Altify’s suite of Salesforce native solutions guide and coach sellers to identify and map key relationships, uncover business insights, align sales processes to buying processes, qualify, manage and execute deals, and grow wallet share in accounts.
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ClearSlide
Score 6.3 out of 10
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ClearSlide enables sales and marketing teams to find content, communicate it whether in-person, on the phone or through email, and get insights into how customers engage, with the goal of helping sales and marketing teams make every interaction count and create amazing customer experiences. ClearSlide is a system of engagement for sales, marketing & services teams. For managers and leaders, ClearSlide provides engagement dashboards to improve deal visibility, coaching, and stronger…
Well suited for accounts in pipe. I'm not sure how well the entire team experience will play out in reality. Resources are primarily available when the opportunity is piped.
ClearSlide is quite easy to use and effective when presenting information and sharing screen. It's also easy for the prospect to access your site; they just click on a link. If an inside sales manager was looking to find out where his/her team might be losing prospects, Clearslide would be a great choice because the analytics show exactly how engaged a prospect is and at what point they start to lose interest. There is a monthly cost/annual contract involved to Clearslide, so for a startup that is very cost-conscious it might be best to investigate free conference/screenshare options, but the case could be made that the analytics will earn back the fee.
Email Functionality - Creation of general templates to be constantly used as well as allowing the team to gain insight as to who is opening and viewing the material. That makes the follow up much easier to have.
Presentations - Very easy to provide customers with a source link of where to view our presentation and also very easy to provide them with the ability to show their screen if needed. The fact that we can have several people on the presentation is helpful as well.
Salesforce Integration - Very important in our organization as we like to have any and all activity pertaining to customers housed in our CRM.
Sales Process Manager: The Altify Sales Process manager's biggest drawback is the lack of usability for the end user. Altify has an out of the box sales process or a custom one can be created based on the company sales process. The drawback is that unless the sales process includes very few items, it can be more cumbersome than helpful. The Rep walks through the Sales Process by selection whether they have "Completed" are "In Progress" or have "Not Completed" the sales process activities at each stage of the opportunity. Altify saves after each selection so there is considerable downtime as the user waits for their selection to be recorded before they can answer the next question. Altify has an option to automatically advance the Salesforce opportunity Sales Stage once a certain % or mandatory steps in the sales process are completed, however this is not entirely useful as it does not advance until the set % or mandatory marked processes within a Sales Stage are completed AS WELL as at least one process from the next sales stage. This becomes very confusing and cumbersome for the users. In most cases, the sales process manager becomes more of a micromanagement tool with managers requiring all items to be marked completed and the Users merely marking items to satisfy that requirement without getting the intended benefit of the guided selling experience.
Account Plans: Account Plans can be grouped in both "does well" and "does poorly" for the Altify Suite. I will outline the bad in this portion of the review. Altify Account Plans do have some ability for customization, however the standard out of the box options are incredibly overbuilt. Filling out all of the information within the Account Plan can consume 40+ man hours for a single Account. While some of this information can be useful and important to note, other portions become more cumbersome than useful. The Completeness and Scorecard portions of the use a number of calculations. These calculations are explained at the bottom of the page but from a user perspective are very confusing and not straightforward. Most users that begin using account plans quickly abandon them because of the difficulty in setting them up correctly and the minimal insights that are gleaned out of the work put into them. One place for the greatest opportunity to improve account plans is in the objectives section, there the user can set objectives and activities (tasks) to meet them. The tasks must be manually selected to create an actual task in Salesforce and this cannot be assigned out to other SF Users. This portion of the Account plan would be improved if it could be used as a holistic account management platform to manage tasks across all the opportunities and potential opportunities, with an ability to assign them out to others in Salesforce within the account team.
Altify Max Insights: Altify max insights is intended to provide coaching advice at the opportunity level. This feature is tied into the opportunity manager. The drawback to this feature is that the insight mainly pertains to whether or not a user filled out all the steps in the opportunity manager: the sales process, the opportunity assessment, strategy, and the customer relationship map. The insights are far less action-oriented and more of a reminder to use the tool components. This tool just doesn't hold value, especially as it is an add on product.
Lack of Customization - While Altify does allow customization of some of their products and components, Altify has a ton of limitations. One of the most frustrating aspects is that all of the processes happen from their "black box" which is the dealmaker opportunity objects that Altify creates. This is essentially a shadow copy of the opportunities within Salesforce that then push changes to the actual opportunity. There is no way to tap into this shadow opportunity to either run custom processes or to even surface the Altify insights in a BI tool such as Einstein. This means that a lot of the use and functionality that Altify does do well cannot be leveraged for company insights or user end improvements.
This has become a vital tool for our sales process and as we grow as an organization, the ability to deliver content efficiently and effectively will become a key performance indicator in measuring our business goals for the coming fiscal year.
Its easy to use from a presenter's perspective. Its web based so anyone who can navigate Facebook can open a live pitch or shared file. This makes it easy to give live demos, share files, and share screens with out downloading any software or installing java patches
I was mostly involved in the implementation process and syncing ClearSlide with Salesforce, and I would say the support was mostly average. It took a few times to get everything scheduled, and a lot of the process was left up to me. I was reading through the documents that they supplied. It wasn't complicated, but more direct support would have been appreciated.
While Skuid is not a match to what Altify does in terms of capabilities, Skuid did allow us to natively create the functions that we needed within the business in a way that was more useful than the Altify tools out of the box functionality. Altify does not offer anything for a more "light touch" opportunity, which is its greatest drawback. With Skuid we were able to create our own solution for these lighter touch opportunities
It is easier to see the full spate of files with Clearslide vs. Dropbox, and each slide shows individually in Clearslide vs. other products that just provide a file in name only. In addition, Clearslide provides direct intel on how customers view and interact with the content you send them, which other products don't provide.
This product ROCKS!!!! ClearSlide shortened my sales cycle by over 50% by enabling to jump right into a LIVE demo on an initial client call so I don't have to waste time scheduling a demo at later date. People are busy and finding a time to schedule a call can take days or weeks
Micromanagement (negative): By implementing Altify as the sales process management tool for our company during a change in sales methodology we created a micromanagement storm that left reps not truly gaining the benefit of the buyer-centric methodology. Rather than using the tool as a guide to the new process, it became a series of checkboxes that reps were mandated to fill out by management. This has left us unpicking the process to reengage the reps in a positive manner on how to work through opportunities in a customer-focused way. Sales process manager and opportunity assessment were disabled to try to fix this negative impact.
Account Plans (positive): While difficult for smaller accounts, the account plan feature did create a standard way for sales users to create account plans and manage their accounts better
Reduced the amount of time that our sales staff have to spend searching for content or collateral. Everything is available in one area and can be surfaced as long as you know the keywords of the collateral you would like.
CS doubles as a conference line and online presentation platform, which is incredibly helpful. Rather than having to use multiple systems or launch an application that requires a plugin, CS launches right from my browser. Prospects that are viewing our presentations have the same ease of use with CS as well.
The integrations with Outlook, Gmail, and web browsers are a dual-edged sword sometimes. They do make it easier to link documents to emails, but they also tend to crash or cause issues with other software. I would say that overall the savings in terms of efficiency are greater than what has been caused by glitches, but not by much.
The tracking details on collateral sent to prospects are incredibly insightful and help us improve our future communication strategy. This has made us smarter about our future engagements by providing targeted information that the client cares about.
