentation, you can then expose individual groups of partners to different content that they can consume. We have not used it that much, but it's going to become more important for us this year, as we have been strategizing about how best to segment our partner accounts, and what kind of communication we want to expose each of those groups to. Once we have a strong strategy around that, we'll leverage this functionality a little bit more.

The user interface for admins could be a little bit better. Something that we appreciate a lot is that Allbound has increased some of the functionality that admins can do. That's good. But in terms of the user interface, there are still some improvements that can be made.

Also from the user's perspective, the UI can be improved. I feel that it's a little bit outdated, the way it looks right now for the partners. We're a tech company and we are very advanced. And then we provide this tool to partners and it looks a little bit "the 2000s". That can be improved.

Something we really want is a certification functionality, where partners can complete X number of learning tracks and then become certified by completing an exam. Allbound does not have this functionality, so we have had to leverage a different platform for that. We really want that functionality. I've spoken with Allbound and they are planning to release that functionality soon, which is nice.

I have been involved with Allbound for a little bit less than two years. 

My role has been to review the success of the processes and interactions that our partners have with Allbound, how the tool functions, and to determine if we need to improve on the integrations that we have between Allbound and Salesforce, and how we manage the content we have on Allbound.

I appreciate that Allbound is actively listening to the feedback that we provide them, and they're actively making improvements to the tool, to facilitate some of the feedback, requests, and functionality that we might want to see. They have been really receptive to trying to incorporate those things.

Positive

There are more features in Allbound than we actually take advantage of. They have different licensing plans. Depending on what you enable or what kind of features you want activated, there might be extra costs.

It's important that Allbound has a packaged-based pricing model, as opposed to tier-based pricing that grows with the number of partners. When there is fixed pricing, it's easier to plan ahead and think about the budget that we have for our tech stack. Whereas, if the cost of the tool grows alongside how many partners we have on it, it's going to always change.

For us, Allbound matches most of our expectations. There are some features that Allbound has that we have not yet implemented or explored. It's on us, as well, to learn more about some of the other features that there are. For example, we're not using the quizzes, playbooks, or gamification in Allbound, but we should. We've been discussing, internally, using gamification for our partners, and getting them to interact with the tool more. The functionality is there. We just need to define, internally, how we want to leverage it.

There are also some things that we might need in the future, things that we are thinking about implementing, and features that we may want that Allbound currently doesn't have. But the urgency to have those things, for us, is not that critical.

Something that I would like to be improved is the integration between Salesforce and Allbound. It's not necessarily Allbound's fault that the integration might not be super strong. It's also our responsibility to make sure that we have a clear process and a clear strategy for how we want the integration to be set up and then share this information with Allbound so that it can be activated. It's not because of Allbound that we don't have a successful integration.

Allbound is a tool. It's a matter of what we do as a company that is important. How do we make sure that we direct our partners to Allbound? How do we make sure that there is enough content of interest in Allbound for them to consume? What are the systems that we create around this tool that make it more successful? By itself, Allbound is really good, but if we are not creating engaging content, if we are not directing our partners to the tool, nothing is going to happen. It's not that we have Allbound set up and, suddenly, all this engagement is happening. It's more that we need to continuously monitor, iterate, adjust, and plan, to keep the engagement up.

If a colleague said they were not ready for a partner management relationship management solution, I would tell them that Allbound definitely adds value if you are working together with partners and you want to be successful. That's especially true for a company that has not had a tool like this. Allbound would check all the boxes.

Allbound is a partner relationship management tool. We use Allbound to manage content resources, playbooks, commissions, etc. Our enablement schedule is exclusively posted in Allbound. We're also evaluating Allbound's Marketing Development Fund module. We have around 150 users in multiple locations. 

Business partners are critical for achieving growth, so a PRM solution is essential. It creates a platform for partners to deal with us and access work. They can register an account, log into Allbound, and get a commission. Partners can see important announcements and look at the playbooks. The number of partners has increased significantly, and partner engagement has improved by 10 to 20 percent. 

Business partners can filter and customize the profile set for them. We can log their activity to see what they have been using. That's a helpful feature we haven't leveraged much because most of our partners sell a whole suite of products. As we evolve and get more partners who specialize in a particular industry or subsection of our product, we will need to add the option to allow partners to filter the most relevant content. 

