Channelscaler Reviews

We use Allbound as our partner platform to focus on deal registration, content, and lead generation.

Allbound's user interface for administrators is extremely intuitive.

The user-friendly interface and features make it easy for a typical user to navigate, which was what we were looking for in a partner platform. The daily and monthly releases from Allbound demonstrate their commitment to evolving with the market.

After we integrated our systems, onboarding became seamless and as simple as signing up with an email address and enabling our APIs to communicate. Keeping the connection active and building within our system helped us ensure that we had everything we needed.

We are able to customize the content that different partners see when they log in. It's as simple as creating a group and tagging that content with that group. The ability for customization is extremely important for us.

Allbound enables our partners to rebrand our white-label collateral. We see many of our smaller and larger partners using it, but we plan to reach out to medium-sized partners to learn why they are not using the co-brand feature as much. We are currently investigating if it is because of a lack of knowledge or a lack of need. However, we know that the feature is being used regularly by those who are aware of it.

Our channel account managers are using the channel insights features. They recently made a change to the feature that changed its visibility. As an admin, we are still producing those reports, but I can also say that we are producing them regularly for our CAM team.

Allbound has helped us to increase partner engagement. We send our newsletter from there, and we can send reminder notifications for things like training. We can also create special programs for certain alliance partners that are different from our reseller partners.

Since launch, our most valuable feature has been getting individual users to sign up and use our deal registration program, as well as providing a place to see all of our events globally.

We would like to utilize partner automation more, but there is some troubleshooting and programming that needs to happen in the middleware to enable this. This is the feature we are most looking forward to, and we hope that it will be prioritized on the roadmap.

We would like more options within Allbound's learning tracks, and either more complexity in integrating with MLS or a minimal MLS option.

I have been using Allbound for two and a half years.

The stability is good. We've had a really good response time in the year and a half we've been working together. I think it's only been down once, and that was for a very short time. I believe it was company-wide for Allbound.

Scalability is phenomenal. As our internal team has grown, everyone has been able to understand and use it. As we onboard and grow, we can continue to expand our market to our partners.

Technical support is very easy and efficient. The response time is fast. For any changes that have been made and impacted us, we have always been able to get an answer and find out if a fix is on the roadmap.

Positive

Before Allbound we hosted our own solution.

Allbound offered a better and more simplistic platform on which to work, both visually and functionally, and allowed us to generate more leads, which was what we were looking for. In contrast, our own hosted platform at that time was only good for simple content and form-filling.

The initial deployment was complex in some ways and straightforward in others. For someone who is not familiar with this type of deployment, it would be difficult to understand at first, but from the perspective of our back-end API developers, it was relatively simple, as they understand how the connection between all of our different systems works.

Six people from our internal team were involved in the deployment.

We used Allbound to help with the implementation.

Allbound's pricing is comparable. We had a lot of optimization in our original build, and all of that was met and able to be executed within our price range

It was very important to us that Allbound has a flat package-based pricing model instead of tier-based pricing because we are new to the market and growing rapidly. Having baseline pricing rather than tiered pricing was essential for us, as it allowed us to grow without having to worry about what we might need to do next or how it would impact our growth.

I would rate Allbound ten out of ten.

We really see the value in Allbound for managing content, and partners, and pulling reports based on that.

The user interface is really important in a partner platform. Partners work with anywhere from ten to thousands of vendors, depending on their size. It's really important that they can navigate what they're looking for quickly and easily, and Allbound allows them to do that.

We use Allbound for our partner portal. That means we have it as our main point of contact for all of our technology and sales partners. They are able to use it to register deals, access content, and message their partner manager. They can also view deals that are in progress related to them. They can see what their pipeline looks like and what their closed deals look like.

It is very easy to onboard a partner using Allbound. Everything is linked right into our Salesforce. Once they close the deal or close the actual partner contract in Salesforce, we have it automated so that when a partner contract is closed, it is signed and sent off. From there, it automates their addition to Allbound or at least the green listing of their email domain from there. They are then able to go on. All of the people at that company are able to register with Allbound. It is very easy as long as they have the same email domain. We have some partners that use several different email domains. We were able to whitelist them so that they could access the portal. It is very easy. I do not even think about it. It is so easy.

We are in the process of utilizing gamification, but we do use playbooks. They make our partner program much more streamlined. Playbooks make it much easier for the partners to access information related to what they are looking for. Playbooks help with the content sorting. They make it easier for content to be found and absorbed by the user, which is great. In terms of gamification, we are in the process of rolling that out. It has not been completely rolled out yet, but it is going to be used to incentivize our partners. The end goal is to use that as a big incentive and drive partner engagement. I am hopeful and excited about that.

