Channelscaler Reviews

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.

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.

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 the solution to enable our partners and onboard them into the company environment. Our onboarding process is not simply directing a user to do A, B, and C but also sharing with them our company spirit. This process also includes training and sharing of all kinds of collateral, including sales, marketing, and knowledge-based articles. To summarize, Allbound helps us manage our partner engagement, allowing them to succeed and making them feel like a Pentera family member.

We have employees and teams all over the world who use the solution on an almost daily basis. On the partner side, the platform is mainly accessed by sales and technical staff, but sometimes people from marketing and other teams.

The product improved our communication with partners. Previously, we had to send out emails, and sending the same emails to several companies could disrupt their privacy. Now, communication through notifications, automatic updates, and so on makes it very easy for us to communicate on a large scale. For example, if a new feature is coming out for our product, we can send out relevant information to all partners or specific partners.

Onboarding partners with Allbound is rapid; it took us a week in one case, and they closed the deal using the interface without any human intervention on our end. That was a European partner, and another case took three weeks. Overall, we can onboard in under a month. A fully onboarded partner can sell our product, so to close a deal like that in a week is incredibly fast. 

Another significant improvement is the ability to assess or validate if partners know what they need to know about our product to succeed, which we can do with the learning quizzes.

Allbound increased partner engagement which is great because we get more excitement and interaction from them. Our partners are happier, so they work with us more than with other products they represent. The bottom line is the solution helps us keep better relationships with our partners through engagement.  

The learning tracks are extremely useful and valuable; they allow us to quickly deliver enablement training, track partners, and issue certificates to those who pass a certification exam.

Partner Journey Automation is a fantastic feature, and it's a must for any Allbound user.

Integration with CRM is another great feature, as it allows for deal registration, sub-use cases, and additional integrations.

The ability to give access to content that we want partners to share without needing a Google Drive or an FTP server is an excellent functionality. We upload all our content to Allbound and can share it with whoever we want in our partner base. An essential element in this process is the grouping feature, which allows us to group partners based on many criteria, including regional and geographical location-based grouping. This enables us to provide a tailored experience to each partner group, which is the main feature, while the supporting features include grouping and visibility.

Overall, the solution's UI is good for admins. Several areas can be improved, though all in all, it's very good and extremely straightforward to use. Users are always looking for improvement, and I'm the same.  

We can filter and customize what partners see when they log in to Allbound, primarily through groups and visibility. For example, we have content that's in Italian for our Italian partners to access when they log in to the platform. We can both localize and personalize available content to specific partners. It's relatively easy to customize content; it takes me around two minutes to publish a piece of content that looks good and is professional and efficient. It's essential that we can show our partners what we want them to see, and we want it to look nice because Allbound is our face with our partners; it's how we communicate with them. The solution is easy and enjoyable to use, which increases engagement. It makes me want to use it.  

We use the Channel Insights features, which allow us to see when there is less activity from specific partners, if they don't get certified or are slow to move through a particular part of the pipeline etc. We can immediately approach our partners and pinpoint the issue, which improves our engagement with them and allows us to be on top of what's happening.   

Allbound helped shorten the sales cycle, which is one of the main advantages. It's not just training and enabling our partners but helping to close deals in a pipeline visible to both sides. We see a shortening in the deal stage lengths, and we've reached a point where our average deal cycle for partners is one to three months. For a product in our market, that's amazing. 

The solution's UI could be improved by providing externalized access to menus, which I sometimes have to dig into. The good thing is that Allbound is doing that, I made the suggestion a while ago, and they're already implementing it. Of course, as a user, I want it to be now, not in a few weeks. Some more flexibility in UI customization would also be a welcome feature; the ability to edit coloring and place images would be excellent.

A way to visually customize the Channel Insights would be a cool feature. They're otherwise almost entirely customizable, but some visual options would be good.

There are some areas regarding learning management that could be improved. I've already relayed this to Allbound's product team, as it would put their solution very far ahead of the game compared to the other PRM systems I've seen. Most of the other systems only integrate with other tools.

Another recommendation I made to the product team is to increase the capacity for HTML editing. This could be by adding JavaScript, which would make the solution more customizable for the more technically inclined, and the ability to upload PowerPoint presentations or Decks, which would be converted to HTML. I've seen similar functionality in other content management tools, and it would benefit Allbound and the end users.