Customizing content isn't too difficult or easy. You need to build a case and send it to the Allbound team. We must schedule a call, and it might take one or two sessions to implement customization. Hypothetically, Allbound enables partners to rebrand white-labeled collaterals, but our company policy doesn't allow it. 

Allbound's Channel Insights feature gives us actionable intelligence on partner engagement. We use it weekly, and we've implemented some custom modules we developed in-house for the partners. That's all listed in Allbound's Channel Insights section, where we can see the number of partners, usage, and activity in the last 30 days. Using Channel Insights, we realized that a partner wasn't using our labels and wasn't engaged, so we started hosting training sessions to increase engagement. 

I like Allbound's ease of use. For example, we have been implementing Allbound's Market Development Funds module. It's intuitive and easy for the partners. If the partners want to see which commissions have been paid, that information is readily accessible. A partner can get certifications, which is essential to partner development. I like Allbound's ease of navigation, UI capabilities, etc. Coming from the IBM world, I think Allbound is comparatively lightweight. 

Allbound has features like partner training, commission management, and enablement scheduling. It can be customized as much as we need. I think it's a perfect fit for small or mid-sized organizations because it serves your purpose and doesn't offer you what you would not need.

Onboarding partners is straightforward. We email the Allbound team, who onboard the partner on the backend within 24 hours. 

Allbound's playbooks have been instrumental. The partners leverage playbooks all the time. We have two kinds. One is a general playbook that covers things like how to use the partner portal, assets, logos, etc. We also have playbooks customized for the partners, such as how to pitch to a government organization or an educational institution. We have playbooks verticalized by industry as well. 

Allbound could have more localization and customization. The templates work well, and maybe they don't want to target large enterprises by design. The solution is geared toward small and medium-sized enterprises, but they could allow more localization and deeper customization. Allbound is broad, but it could be deeper. 

We have used Allbound for about a year.

Allbound is stable. We've never experienced downtime. 

Allbound has lots of modules. The last time I spoke to Allbound, they talked about adding an HR module and various other modules. Scalability is available. The templates also improve the scalability. 

I rate Allbound support 10 out of 10.

Positive

We had another solution before we moved to Allbound. We switched because of the ease of use, templates, and ability to create modules with a 24-hour turnaround. It's easy to take control of modules that are available in Allbound.

I wasn't involved in the deployment, but I was told it was straightforward. We deployed it in one quarter. It requires no maintenance after deployment.

We've seen an ROI of about 20 to 30 percent. 

Allbound is one of the most affordable solutions. The license is based on the number of users, and we have some flexibility because we purchased an enterprise license. We're pretty happy with the license, and we don't get billed for anything additional. Allbound's flat package-based model is helpful as we grow and become more complex. 

I rate Allbound 10 out of 10. Implementing a PRM solution isn't just a matter of cost. A PRM solution has two benefits. The first is increased partner engagement.  

The second is ROI. A PRM ensures the right assets are targeted to partners so they can deliver the commission better. They have the right playbooks, increasing efficiency and ROI. The partners are more satisfied, which is essential for success for anybody working in a channel organization. There's no reason for somebody not to use a PRM.

I am the partner enablement manager for our company and I manage Allbound. Internally and externally, we call it the "partner portal." I handle any updates, edits, changes, technical questions, and difficulties.

We route our partners who log in to the portal to another portal, our learning and development portal, which is a learning management system platform, so they can go through all of their training.

Allbound keeps us organized regarding our pipeline, which are the opportunities our partners put into the system. The opportunities go to Salesforce. If we didn't have that, we'd be in trouble. It's a necessity. We absolutely have to have a platform.

It has helped shorten the sales cycle. We have to have a platform where people can enter an opportunity so that it can go to Salesforce. If we didn't have this platform, I don't know what we would do; we wouldn't have much of a sales cycle. We wouldn't know what we are doing.

Another benefit is that it has helped to increase partner engagement. That's important because I enable all of our partners. I take them through the partner portal along with the learning portal. And I have created a welcome video that goes through the partner portal in depth.

The valuable features are the 

• integration with Salesforce
• ease of adding assets.