We are able to filter or customize the content that different partners see when they log in to Allbound. We can definitely do that based on the type of account they have. Whether it is an executive account or a salesperson account, it is all set up when they register. We can also do it based on the partner tiers. We have gold, silver, and platinum partners, and we can diversify what content they are seeing based on that. We can even break it down further. We can do it by partner type, such as whether they are a GSI, systems integrator, more regional-based, etc. We can break down the content into different groups. We are able to create as many different groups as we like and then set our content availability based on those groups.

It is easy to customize the content that partners see in Allbound. It is so easy that I do not even think about it. For me, this customization is super important, especially as we continue to grow our partner program. We are showing a lot of growth in our standard partners, which are our lower-tier partners. Because of that, we want to ensure that they are getting the content they need, but also there is a value that comes with moving up in the partner tiers, whether that is because they have created additional leads or things of that nature. It is very important to us to be able to demonstrate that by the type of content that we have made available to them. We want to make sure that certain valuable content is only available for higher-tier partners.

Allbound enables our partners to re-brand our white-label collateral. There is a co-marketing feature or co-branding feature, which is great. We are able to take a look at it. We are able to say where their logo can go. They upload their logo onto the portal, and then they are able to drag and drop it. In terms of the effect of this customization on the partner experience and their time to market, we are newly offering some of those things, so there has not been a big impact at this juncture, but there will be as we move into the new year because we are looking at growing and making it more self-service friendly for our lower tiered partners. They do not need to work directly with partner marketing. They can go through the portal on their own and set up their own collateral.

There has not been a huge change at this point in terms of the time we spend on partner administration, but there will be. We are in the process of getting everything set up, but everything should be really cutting down our partner administration time by a lot. It would probably cut that by half, if not more.

Allbound has absolutely helped to increase partner engagement. Our partners are much more engaged. They are able to access our information much more easily, and it helps with my job because I do not have to worry about whether they have access to something or whether they are wondering where to find things. They know where to find it.

Quarter over quarter, we have seen a drastic increase in the opportunities that have come right through the portal, so partner-sourced opportunities have gone up. Quarter over quarter, we have also seen an increase in the partner-attached field. That means we have more partners involved in some way in our deals than we ever have before. It was over 50% last quarter.

The deal registration portion of the portal has been very valuable. It connects directly with our Salesforce, so it is super easy. We recently started the process of implementing gamification within our portal so that our partners can earn points and then use those points and access gift cards or donations on their behalf. That is something that we have not yet fully implemented, but it is certainly in progress. It is something we are really excited about. We think that it is going to encourage our partners to register more deals via the portal rather than going with their partner manager. It will save them time. It will save our partner managers' time, and it will get our partners points. They all would want to get points. It would be a nice way for us to be able to do that.

Allbound's user interface is very easy. I have worked with many different PRMs and many different interfaces before. Allbound is very easy to use for me. I found it very straightforward and streamlined. If there is something that I am unsure about, it is easy to get a response. They are very quick at responding and letting me know. It has been wonderful. I really enjoy it.

Some of the integration and some of the content management could be a little bit better. They are working on some of the areas. The best part about them is that when I have feedback, they are very quick to respond and say, "That is a great idea. Let us work on it." I do not have a whole lot of feedback. Obviously, I want to see some additional integrations, but they are working on those.

I would love to see a little bit more responsibility from the account management team, but that being said, I know that they were going through some internal changes. Within the last two or three weeks, I have not had any issues.

I have been working with Allbound for about a year.

There was a lot of influx that happened internally within the last little bit. They had a new CEO come in and a new CMO. There were a lot of changes. For me, that was concerning, but I do not have any issues now. They have really turned it around.

It has scalability. It is great. 

We are just using it as a partner portal. We have over 200 active users. They are active on a weekly basis. 

Their support is amazing. I can message them right now, and I know that any issue will be solved before the end of the day. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

When I came to this organization, we already had Allbound, so I have not used any other solution with the company I am at now, but I have used others in the past.

I was not involved in its deployment. It was deployed before I came on, but we had our Business Systems team handle deployment.

In terms of maintenance, as with all things, occasionally, there are going to be issues. Connections are going to get broken, especially as we make updates in our own Salesforce. It is great to be able to look at it and fix it. Whenever there is something that breaks or anytime there is any kind of maintenance, it is a super easy fix. The only thing that requires additional maintenance would be updating the content if things change. Other than that, there is not any ongoing maintenance other than me going in and making sure everything is working.

We have absolutely seen an ROI. We have seen an increase in partner-sourced opportunities. We have seen an increase in partner-attached ARR. That just continues to go up as we continue to improve the portal experience.