We have used the solution for over two years. 

The solution is highly stable. We never had an issue.

The scalability is excellent, and we have continuously upscaled our use of the platform since we purchased it. We have hundreds of users and the tool scales as required. We only need to add the content on our end.

The technical support is incredibly responsive; I usually get an answer within hours. Typically, I don't run into issues, though I sometimes have questions about how to use specific elements. The online help in the platform requires some improvements, but overall the support is excellent.

Positive

We previously used a combination of tools to fulfill a similar purpose to what we use Allbound for, but not a dedicated partner relationship management system. These include HubSpot for notifications and some elements of partner engagement and Google Drive as the content repository, which isn't particularly user-friendly and doesn't feature a single interface. We also used various form systems like Typeform to create quizzes, exams, etc.

We switched to Allbound because it enables us to train and assess our partners through a central content-sharing repository that isn't Google Drive. That was important because we want to limit access to our internal Google Drive. It was also critical for us to have visibility over the deal pipeline and be able to manage this process with the partner.

The initial deployment was very smooth; we had a few meetings with Allbound staff where they collected information and built out the Sandbox, the first iteration of the solution. Then we went through, ensured everything was functioning as intended and ran some tests. Overall, the deployment was quick and painless. It was just myself involved from our side, and there were two staff members from their side. 

The solution is SaaS, so there is no IT maintenance required from our side. I continuously update the content used by our partners. 

We covered our investment in Allbound in the first year based on the number of partners we onboarded because our average deal size is $50,000.

Considering everything the product provides, the price is fair. There are cheaper tools, but they don't offer the combination of requirements we have. The pricing model is also very compelling.

The package-based pricing model is excellent; we can add as many partners as we want for the same price, which makes Allbound more affordable than solutions employing a per-user model. This was essential to us and made the solution more attractive than other products. 

We always evaluate at least three different tools in the same category for an accurate assessment of which meets our requirements. We looked at Salesforce PRM, which is limited compared to Allbound; I didn't see any advantage there. Salesforce may be suitable for smaller organizations with less emphasis on partner relationships. We also considered Impartner and Channeltivity, but they lacked the combination of features and capabilities we were looking for. The three main features for us were the ability to train partners, visibility over the deal pipeline, and content sharing. Allbound fulfilled these requirements and more, which made it the clear choice for us at Pentera. The other solutions aren't bad by any means, they all work well, and we had demos; they didn't have the combination we wanted.

I rate the solution ten out of ten. 

Allbound has the best range of features of any PRM solution I've ever seen; they tick all the boxes and fulfill every requirement for a system to manage partners. Using the tool is also an easy and enjoyable experience. Allbound not only has the most features of any PRM solution, but it also has the most effective features. 

To date, Allbound gives our organization everything we want from it. They're going in an excellent direction, and I see several use cases where having a few more customization options would be beneficial.

We use the solution's quizzes and playbook features, which are very helpful during the onboarding process. Playbooks help us organize content in specific folders or areas we can provide to our partners on every step of their journey. In the case of automated onboarding, the partner can access content relevant to the specific stage of the deal process. When they get to the proof of concept phase, we can provide them with all the documentation and templates they may need to succeed. One of the things we are proud of at Pentera is that we share the same information and documentation with our partners that we use internally. We always use quizzes for the learning tracks at the end of every step to ensure partners understand the topics, etc. The same quiz engine is also involved in certification at the end of the process. We don't use gamification features yet, but we recently hired someone who will be in charge of the operational side, and they will assist us in leveraging some of those lesser-used features.   

Allbound enables our partners to re-brand our white-label collateral. Not all of them used it, but it was very effective for those who used the co-branding. It saves them the time of recreating their collateral or putting our content into their documents. They need to put in the logo and what they want to be co-branded and shoot it out so the time to market is shorter.  

This capability doesn't particularly affect the time I spend on partner administration, as they can access the collateral from Allbound and do their re-branding and co-branding. It doesn't affect me personally, but it improves the experience for our partners.