The user interface is super easy to use. It's like WordPress. Before I started with Allbound, I worked with WordPress, so I understood how to use it prior to even working for my current company.

I also like the Allbound university. If I have new employees who are helping with admin, they can go through the university to learn how to make changes themselves, so that I don't always have to do it. That feature is great.

Onboarding a partner with Allbound is very easy.

I also use its playbooks, which are really important because we then provide our partners with a sequential "how-to" about whatever topic they are looking at: for example, "Getting started with our company" or "Marketing resources for our company". It helps our team put together a playbook for our partners.

We can also filter or customize the content that different partners see when they log in to Allbound, and doing so is fairly easy. That's pretty important so that I don't waste time.

They could add an LMS component to the platform where we would have courses through Allbound and a record of whether partners pass or don't pass. The quiz feature would come in more handy at that point.

It could also be more attractive. It looks like the back end of a website. Someone actually posted on LinkedIn about how bad-looking the platform is and how bad our portal looks. It's pretty embarrassing for our company.

I have two years of experience with Allbound, using it every day.

It's pretty stable.

I talked to the founder of Allbound. They are doing things to make the portal more customized, and that's making it more scalable. But you pay extra for that, which is fine.

For us, it's deployed across multiple departments internally. We have a lot of people who don't want to touch it but sometimes have to. Most of the time, they asked me to touch it. Externally, ours is a global platform with over 1,000 partners that log in to the portal along with their teams. That means there are multiple people from their partnerships who use it.

Their technical support is amazing.

Positive

We have seen ROI.

Other options were evaluated, but that was done before I started with the company.

We'll probably go with Allbound again. We haven't had time to evaluate any other partner portals. Maybe, when we next have that time and we start looking at the partner portal earlier in the year, we will go with somebody else.

There is hardly any maintenance involved.

If a colleague from another company mentioned they were not ready for a PRM solution, my response would depend on their budget. I don't think Allbound is that cheap. Depending on their budget, it could be worth it.

The learning turnaround time requires some budget to go through the Allbound university. And if you're just starting off with Allbound, you need to budget for one or two people to work directly with the platform.

We resell our own solution through partners, and we need to work with these partners. Allbound is the perfect solution to engage with our partners and automate some of the tasks that otherwise would have to be done manually.

It has made everything much more measurable, which is something that we like because we know exactly where we stand with our partners. We are able to measure, which also helps us to grow, and understand where we should be investing and where something is not of great use. It's also something extra for our partners. Our partners are happy that they can get something extra, and there is something they can always fall back on before they contact us directly. It's also valuable for the employees of the partners. For us, as an organization, it has made things measurable and helped to gather more data about our partners and deal registrations.

It's easier to onboard partners than doing everything directly. It's very easy. The platform speaks for itself. You can guide them through the steps, and you can even make these little introduction videos to make onboarding even easier. Everything a partner needs is there or can be there. Of course, the human element is needed when a partner has concerns or doesn't understand something, but the standard story is perfect to put in there.

We use gamification, playbooks, and quizzes features. Gamification is really good to give the partners some incentive so that, other than the knowledge, they have something to come back for. It's a little extra motivation to help someone. Our partners use playbooks for their end clients. They are also useful, but I don't know how often they're used. We also have quizzes. We end every learning track with a quiz. Quizzes are the perfect chance to check that someone has all the knowledge and that they went through the content and didn't just click through it.

We are able to filter or customize the content that different partners see when they log in to Allbound. We have different groups, and we have different phases of partners as well. Based on those, we give them certain content. We also provide content based on the language. We are originally Dutch, but we also have a lot of international partners. So, we filter based on the groups or where they are based, and we try to make the content as specific as possible. It's very easy to customize the content that partners see in Allbound. It's basically a single click, and it can't be easier.

This ability to customize is critical in the long run. If you want a solution quickly, then making everything customized is not a must. However, in the long run, and if you want to be able to help your partners as best as you can, it's really important to customize what they see because it needs to be relevant to them. If the content and resources are not relevant to them, they're not going to come back to the portal. So, customization is the key.