I have no complaints about it, but it is not something that is my purview. I know the pricing. I deal with it, but I have not compared it to other things. I know it is much more affordable than going with some of the other services. For example, Salesforce has a partner portal option, but it is much more expensive, so I know Allbound is reasonable in that sense, but I do not know what the reasonability is across the board.

Allbound has a flat, package-based pricing model, as opposed to tier-based pricing, that grows as our number of partners increases. I love it because growth is a huge part of our partner program right now, but it is not a huge deal because overall, within the partner ecosystem, we are starting to see that partner programs are more focused on quality over quantity, so there is not a big drive to have hundreds of partners as there once was.

To a colleague at another company who says they are not ready for a PRM solution, I would say that it is not true that they should be ready. They do not need to have a lot. Allbound is going to help them work through that process, and it is super important to just get started. If they have partners, then they are ready because they need to communicate with their partners, and this is the best way to get involved

To those evaluating Allbound, I would suggest looking at what their requirements are and looking at what they need to get involved or get in place and then go from there.

When I first started working with Allbound, I was not that impressed with the features they had in place, but I have noticed that over the last year, they have taken feedback from their partners and their customers, and they are increasing the type of things that we can utilize. For me, it is the gamification feature that we are implementing in our portal. There is also the partner journey feature. They are implementing integrations with LMSs, which is a huge one for us. That is something coming down the pipe within the next few months. They are definitely starting to improve their integrations and availability. That is going to be very important, especially as we continue to grow our partner program, and we want to continue to grow with them.

In terms of Allbound's effect on shortening the sales cycle, because we were not effectively tracking sales cycles before I came into Camunda, I do not have definitive data on that. However, overall, our partner sales cycle is shorter than our regular sales cycle. I have definitive data on that.

Overall, I would rate Allbound an eight out of ten. There are a couple of things we obviously want to have, and that is normal. That is part of the growth process. As partners of theirs, it is nice to have someone who is responsive and able to tell me that we are working on making these changes.

We use Allbound as a platform for our partners. Allbound is used to share collaterals with partners as well as the training and pre-sales part of enablement. A partner can come and register any new deal in the Allbound portal.

Allbound saves a lot of time. A partner team is an ever-growing ecosystem, so we're constantly onboarding new partners and users. We have to fulfill their requests for collateral or resources that they need. When they are talking to a customer or a prospect, they will come to us asking for some resources. That is a time-consuming recurring process. The solution helps us shorten our sales cycle by quickly enabling our partners and giving them the necessary resources. They are independent from a learning and product understanding perspective.

The solution improves partner engagement. Before Allbound, we had no platform, so onboarding new partners was a long, tedious process. Now, we onboard partners with a few clicks.

With Allbound, we can regularly update the collaterals, and partners can access those when they sign up. Then, from a pipeline perspective, any user can register a deal so that it does not create confusion later on about who was assigned that deal or who we should be working with.

Allbound enables us to co-brand our collaterals with partners. We ask our partners if they want any collaterals to be co-branded with them. They can do it themselves if we enable that. When we publish that content or collateral, we select the co-brand feature, and the user can co-brand that collateral in the portal. 

I like the content and resource section, where we can publish all sorts of videos, PDFs, PPTs, etc., and send automated notifications or emails to partners or user groups. We can form groups and design our courses or collaterals for them. The platform is simple to use. Everything on the interface is self-explanatory and accessible to any new users. 

Allbound provides many features from a partner perspective, and we are satisfied with those. It has a repository for all our collaterals and a calendar where we can publish all our upcoming events and webinars. There is also a dashboard that offers a platform to share the most important things happening within the organization or in the industry. We use all these features to build on this partner ecosystem.

The solution has excellent integration with other platforms like Salesforce or HubSpot. Every partner needs to be added to Salesforce, and we can onboard them from Salesforce to Allbound with a click. All you need is a company mail ID, and a new partner is onboarded. So it is quite an easy and very fast process.

The playbooks are a powerful feature. We can group similar types of collateral. For example, we have a playbook for each of our 3 major product lines. Cybersecurity partners don't need to search everything in the content and resources section. They can jump to the cybersecurity playbook and find all the related collateral. We can also form a playbook for salespeople where they can find all the collaterals related to sales training and sales.

We use Allbound's filtering feature for our groups. We have groups for partners, sales, and developers. Any developer content is not accessible to the partner community. We separate the groups and filter them from the company's perspective. We can select collateral from the company section if we want to share it with a particular partner. Publishing the content is a manual process that takes some time, but filtering is quick. 

We use the channel insights feature, but we're only scratching the surface. We have used it to see how many new users have signed up in the past 50 days or the last time a particular user logged in. It shows us the top 10 content resources or the number of partners onboarded this quarter.