To a colleague who says they are not ready for a PRM solution, I would say they could start small. The basic package price is affordable, depending on the organization, but the ROI is felt within months, so I recommend it. If Allbound addresses their particular pain points, then it's a good choice. Every company I've spoken to that either uses Allbound or is looking for a PRM solution; their requirements are met thanks to the combination of features it offers. If you want a good relationship with your partners- and to me, that is the definition of a partner- Allbound is the tool to use. 

The biggest lesson I've learned is the importance of sharing our knowledge, our content, and our way of doing business with our partners, which helps us both to succeed. The numbers speak for themselves. The visibility that Allbound provides is also extremely useful.

We started looking for a solution to handle the relationship with partners. As a Cloudify vendor company, we were in a state where we were looking at partnering with bigger partners around the world. We were looking for a solution to provide the capability to register and to expose online training for any kind of training.

We also wanted to have the possibility to do some co-branding with the partners with the Cloudify material. We wanted to speed up the process of creating qualified leads. We followed an evaluation process, and we eventually chose Allbound.

Before using Allbound, our customer success team and our sales and presales team used two, sometimes three, different platforms in order to manage the content. This content at two different portals required lots of IT resources. It also wasn't aligned with our company's vision of having one platform. After we purchased Allbound, this process was streamlined with our internal process. Our sales and presales team started using one platform instead of multiple platforms, which helped us to communicate better as a company. We could support customers and partners from one place. The content wasn't spread across multiple platforms, and we didn't have different content managed by teams on their own.

Everything that you require to onboard partners is built into the platform. You just need to upload all the content and create the logic within Allbound in order to have a fast-track onboarding of partners. Its onboarding capabilities allow us to innovate faster with partners. It has helped us to communicate with and support seven new partners within six months. Previously, it took us three months for every partner. So, you can imagine the time saved by using Allbound.

As a part of our strategy for self-learning and self-paced training, we have quizzes. We use quizzes with gamification. We also use playbooks for specific tech vendors. We showed them the playbook that we made for them, and they were impressed that we are able to create very focused content, specifically run playbooks in a specific order.

It has a nice reporting capability. We can filter almost everything in terms of reporting analytics. It's very helpful when you want to filter specific content. For example, you can see the number of views from a partner to see which content was viewed the most. This capability is built into the platform, and it's helpful to make some decisions based on this data. They are still working on providing more information on the dashboard. Currently, they don't have all the things that we expected, and they are working on the things that we have requested, but this is a good possibility instead of using Excel spreadsheets and doing analytics in third-party tools. One of the good things about Allbound is that if they don't have the features that we need, they are able to develop them very fast.

It's quite easy to use for customizing the content that partners see. You just need to create specific content groups and assign the content according to those groups. They'll get only the relevant content. It would be nice to be able to do that in bulk rather than manually for every content, but it's still quite easy. It's not hard. You can have different roles and different groups, and you can define by type or audience. You can change the content based on the type, product, audience, or even sales stages. It's very easy to manage. This is one of the most important features because this is how you classify the information that you want to publish to end users. Sometimes, you have different role types, such as executive, tech, or engineer, and you would want different types of content for different needs. 

The co-brand feature allows users or partners to bring their own logo, put some text around that, and download co-branded material with the logos of the vendor and the partner. In the beginning, we thought of it as a nice feature, but we didn't see it from our partners' perspective. When most of the partners saw this feature, they were very impressed. They mentioned there was no such flexibility with other partners they use, such as Salesforce, SAP, and other big vendors. When I showed it to the marketing teams of our partners, they were very impressed that this capability is built into the platform. This feature is very good. So, even though we didn't use it much in the beginning, we found out that many of the users or partners wanted to have this kind of capability. They were happy that they have the possibility to do it within the platform, instead of going to an outside designer and doing the editing. Sometimes, it costs organizations a lot of money to make these changes.

The co-brand feature has saved time. Previously, we had to wait for the marketing to have time to do some editing for partner needs or requests. Sometimes, it took hours, and sometimes, it took days until they got the time to make the changes. Now, it can be done in two minutes.

We use Channel Insights features to get actionable intelligence on partner engagement and success. It's a part of their reporting capabilities, and it's very useful. We are using this feature quite a lot to understand which content is more relevant, which content is most used or most viewed by the partners, how many pipelines or deals are open, and what is the average time for closure. We get very useful information from Channel Insights.