Allbound enables our partners to re-brand our white-label collateral. I'm not sure how often our partners use it, but they are able to re-brand many of our resources. The ability for partners to re-brand collateral has affected the time we spend on partner administration. It has gotten better because we are not needed in any process. They can just do it themselves. We get fewer questions about the content because everything is available there, and they're able to white-label it themselves, which has decreased the time spent.

It has helped to increase partner engagement. Our partner deal registrations have been growing three times with Allbound. That definitely has increased a lot. It's also due to the fact that we didn't register everything before. So, in that way, engagement has definitely increased.

Deal registrations are huge for us because since we've been using Allbound, we are able to keep much better track of those.

Learning tracks are also valuable. They make it easy for the new employees of partners to get to know us and our product. Now, we are testing a partner plan as well, which we absolutely love so far. It will enable us to grow our partners even quicker.

It has a very friendly interface. It's very easy to work with. Every possibility or everything is completely clear. There are no parts where anyone has to think, "What could this mean?" From the first view, you know exactly what it means. It's easy and straightforward.

Its range of features is probably bigger than what we are using right now. It has a big range, and everything that is in there makes sense. It's not too much. For every feature, there is a good reason, and when I look at the possibilities that we are giving our partners right now, there is enough to go from without confusing them or providing too much. I feel that the feature range is perfect right now.

People are not able to deactivate members themselves. If someone leaves the organization, partners would like to do it themselves, but currently, they have to ask us. 

With the partner plan, there is not a lot that could be improved, but it would be easiest and the best if we could make the integrations ourselves. For example, for integration with our CRM, we need an integration specialist. If we are somehow able to do that ourselves, it would save the time of Allbound and us.

In terms of the additional features, we don't need any at this time. 

In our company, we have been using it for about one and a half years.

I haven't seen any instability since I've been working with it.

It's definitely scalable. There can't be an easier way to scale it.

In terms of usage, within our team, we use it across the company. So, marketing is involved because of the content, and then the customer or partner success team is involved with the onboarding. The account executives or sales teams are involved with the deal registrations. So, it's being used company-wide. With partners, I see that the sales guys are involved in putting all the deals in, which is followed by training to make sure that they are certified consultants. There is marketing as well to make sure that they have everything to update everything on their end and to make sure that their clients also understand what it's that we do and what it's that they would be getting.

From our end, we have a lot of people actively working in the portal. There are about four people from marketing, and then on the partner's end, it really differs because they have a lot of sales and marketing people. It can be anywhere from 1 to 30 people.

Our partners are of different sizes. We have big ones, such as resellers, but we also have ones who just advise people. In the case of our end clients also, there are small companies, and then there are very big ones.

We are testing the partner plan right now. If that is completely there, we would be very happy, and we are going to use Allbound for exactly what we need. It will also be used to engage our lower-impact partners and measure things as easily as possible so a partner knows exactly where it stands.

It has been great. Also, the testing that we've been doing has been really easy. It has always been quick. I would rate their support an eight out of ten.

Positive

We did not use any other solution previously. We just used our CRM and did everything manually. It was a lot of manual work.

It's a SaaS deployment, but I was not involved in its initial setup.

In terms of maintenance, it needs updating from our end. We need to make sure that our content is always up to date. That's about it. So, it's only about adding things and making sure that our learning tracks are still applicable.

We have seen an ROI in terms of better insights into what our partners are doing. We are able to influence the decision more because we understand what is going on. I don't have the metrics, but we have a better grip on deals and more influence on the buying process of the clients of the partners.

Allbound probably has helped to shorten the sales cycle because we now know where we can get involved and where we can influence things. In that regard, it has helped, but because our deal registrations weren't perfect before, it's hard to measure in exact numbers. My guess is that it did.

It's reasonably priced for what it can do and how much time it can save. It's a big amount of money, but for the time that it can save for people from having to do the work, it's definitely worth it. Considering the constant improvements and the features they keep adding, its price is reasonable.

It's perfect for us that Allbound has a flat, package-based pricing model, as opposed to tier-based pricing that grows as the number of partners increases. Especially for our scale, it's so good to know that the pricing will remain the same even while growing. In the end, Allbound gets cheaper for us, which is really nice.

We probably evaluated other solutions, but I wasn't involved in that process.