I would like to see more features for tracking training progress and quizzes. The progress report that Allbound generates isn't very helpful. I want to track how much a user has completed and who has or hasn't restarted. We are using a third-party platform for training purposes, especially enablement purposes. The progress reports and analytics are very powerful, and we'd like to see something along those lines. Allbound has certification, but it's missing some things from a certification point of view that are available in other products. 

We have used Allbound for nearly 2 years.

Allbound is stable. 

Allbound is scalable. 

I rate Allbound support 10 out of 10. Allbound's support is very helpful. 

Positive

Allbound is a SaaS platform. We haven't had any trouble installing or maintaining it. 

While I don't have any data on Allbound's ROI, it helps us and offers a good return. We have recently renewed our contract with Allbound.

Allbound is reasonably priced, but I haven't compared it with any other solution. I like that Allbound charges a flat rate instead of charging by the number of partners or users, which is the model other platforms use. 

I rate Allbound 9 out of 10. Before implementing Allbound, I recommend comparing the features of 1 or 2 competing solutions. The use cases will be different for different audiences or organizations. If you are looking for a platform to build a partner ecosystem, I would recommend Allbound. It's an excellent platform, and the pricing is reasonable.

It depends on your organization and the size of your partner ecosystem. Budget constraints are also part of the picture. However, if your partner ecosystem is growing quickly and you have the budget, I recommend at least doing a demo to understand Allbound's features and how you can utilize the platform. 

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 use it as the system of record for all partner content. We did that very deliberately to make people in the organization understand what's going on in the partner program.

I can clearly see how many partners we onboarded and how many partners are using deal registration. When I came on board and we were using Impartner, nobody was using it. That's not because of Impartner, it's because of what we did. It's because Impartner makes it really easy for me to quantify what the partner program is doing that I can tell you that we had almost no deal registration going on. We had one deal registration for $20,000. When I check in Allbound today, we have 11 deal registrations, and the average deal is about $130,000 I think. We're a really small organization but we have $1.5 million in the pipeline. That's huge.

Another benefit is that Allbound has definitely helped to increase partner engagement. I can see it. I can contrast what we were doing last year and what we're doing this year, and I can see that it has increased engagement. But that's not the tool. The tool is just the "repository." But what it does enable us to do is to reach out and surface the right content.

This is my second tour at my current company. Even though I'm not being employed in the same way that I was, they did hire another partner business development person. And we have been able to show the value of partners in general, and Allbound helped us do that.

In terms of shortening the sales cycle, that is something that is possible with Allbound, but it's not happening right now. But that has nothing to do with Allbound. It has everything to do with the fact that, for the longest time, my company has been a direct company. But what we're doing is using deal registration to impact how our internal salespeople work with partners. Longer-term I think we are going to see a big impact, but right now it's really a matter of changing behavior and that takes time.

With Allbound, we're really clear about what our partners need and Allbound allows us to very quickly surface that. I don't have to think about it. There are some limitations and you have to be smart about what you do, but that's okay. User experience can be over-engineered. I like the fact that I can go into Allbound and quickly update what I need to update. And I like that when we have a new initiative, something that is really important for our partners to understand, I can feature it in different places on the portal. The portal gives us what we need, the things that are super important to partners.

You could have a whole bunch of bells and whistles and, admittedly, we're a smaller company that might not need all of them, but at the end of the day, Allbound gives us everything we need.

We use playbooks. That is probably in the top-three things that I work on in the platform. Everything in the portal is in a playbook. In terms of gamification, Allbound was really encouraging us to use that, but we just never got to a point where I could think about a strategy and implement it, but I see the value in it.

I have also used the solution's Channel Insights features to get actionable intelligence on partner engagement and success every month, when pulling together reporting for either my direct manager or the larger organization. It does a good job there. I wouldn't say it's amazing, but it is good enough.

I've been doing PRM for a super long time so I know the value of looking at partners from an overall standpoint and analyzing, "Which partners are actually performing well for us?" What I love about Allbound, and I am 100 percent behind this, is that not only is it helping me to measure revenue and how partners are impacting the pipeline, but I love the ability to show what they're sharing on social. Sharing on social requires somebody to make a decision that they're going to take extra action. That is something I love.

I like that Allbound is constantly improving. A recommendation I would make to them is to improve their communication because I don't always get notice of improvements. I know that they're communicating, but for some reason, it has been difficult to get the updates. They are doing a better job. They're starting to use the portal to say, "Hey, we have this new feature available."

I would like them to keep innovating and certainly at the pace that they're at, and maybe even a little bit quicker.

Also, filtering or customizing the content that different partners see could be done better. I know how to work within the confines of the system, but I think there's an opportunity for them there. However, I also understand that there are probably some things I could do within the Partner Journey Automation that I just haven't tapped into yet.