It speeds up the sales process, but it's hard to measure the time savings. A salesperson can see the whole process and has a basic view of the next phase that we expect him or her to handle during a deal. After it's qualified, the customer is expected to have a demo or do a trial before the proposal. After they have a proposal, it's just a basic process of closure. You can then do some analytics around that with Channel Insights to understand what went well and how to duplicate that, and in case it didn't work well, how to improve that.

Previously, we didn't have any deal registration in place. We had a basic page or customer department that did the deal, and then they had to manually upload the data into the CRM and do some kind of calls with the sales to understand better what was the nature of this deal. Now, all the deal information is in Allbound from the start, and if you don't have all the information, it won't get into the qualified state. It's very powerful to ask the partners to provide the right information at the very beginning. You can't just say that I have a customer A in region A and the deal size of $50K or $100K and then not have more information or documentation about that. Instead of not having this process defined correctly, with Allbound, you have the possibility to create a deal in a matter of minutes instead of hours or days. It's very easy. Once people see that it's very simple to create deals, they are encouraged to create more and more.

What I like about the solution is that they have a fast channel of communication for the customer. For every deal, you create a template prospect page, which I found useful in Allbound. You can create a specific page for an end customer or partner, and you can share it with them where they can see playbooks or download some documents created in advance. You have the possibility to see how many times the end customer or partner opened the page that you created. It's like a landing page coded with specific information. This was the first one that we looked at and liked.

The second one was the possibility to do co-branding. If I have a page that I want to expose to a partner and they also want to just put their logo or some specific message on it, usually, you have to involve marketing of both companies to add the logos and put them in the right format, etc. This capability is built into the Allbound platform, and this is very useful for a salesperson who wants to create something co-branded.

The other thing that we like is the collab feature. When a salesperson has a deal and gets a question from the customer, previously, the salesperson would send an email to the resource support team to answer the questions received from the customer. Within Allbound, the salesperson can do that with the collab feature. The salesperson can assign the questions to a specific team or specific person within the organization. There is no need to copy from the organization's page into emails. This is a very powerful feature because it speeds up the process and improves collaboration between teams.

It has a very intuitive interface. It's very similar to WordPress in user experience. It's very easy to make changes, create pages, etc. You don't need to be a very sophisticated developer or designer to do things within Allbound. Every user can use it, which is very useful.

While defining the KPIs for choosing the right platform, we never thought of the gamification feature, but one of the strengths of this solution is the possibility to do gamification. It's like task automation. You can create engagement of the end user by saying, "Hey, if you do this kind of training or this kind of deal, you earn more points," and then after a certain number of points, you can reward the end user with some kind of a gift card or something else that's common in the organization. It also allows you to communicate better with users. For example, if there is a deal and they didn't update the deal for two weeks, you can create automation around that saying, "Hey, you didn't update the deal. We told you to update the deal titles before you get into irrelevant for Cloudify." We got good feedback from the partners about this. This is a very powerful and relevant feature. We hadn't seen anything similar in this space. We tested six vendors in this space. They didn't have this kind of capability built in, but they did have integration with third-party for this information.

It's easy to assign the content according to groups, but it would be nice if they had a bulk operation around that. Currently, we need to do that manually for every content.

They need to improve its reporting capabilities. They don't have all the possibilities to drill down in reporting.

Some of the enhancements are from the user management perspective, and they're working on improving and developing that. Currently, if I want to change something from the user perspective, I need to get that one by one. I cannot see which user did which operation and what was their role, and I need to create a specific case to define specific roles in order to define the specific content that I want to expose to them. For example, I'm a tech manager, but there is also a sales manager. They don't have the flexibility to define different role types for managers, such as sales manager and tech manager. From their perspective, they're the same user roles. So, we need to create them to support that. So, user management is something that they need to improve. Currently, it lacks the flexibility to do the customization, and for many of the required fields or many of our needs, we need to contact the product managers. They're working on supporting that in the future or the next release. They have a good roadmap. If they can't make the fixes today, they work to do that in the next release. It's a good motivation to continue working with Allbound and not move to other vendors or competitors.

Another improvement is about better, greater support for specific packages. Some of the packages cost more but have very few features. They aren't worth the money. For example, MDF has the highest cost, and sometimes, for one or two features, it isn't worth paying so much. I would like to have this kind of capability in a better package instead of the highest one with which you get only one, two, or three more features.