It's great if you need more insights into what your partners are doing and how they're growing. It takes away some of the manpower needed to onboard partners. You can build some automation in there while still being able to also keep the human component in there when they need it.

As a result of my experience with using Allbound, if someone says they are not ready for a PRM solution, I would first want to understand why they feel that they aren't ready because it's very easy to work with. It's a good start once you have something in place. It's so easy to scale from there. So, you can start small. It doesn't take extra effort if more people are getting in. It's a very smooth process to build this platform.

To get actionable intelligence on partner engagement and success, we don't use the Channel Insights features as well as we can. On our end, we could be using this better, but it's a powerful tool to see:

• What's performing well?
• What's not performing well?
• What can we change?
• What should we do more?

At the moment, the Channel Insights information hasn't affected the way we interact with our partners because we haven't based a lot of our decisions on this. We are currently forming a project group so we can do more of this. We have been a little low in terms of marketing people, so we aren't using it a lot, but I do see the potential there.

I would rate Allbound an eight out of ten. There's always room for improvement. There are probably things that are possible that I don't know about or I haven't thought of, but for what we needed it for, it's really good.

In our organization, we have a huge partner network, and we use Allbound as our partner portal. We allow partners to create accounts, log in, and then they can find deal registration and marketing resources that they can utilize to sell our product.

I work on the marketing team. I work a lot in the campaigns-in-a-box features, and I create co-branding tools, as well as learning tracks. We have various learning tracks for our partners to use. We use quizzes for the learning tracks that have to get our partners certified in different areas, but we haven't set up any playbooks or gamification yet. I also look at a lot of the reporting dashboards that Allbound has so I can track what's the most popular content.

We hear a lot of good feedback from our partners that they love logging into the partner portal and being able to see all of the content and resources that they can use on their own. It's very good that it's like a self-service portal, so they don't need our help unless it's something specific. They can just log in when they feel like it, complete any quizzes that they want to complete, watch any videos, or co-brand any marketing materials. It's all very easy to use. It has definitely improved our engagement overall with our partner network, and it has made us a better company overall.

It enables us to filter or customize the content that different partners see when they log in to Allbound. We can set up different visibility options when we're creating content. The majority of our content is open to everyone, but there is some content that is only open to certain types of companies because it's only relevant to them.

It's easy to customize the content that partners see in Allbound. As an admin, I can just go in to view all the content and edit in a Quick Edit view, or I can go in individually to a certain piece of content to which I want to change the visibility. It's pretty easy. This ability to customize is definitely very important. We want to make sure that the right people are seeing the right content. We also have some content internally for our company, and we want to make sure that's only visible to people who work within our company. We don't want partners to see that. It's definitely an important tool.

It's a pretty simple process to onboard a partner using Allbound. All they have to do is request an account, and we just have to make sure that the domain is the same one that we have. Of course, we will always run into some issues with certain customers who are having difficulty logging in, but we've got a system set up to help them log in and make that process as easy as possible for them.

It has definitely helped to increase partner engagement. For 2022, we had around 50% active users in the portal, and we're hoping to ramp that up to around 70% for the next year. Overall, we've seen a lot of engagement in the portal.

We recently used Channel Insights a lot to get our end-of-year reporting done in early December. It's definitely a very useful tool. We're hoping to use it more in the future because we're ramping up our international teams, and they're interested in what partners are doing regionally. So, we definitely want to utilize that tool more in the future. In Channel Insights, we can see what is the most popular content. We can use that to move forward when we're drafting up new content. For my use case specifically, the learning tracks and quizzes are really popular, so we know that we want to make sure that those are up-to-date and that we're creating new content for them because that seems to be what partners are using the most.

I'm on the marketing team, so I mostly use the campaigns-in-a-box feature and learning tracks. There are always updates happening with Allbound that I notice, and it keeps getting better with every update. Our Allbound representative, Tricia, has let us know about the new features that are going to be coming out soon. There are some features that we're definitely going to utilize that I'm excited about. There are definitely some features that we haven't used personally. We just haven't had time to set them up, but starting in the new year, we'll definitely take advantage of a lot of new features that are coming out.

I find it very easy to use. It has a pretty good UI. I'm relatively new, but I'm able to learn it very quickly. I'm definitely happy with the interface.