My advice to them is to make the co-branding piece easier. Allbound does make it easy not only for the administrator program, but also for partners, to interact. So if they can make the co-branding piece a little more robust, that would help. What I could do within Impartner was see a logo, where it was going, and know exactly where I was at in content. It did make it easier for partners to add content at certain spots in a piece of collateral. It could be that I just don't know Allbound well enough and that it does all of this, but it felt like it was easier to do in Impartner.

One thing I would love to see is that when I make an update, it would show in my own time zone. I think that they're starting to do that now. We've actually gone back to Allbound and said, "Hey, we would love it if you did this," and then, three or four months later, we see it. That's awesome.

I've been using Allbound on and off since 2019. In 2019, the company I worked at acquired another company that was using Allbound, and that's when I first got exposed to Allbound. And when I went to my most recent company, I strongly recommended that we use Allbound over Impartner.

There have been a few times when I questioned the platform's stability, but for the most part, it has been a pretty stable product.

Another thing I can say about Allbound is regarding the implementation teams in particular. They are absolutely amazing. It's not just about the tool. Whereas most people are looking at functionality, I personally care more about how well a vendor supports me, because I can't be an expert on every system. Allbound does a really great job of that.

Positive

We implemented it the first time really not knowing what we should have from a partner program. A lot of smaller companies use Allbound because it is so easy to get going, but we've had to go back to Allbound and say, "Hey, we need a reimplementation." We're in the process of reimplementing because we realized that there was a lot we didn't know or a lot that we would rather rethink.

Part of the challenge—and this is not necessarily an Allbound problem but, unfortunately, the perception falls on Allbound being a factor—is that because I've worked at many different-sized companies, a small company, like my current company, doesn't know. That's something that Allbound could do more on from an implementation standpoint. They could say "Hey, we know you're probably kind of new to this and you may not have people who have been doing this for very long." People think they understand "partner" and they don't. They don't want to hear you tell them that. But if you haven't been a part of the partner world, you really don't know. A company that's somewhat new to the whole partner thing may need more hand-holding when it comes to implementation. A company that is new to partnering doesn't know what they don't know.

For onboarding Allbound, it was just us and their implementation team. They were great, but the mistake was that our company didn't know what it was doing. The other challenge was that putting together a partner program on paper is one thing, but it works differently in systems.

Allbound has forced other vendors to be a little more competitive with their pricing. For what you get, which is a lot, the pricing of Allbound is fine.

Allbound's flat, package-based pricing model contrasts with tier-based pricing which grows as the number of partners increases. I don't like that latter model at all because you run the risk of suppressing the process of getting more partners.

I'm of the ilk of figuring out who your partners really should be. What goals are you trying to achieve? Find the partners that will help you support that. But there are definitely other companies that want as many partners as they can possibly get, and when you have that kind of pricing, it's not fun at all because there's nothing predictable.

In addition to Impartner there were two other companies that we talked with. We had a whole list of functions that we wanted the partner portal to be able to support and it came down to Allbound and Impartner, and because of my experience with Allbound, we went with Allbound.

The reason I really pushed my current company to use Allbound is because of how easy it is to use all of the functionality. When using one of Allbound's competitors, I actually had to hire an HTML person who had to do some scripting. With that solution, the kind of technical ability that we had to have, to make the partner relationship management tool reflect what we needed as a company, was crazy. One of the things I absolutely love about Allbound is how easy it is to use. It's not just one thing, it's how the whole company approaches it.

The other thing that I absolutely positively love about Allbound is that we've been really working to make deal registration super simple for our partners and that has required a lot of implementation support from Allbound. If we had been using a competitor, specifically Impartner, we would have had to pay megabucks to get the changes that we needed to have done.

With Allbound, I don't have to think about the design elements on the page because they've done that for me. Some companies might view that as a negative. And in fact, the one thing that I can say that Impartner may do better is in allowing you to customize things. But you had better have the resources to help you do that, or you're paying $175 an hour to get it done. With Allbound, even though we may have given up some flexibility, I don't have to deal with the partner portal being the main focus of my job. There are so many more strategic things that I need to do. Allbound has created enough flexibility with the system to allow our partners to have a good experience, but to allow me to focus on what I care about, which is creating the programs and giving partners what they actually need.

I am not a person who likes a tool to dictate what I'm going to do in my partner program. But what I know to be true is that I would get super frustrated within Impartner because, if I wanted to make a change, it would cost me. Whereas within Allbound, we can at least have a discussion about whether it's possible, and they are responsive. In the case of deal registration, where we wanted to make a change that benefited our partners, Allbound has gone above and beyond. It's to the point where I need to go back to the guy I work for and tell him, "If you had been using another system, you would be in this to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars."