Another improvement area is the prospect page. You have the number of views. You can see how many customers viewed the pages from the prospect or the template prospect that you created, but you don't have the possibility to see if it was viewed by a partner or an end customer. You don't know who looked at the documentation or the page that you created for this opportunity. I have raised a request to have this basic feature.

We purchased it in the first quarter of the year, and it's in full production right now.

So far, we haven't had any outages. As a customer, it's up and running all the time.

There is no limitation on the number of users or partners you can onboard. There are not just partners and customers; there are also customer success teams who are impressed with this platform from our side. In terms of scalability, we have gone from presales and sales to customer success, and now, we're moving to the knowledge base content for tech customers. It's very scalable from our side.

In terms of usage, we have seven partners and more than 35 users. All of them are spread around the world. The majority of them are in the United States and Europe.

I'm having meetings with the technical teams every two weeks or once a month. I would rate them a 10 out of 10. They're very professional, and they're very supportive, which is one of the most important things for partners or companies.

Positive

We didn't use any similar solution. We started with Allbound right away. 

It's deployed via a cloud. I'm not sure where they deployed it because we just log into our tenant.

Its initial setup was not complex, but it was also not so straightforward. There are about eight steps. One of the things that stopped us from doing faster onboarding was integration with the HubSpot CRM. There were several sessions around that until we got the full integration of HubSpot. Besides that, it was very fast. It wasn't too straightforward because you don't have the flexibility to do everything on your own. Sometimes, I wish I had the flexibility to do whatever I want as admin, but the fact is that I need to raise a ticket in order to get some support or changes done in Allbound. I don't have full control of the environment, which sometimes is not that good.

We had help from the customer success team of Allbound, but all the integration was done by us. There were three people from our company doing this integration, which included me and other two colleagues, but we had support from their team. The people we talked to from their team were very professional. They knew exactly what had to be done for the integration.

In terms of maintenance, it's managed by Allbound.

We have seen an ROI.

This is the highest price that you'll pay, but I am not comparing it with Salesforce, SAP, or Oracle. In the mid-level solutions, Allbound has one of the highest costs, but it also has higher capabilities and flexibility to customize things without developing.

I'm not sure if they have flat pricing. At least at that time, they had three different levels of pricing without limitation of how many users, tenants, or partners you wanted to onboard. Even today, I don't have any limitation on how many users or partners I can use within the platform. Other platforms have this kind of limitation, and this is something that we had to think about during the purchase because we didn't want to be limited in some way.

When I joined the company, I said to the management that we need a PRM solution. Allbound was one of the solutions that I thought was most relevant, but I did look at other PRMs or other vendors. 

The deciding factor was the KPIs or the features that we wanted. It had the most comprehensive features and also in terms of pricing, it was the easiest choice for us to go with Allbound and not others. With other competitors, some of the features would have cost us additional money, whereas, in Allbound, they were a part of its basic features. So, while choosing, we looked at our KPIs versus the price that we would pay eventually. Allbound wasn't the cheapest one. It had one of the highest prices in its segment, but it had more pros than cons around our KPIs.

We had 10 KPIs. We looked at onboarding, deal registration, CRM integration, billing, agreement process, multi-tenancy, LMS, automation workflow, reporting analytics, and the MDF program. Allbound met all these 10 requirements. Others also had these capabilities, but the pricing was sometimes higher than Allbound.

The request for partnership management stemmed from bigger system integrators around the world. Many of them asked to do business with us only if we have this kind of platform. So, in order to do business with big system integrators, we had to have a PRM in place. For us, there was a demand from the field asking us to align with the world standard. They needed a partner relationship management platform in place before they communicate with us.

If you want to work with big system integrators around the world, you will come across this request. If you want to work with top Fortune 500 companies, you will need to purchase a PRM solution. Otherwise, you will maintain a small size, and you will take slower steps into partnerships or scaling with the opportunities.

My advice to anyone looking into implementing or evaluating Allbound would be to define KPIs not only for the business but also for the other teams in the organization, such as marketing, customer success, and technical support. You should get all their requirements and define the best KPIs. You can then build a strategy around that. That's what we did.

I would rate Allbound a nine out of ten. Our experience has been very positive.

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.

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.