On the design side, there could be some more updates to make it look a little bit more modern. We right now use the classic dashboard, but we're switching to the minimal dashboard that's available to try and make the UI look a little bit prettier for our partners. In the design area, there could definitely be some improvements that partners would appreciate.

I have been using it since I started working at my current organization, which is about six to seven months.

I haven't run into any issues where the site has been down or anything. So far, so good. I would rate it a nine out of ten in terms of stability.

We've partners onboarding every day, and we've never run into an issue where there are too many. It's a very scalable platform that we can keep moving forward with.

In terms of its usage, our marketing team owns Allbound. We are the admins for it, but everyone who works at my company also has an account because there are some internal things in there. When it comes to the partners, they have to have an agreement with our company before they get access to the portal. After that, all they have to do is create an account, and then they get access to all of the resources.

They've been helpful. Whenever we want to try and utilize new features, they're super helpful and quick to respond. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

I haven't used any other solution.

I was not involved in its deployment. That was done prior to my joining the company.

It doesn't require a whole lot of maintenance. We've got an integration manager or representative with whom we can speak directly if we run into any issues, which is very helpful. We've got a customer service rep as well, but since I've been using it, it hasn't required a whole lot of maintenance.

I don't have specific numbers, but I would assume we've seen an ROI just because we've partners in the deal registration pipeline every single day selling our product. So, I believe that we've definitely made a return on investment.

In terms of Allbound's impact on shortening the sales cycle, I can't prove that necessarily, but from the general feedback that we've heard, partners do seem to enjoy being able to log in and look at the marketing materials that will then help them sell our products.

Its pricing is fair, especially because we can have as many partners create accounts as we want. It has a very fair price range compared to other companies that charge per partner. We've thousands, so it would just be too expensive to go with a different option.

We really appreciate the flat rate. Because we've new partners onboarding every single day, it would get expensive very fast if we had to pay per user. One of the main reasons why we love Allbound is the flat rate.

I believe we did, but I was not working at the company then. I'm not sure which one it was, but I have heard that we were looking at something else, and because Allbound doesn't restrict the number of users, that's why we decided on Allbound.

I would advise getting a demo, going into the nitty gritty, looking at all of the features that they have, and asking a bunch of questions.

As a result of my experience with using Allbound, to a colleague at another company who says they are not ready for a PRM solution, in my biased opinion, I would say that a partner engagement tool is really necessary to grow your company. My company would not be here today if it wasn't for our partner network that keeps on growing. A tool like Allbound that can provide a partner portal for self-service is very beneficial. It can help accelerate the growth of your company.

I would rate Allbound a nine out of ten.

We use it specifically for a partner program.

Allbound streamlines the entire process of capturing partners' interest in reselling our product. Now that we're able to reach out to partners on a platform that most of them are familiar with, we're able to expedite our whole partner sale process.

We also grab metrics from the Channel Insights to see what's currently going on with all of our partners, where they are in the process of a sale. It helps us keep track of the partners that we engage with frequently, as well as who the new partners are.

It has also helped to cut down the sales cycle by two to three weeks and increased partner engagement. The effect of that has been positive for our business.

What is important to us are our partners and clients. The user experience for those partners and clients, that they're able to quickly use it, is what I like about it. It's very simple to use. We set up a training session with a partner to train them once, and they usually figure it out after that.

And a great aspect is the user interface for administrators of the solution. We simply use it and it provides the data we need. It's also very easy to onboard a partner. Everyone seems to get it right away.

I also like the fact that it shares information between partners and my company. We have a very basic package, so there's more that it can do that we're not using. But it does what we need it to do, which is gather the information we need for a specific partner sale.

They could provide a bit more user and technical training to our team. If I were able to really control the workflows in Allbound, with more of the expertise that they have, I could configure it to be a bit more responsive to our needs.

Also, while they make it easy to use, it could be nicer. They could add more graphics to it to make it a bit more interactive.

I have been using Allbound for a year and a month.

It's a very consistent product.

It's easily scalable.

Their customer service is really excellent, easy to use, and they are very responsive to our needs.

Positive

We didn't use a previous solution.