Allbound does enable a partner to rebrand our white-label collateral, but I've never seen a partner do that. That's only because most of my experience with it has been while at my current company and we are really different in the fact that most of our partners are former employees. But this is probably another area of opportunity for Allbound because Impartner did a much better job.

If you don't think you're ready for a PRM I would ask, "Do you really want to do everything manually? Do you understand that if you had this PRM, not only do you have a content repository, but you have a framework to start building your partner program against?" I just can't even imagine not having Allbound.

If you're looking at solutions, overall, make sure what you're looking at is easy to use and doesn't require additional technical talent or implementation services. And really understand what it is you're trying to do, and don't overcomplicate it.

We use most aspects of Allbound, although there is some functionality that we don't use it for, such as the revenue recognition piece. It also has a feature that allows you to send gift cards but we don't use that system right now. It's a feature where people get points for doing certain actions.

When it comes to onboarding a partner there are some limitations, and I've adapted to them. The person I work for would probably advocate for more flexibility, but I have learned to use what Allbound calls Prospect Pages. That is the function that I use the most on the portal, beyond deal registration. I use that to drive an emotionalized experience. The challenge I have is that I was just getting into the Partner Journey Automation. There's a lot of power there but I have enough experience to know you just don't go in there willy-nilly and start doing things. But I do believe that the Partner Journey Automation is easier to use and it's part of the package that we have, whereas, at least when I was using Impartner, that was a separate piece that we had to buy. If Allbound can keep innovating PJA, that would be awesome.

If I end up in another organization at some point, and have the opportunity, I will recommend Allbound again because it's simpler for me, and it's easier for partners, to move around in the program. 

And I cannot stress how important it has been for us that Allbound has gone above and beyond. I love that about them.

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.

Our primary use cases are partner onboarding, partner training, enablement, and deal registration. We also work on a partner directory.

One of the biggest things Allbound has done is to give us a single place to put critical content for partners. This allowed us to be consistent in how we create not just a partner onboarding experience, but also the partner onboarding experience for partners of all types and sizes. For example, "You've been a partner for a long time. What are your training needs?" They're different for different people. And now, we have a single platform to do everything. We don't have to have it in all these fragmented locations. I can't imagine a world where I have to go back to pulling PowerPoint files, and training videos from different locations, sending them to a partner, and then having to do something different for the next partner I talk to.

The solution allows us to filter or customize the content that different partners see when they log in and this is something we want to do more of. What we want to do is set it up not only by partner but also by role. A salesperson gets different content than a software developer because they have slightly different needs, not just based on what company they work with, but their role in the organization. We are just continuing to personalize that experience. My internal teams and systems make it harder to do. The Allbound platform makes it super easy. Without the solution, it takes time to think about, "Who are those people, what companies are they working with, and where else is that data stored?" But on the Allbound side, it's super easy. The solution is not the problem. I'm the problem.

Customization is important. We also like to work with tools off the shelf and get the maximum value from them. I believe it is also important to know where the streets end in terms of what we can actually do out of the box and the product versus when we have to start customizing and building deeper integrations. We're just now hitting the end of what we can do with the product. It's been really easy to customize and integrate, such as into our CRM, for example, for dealer registration. System plumbing and integrations weren't challenging. The Allbound side wasn't challenging. It was our internal systems that were challenging to integrate into.

We've noticed shorter sales cycles for partners that are enabled on Allbound. This could be due to their increased engagement and access to our partner managers. However, we haven't found a direct correlation between the two.

The most valuable feature is deal registration. We track, contribute, and monitor our leisure line activity through our deal registration process. This allows us to partner with others, submit register, and co-sell deals easily. We always look for new opportunities to engage with our partners.

The range of features Allbound makes available is comprehensive, pragmatic, and valuable. The features are Allbound's best value. The solution doesn't do everything, but what it does is exactly what we need for the place we stand in our growing program. We get a lot of positive feedback from partners that the solution not only meets their needs but is actually easy to use.

The user interface for administrators of the solution is great, easy to understand, easy to work with, and easy to train new admins and co-admins on. We have a lot of our primary partner managers manage their own partners or work with their own set of folks. Very minimal user training and onboarding are required. Most folks are able to figure out the admin console quickly on their own by clicking a few buttons and reading the screen.

Onboarding partners using Allbound is pretty straightforward. We can do some of the onboarding ourselves but some areas need to be configured to make it a little easier. In general, I tell people to go to box.allbound.com, sign up, and that's it. If we can type box.allbound.com, we can register and get going.

The partner finder on the website is not as good as it could be. For example, someone finds a partner on our website, and they push to learn more, but there is no connection to the Allbound or deal registration process. This makes it difficult to capture that information. I am currently working on fixing this issue.