I wasn't involved in the setup but it requires very little maintenance on our side.

There's definitely been a return. It has been one of the best-used products in our channel partner program. Because of the tiered approach, we can get the basic needs we want out of it, and once our budget opens up, we can expand on the features of Allbound.

Packaged-based pricing makes sense because it gives us an opportunity to test out features in the product prior to upgrading to the next package.

If you're not ready to use a PRM because of a budget issue, there's a positive return once you implement it and get past the initial hump.

My advice is to have the right technical people ready to implement the platform.

We use the product to house and manage information about our partner companies and process deal registration requests. That's our current use case, and we expect to increase it soon. We're not on-prem; our deployment is in the cloud though I'm unfamiliar with how it's set up.

Internally, we use the solution to manage our partners, and then our partners can also log in to access their profiles, resources, training, sales plays, and all kinds of enablement. 

Allbound offers a single place to send partners, simplifying the sign-up process. It also flows data into Salesforce, our CRM, streamlining onboarding. When a partner signs into the system, it brings up the end user agreement, so we know essential boxes are being checked along the way, and our partners know they can access everything they need from one place. The product prevents us from being a bottleneck.

The self-serve deal registration is excellent; companies can register for deals themselves, and the process is managed through our system.

Allbound offers a decent range of features, though we can't currently use some of the richer ones due to an internal issue with our integration. That's not a problem with the solution, and having an abundance of features is good, as it positively impacts our partner experience. They have a trusted place to go that features our and their branding, and when we can turn on more features, it will be even more positive. We aren't currently able to turn on gamification, for example. That feature would add some more self-service to our partners and have a significant positive impact on their experience.  

It's relatively straightforward to onboard partners with Allbound; it certainly helps in that process.  

We can customize the content different partners see when they log into Allbound, and that's relatively easy to do; a content manager can go in and define the settings we want. This customization is essential, as each partner has different needs; surfacing all of our collateral to them would be unhelpful. We can create the right user experience for each partner by filtering the content.   

Allbound enables our partners to re-brand our white-label collateral; we load in the documentation, and in the back end, we can mark them as co-brandable, and then a partner can click the co-brand button. They can take a white paper they want to share with their customers and, through co-branding, add their logo, contact information, and any other text they wish to add. Then, they can save the document as a PDF and send it out.  

I'm not a fan of Allbound's UI for administrators. For example, there are some issues with the report-building tool, and when I'm building a report, it's not always clear what the outcome will be. There are a lot of radio buttons, rather than filtering or being able to select from a list. It's an accordion layout, so I click on one option, and it expands to reveal a radio button selection, which means I can't always choose everything I want. Checkboxes or selecting multiple options from a list is an improvement. Additionally, the report output looks very dated, so the interface needs some love.

The UI is somewhat clunky and unattractive. It's relatively straightforward to use, but the looks need updating.

The interface around re-branding collateral could also be improved; placing items such as logos and text boxes is awkward, so it's hard to ensure they're well-placed. As a result, we see little engagement with the re-branding feature by our partners.

The ability to re-brand white-label collateral has not affected the time we spend on partner administration. When scrolling through the interface, it's not entirely obvious which items are co-brandable; there's a little green triangle in the corner of the preview that says ''co-brand'', so it doesn't catch the eye. There's no way to filter specifically by co-brandable material, so the feature requires a lot of handholding and education to get our partners to use it. We can filter by type of collateral but not specifically by co-brandable documents, so we either need to click through page by page or know the exact name of the document we're looking for.

We've been using the solution for around a year and a half.

The product has been stable, and we haven't experienced significant outages. 

The scalability is poor. Once we have the Salesforce integration activated, which most of our customers now use, the scalability will be there because we can push data from Salesforce into Allbound. We hope to resolve this issue soon, and we currently have limited ability to self-serve with bulk actions from the admin side. There is some capacity, but if we want to add a huge list of partners or whitelist a bunch of domains, we have to go through customer support; it's not possible to do that ourselves.

We contacted Allbound's tech support before, and they were responsive and helpful; I rate them nine out of ten. The only issues we experienced with the support were less to do with the help and more with how they run their company.

Positive

Allbound is our first PRM tool. 