Allbound supports a few frameworks, but not necessarily the ones we use internally. We use an app called Workato as our primary integration layer for the company. There are ways to connect, but it's not an out-of-the-box connector with robust documentation. The solution requires a little bit more work that can easily be done, but, it requires more knowledge and heavier lifting. Their deeper API and integration framework makes it easier for us to build deeper integrations, but the connectors aren't as robust as we would like. 

I have been using the solution for five years.

Allbound's stability is perfect. I never think about stability because the solution just works 100 percent of the time.

Our partner program is not the smallest, and it's certainly not the largest, but I'd say it's very good, which would be the scalability. Allbound has been able to meet all of our requirements so far, but I also don't know how it would translate into a hundred X growth of our program. So far, so good.

I have had open cases, but when I reached out for help, it has been almost instantaneous. All my concerns have been resolved in a timely manner. I have had very few issues, and when we had them, we just use our CSN and they normally get back to us within minutes, so the technical support is perfect.

Positive

Previously, we used a mix of homegrown and alternative solutions. We had some items on our support site, some in a shared box holder, and a lot of items that were sent via email or at a moment in time, but nothing like what we needed. We were just trying to solve similar problems with other internal tools.

The initial setup is straightforward. The team is fantastic in serving us everything we need and making sure we are aware of what is coming and when. The challenges are not external, but internal. Our TSN team and partners have been great in helping us understand how this new technology can be useful to our business.

We didn't hire any new people for the deployment. We had three people including one partner program manager and a partner operations person who were overseeing the deployment and still oversee the solution today. That's in the normal scope of their job. Allbound is a tool for the job because they would've been doing onboarding and training partners anyways. Now, we just gave them Allbound as the tool to do the work. They would've had alternatives but not in a single place.

The implementation was completed in-house.

The qualitative ROI has been incredibly high. I need to translate that to some other business metrics, but it's certainly making me happy by saving me a lot of time at the moment. Our partners can find all the information they need through the solution without us having to send numerous static links so they can access the same information.

The pricing model is critical because it helped us grow our program without being penalized. We didn't want to continue to pay more just to add more people who weren't engaged. 

Allbound's price is a great deal. The way I describe it to people internally is I would personally pay for Allbound if we didn't have a budget. The solution is very useful. Allbound would have to be pried out of my hands because what we get for the cost is more than worth it. If the solution was sitting on the shelf, it wouldn't be worth anything. When we actually implement it and start to get it going, we get a lot of value for the money invested and a lot more time. There's a lot of staff time invested that goes in, as well. One of my larger costs is partner enablement, partner training, and development. The people I pay cost a lot more than Allbound, but without the right tool for the job, they wouldn't be as effective in their role.

We evaluated Salesforce and some of its partner functionality and communities. I don't know if there were any more at the time. I've seen references for them around, but I think Allbound had the right mix of features, price, and also customer success that matched really well with our needs.

The biggest benefits that I've noticed with Allbound compared to others are the value and the great customer service. Allbound has met and exceeded our security standards, which is really hard to do given our business at Box. The team is also easy to work with, and everyone we've interacted with has been excellent. 

I give the solution a nine out of ten. 

Allbound takes my feedback and makes it better. That's a strong recommendation for me. I'm a choosy buyer when it comes to these solutions. I am very satisfied with the solution, and then some.

Allbound enables our partners to rebrand our white-label collateral but we have not rolled that feature out yet. The feature is pretty cool but to roll it out, I first have to redesign how my collateral is created so that it could be branded and then have a review process for it.

To anyone who doesn't think a PRM solution is for their organization, I would not only recommend Allbound, but I would offer to sit down with them and show them how we use the solution. I would share feedback from our partners, and they can see if it meets their requirements. Allbound is the default recommendation I give to other partner leaders looking for a PRM because I have used and evaluated perhaps all the alternative products in the market. The reason I continue to use Allbound is that it works and makes me happy.

New users should know Allbound is just a tool. We have to really think about who our partners are, what the journey is, what their personas are, and what their needs and requirements are. We have to spend some time talking to them and understanding them before we just throw any technology at them. What's key is making sure that people will get value from the solution based on what they are trying to do, whether that's training or selling a product doesn't matter. We need to understand what needs to be done in that platform and make sure we're able to prioritize the feature deployment, prioritize the implementation, and relay the communications to our partners based on what's valuable to them, not just trying to implement every feature that's on the feature list, initially.

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 use it for partner management and to provide training to our partners. We use it for them to have a place to register any leads or deals. We also use it for content visibility, so that they're able to log in and see content in relation to our organization, the partnership, our service, their service, and how we work with them.

Allbound has enabled us to have all of our partner information in a centralized location: everything from deal registration to training to providing them with content and having it visible on their dashboards. They have full transparency into how the partnership with us stands and where they can find information.