Considering the interface, the price is high, although Allbound offers a lot. Some of my negative opinion here is because we have yet to upgrade to using the tool's best-in-class features due to internal issues. As it stands, I don't personally see the value that supports the cost, but that could change when we turn on the features.

For example, we only get one sandbox, and as we're waiting for this internal project to finish, we can't stage or test much in Allbound's systems. We're stuck waiting, and the project is a year overdue, which isn't Allbound's fault, but they only offer one sandbox, and we don't have the option to pay for another one. They did create a custom environment for me to test in, but it's not a match to our production environment; it helps, but it's not the same as a full sandbox that matches all of our settings, users, and so on.

The company evaluated other options, but I wasn't here then.

I rate the solution seven out of ten. 

One of our struggles is with how content is surfaced to our partners, which is more of an internal issue with us as a company, and something we need to revisit.

Regarding the Channel Insights feature, we don't currently use it as we have yet to find a way to match its reporting to ours or in Salesforce. The feature is active, but we see little use for it.

To a colleague who says they aren't ready for a PRM solution, giving self-service options to your end users is the best way to go forward in a fast-paced, tech-focused world. The easiest way to do that is to buy into a PRM system that allows you to manage all your partners and gives them a place to find everything they need so they're not waiting on you.  

We use it to manage or build our partner portal.

Playbooks are helpful to have a place where we can consolidate the knowledge and the content of a particular topic. 

We are able to filter or customize the content that different partners see when they log into Allbound. It's easy, and it's extremely important because we have a tiering system of the partners, so we do need to have different levels of visualization.

Allbound enables our partners to re-brand our white-label collateral, but we're not using it to the extent the platform allows or enables.

Content management is most valuable because it's the one that I use the most and the one I'm pleased about.

It's good in terms of the range of features. They offer more than what we are currently able to utilize in terms of our capacity to spend more time on the platform and improve the portal. Our package offers more than what we're currently using. 

It's a bit confusing to navigate. It's not that there is duplication, but some of the functionalities that are expected to be in the same place are at different places. For example, Channel Insights—for analyzing, learning, and gaining any insights—are under my user profile photo on the main screen, but in content management, I can see Channel Insights again. It's in two places. I don't know why they design the interface like this. 

Another odd aspect of the interface is that, under the settings, there is Content Management, and then there is Content. I never know which one is which.

The Channel Insights feature doesn't go to the level of detail I wish. It's too superficial. It gives me a snapshot, but it's not super helpful. I wish Channel Insights had more intelligence, where it not only provides data and stats, but also offers more analysis and an extra layer of actionable insights on the data that it has.

It would be good if we could customize the main dashboard further, which is the main interface where people log in. We should be able to move modules around. There shouldn't be a fixed layout in the UX. I wish we could just move things around. They should just make it more customizable.

I've been using Allbound since October last year.

It's very stable. I never had any issues. We found just one issue in the reports feature, and they said they were working on it. The platform is up 100% of the time.

It looks like we can accommodate more partners and more content. It seems very scalable.

We have a global deployment. We are fully remote, and it's used by the RevOps
team, the partner team, and the partner marketing team. 

Its usage will grow as and when we have more partners and more users accessing our portal. We don't necessarily plan to expand the package or the tier for which we pay Allbound, but we expect it to grow with us.

It's very good. They're very generous with their time and knowledge. Based on the information and how available they are to us, I'd rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We most probably didn't use a similar solution previously.

We have a cloud or SaaS deployment. I wasn't here when we implemented it. 

In terms of maintenance, I just need to make sure the content is always up to date, upload the new marketing content, and take the old content off.

Allocate an owner for the portal. Not only for the setup, but also for how it will be maintained on an on-going basis. 

Yes, we shortlisted a couple of other vendors based on their features.

To a colleague at another company who says they are not ready for a PRM solution, I'd say that they could consider Allbound because the platform has a number of features from the basic partner programs to more sophisticated programs.

I wasn't part of our evaluation team but, as a user, I'd strongly recommend identifying an owner of the solution after it's in place, so that the maximum of the features are used, and there is ownership. Make sure someone owns the platform, and it's not just used by different people without a strategy for the partner experience.

I'd rate Allbound an eight out of ten.