The most valuable feature is definitely the deal registration component and the fact that it is reflected on the dashboard. It's nice that our partners have visibility into where the deals they submit stand, in terms of the sales process, and they can know when something is closed-won, closed-lost, still in negotiation, et cetera.

Allbound was one of many PRMs that we were looking at when deciding which one was going to be right for our partner ecosystem. It definitely had the most ticks in terms of what it can offer. Deal registration was the most important thing, but it also has a way to provide training.

And when it comes to onboarding a partner, it's extremely easy.

Better segmentation in terms of user rights and access. Both internal and external users can be given specific access rights and I don't feel that there are enough options and this impacts reporting and access.

I would like to see more relevant data on the dashboard, data that's not exclusive to deal registration and tier progression. Something that could provide more data to customers would be important. Although it serves its purpose, it would be great to have enriched data available i.e., certifications for managers per team 

We have had Allbound for about a year, but it only went live for our partners in July, about seven months ago.

We really haven't experienced any significant issues in terms of its stability. That being said, we don't actively use it 24/7, but there has been very little downtime.

The only thing to note is that sometimes there is a little bit of a lag in terms of the integration between Salesforce and Allbound, which can sometimes go beyond the five to 10 minutes that it's supposed to be. Sometimes we have waited for an hour for things to sync fully, but that has only happened on a few occasions.

It's very scalable and extremely easy to scale, especially with the pricing model. It's very easy to onboard partners into the program and to recommend it to prospective agencies that we're dealing with. We work across partners who are digital marketing agencies and it's very easy to scale when it comes to growing out different regions.

We have contacted them a number of times and so far so good. The support that we've received is always quite timely. Sometimes they say it's going to take up to five days for them to get back to us, but I've never waited for more than a day. Ninety-five percent of the time, they're able to resolve the issues that we're having.

We have a dedicated CSM who is really fantastic. He is always available as an additional point of contact, should we need to escalate something.

Positive

We previously used Impartner but it wasn't able to assist us in terms of where we wanted to take the partner program. We are really focusing on acquisition and increasing our partner network. Impartner was something of a dated PRM and it didn't really have the capabilities we were looking for, with regard to deal registration and automation. Those were things that Allbound was able to provide us with.

The initial deployment was definitely complex, but compared to other PRMs that I've worked to implement, it was on the easier side of things. The points of contact that we had were really great and were able to help us through the issues that we were having. It was certainly better compared to other PRMs.

We did the majority of it in-house, with our development team and other internal teams. But we chartered a company called Little Taller and they helped a lot with everything in the dashboard and the integration with our Salesforce. There were eight to ten people involved.

To date, there hasn't been any return on investment, but we're not really using it to track ROI. We're mostly using it to provide a soft benefit to our partners.

What we are paying for it is comparable to the market, but the price of PRMs is quite high for the value they deliver.

Allbound's flat, package-based pricing model is to our benefit. It's good to have a set service that is predictable regarding pricing. There is also a little bit more transparency, and it doesn't punish the people who use Allbound and have success in growing their partner networks.

We looked at PartnerStack, ZINFI PRM, and ZiftONE. We went with Allbound because it ticked the most boxes concerning what we were looking for.

I've worked with so many PRMs in the past, with Impartner being the most recent, and Allbound is definitely a much better solution, especially for the way that we're using it.

We are able to create groups and, through them, allow specific partners to see content that is relevant to them, whether it's based on geo or on partner tier level. We don't actively use that feature so much because the majority of the content is available to all partners. But using it was very easy. It was just a matter of creating groups and filtering things by them. We had to learn how to do that, which was done in a 30-minute session and then we were able to put it in place. In terms of importance for us, the ability to filter is a five out of 10. It's not super relevant, but it still provides value.

Allbounds' Channel Insights is something that we have just started to look into. It's something that we're not using too much at the moment because there is just not that much actionable data for us. We're waiting until we hit July again and then we'll have one year in which partners have had access to the portal and we'll start using it more.

If I were discussing PRMs, and my experience with Allbound, with a colleague at another company who said they are not ready for a PRM solution, I would say that having a PRM can help them to better align their processes internally and really be a way to help them organize their partner networks. Depending on the size of their partner network, it's really great to have all of the assets in one place so the team doesn't have to do things on an individual basis. You can bring everyone to Allbound, or the PRM, and all the data that they need is housed in one location.

But be prepared for the integration and implementation to take a lot longer than expected. Although there were definitely some delays on our side, the implementation period they gave, of about six to eight weeks, was more like two to three months.

Overall, I would rate Allbound an eight out of 10. There is still some room for improvement, but it really does help us to accomplish the goals we're aiming for as well as with where we currently stand in our program.

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.