Altify vs. Oracle Sales

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.

Incentivized

In the market for Sales and Service, Oracle CX is the best especially in integrating with other systems. It has a stable and huge database that can handle a bunch of data. It gathers all data of customers, accounts, leads, opportunities, service requests in one place and related in a good way. The tools used for reports and analytics as BI is strong and great to use also it is not hard[.]

Incentivized

• Organization chart: really well integrated with SFDC and the visual is easy.
• Profile recommendations in Org chart: great coaching builtin to be fair, but it's tough on your thought process.
• Plan overview and POV hit the mark on what is most important.
• Love the idea of using this with the prospect for early stage alignment and coaching.

Incentivized

• The product is good for tracking leads which can help you acquire new customers.
• The product is good for creating opportunities which can help you convert sales.
• The product can easily be integrated with other applications to make the transfer of data seamless.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Oracle CRM is incredibly complex making it fairly difficult to learn from scratch
• The original implementation of Oracle CRM was a lengthy and involved process
• We have had outages where we cannot connect to Oracle CRM which leaves us at a loss. I'm not sure what the solution to this is, but less outages would be ideal.

Incentivized

Overall our organization has completely moved to Oracle CX Sales and now is able to utilize the latest technology backed by AI to provide a much better experience to customers and saving money at the same time. So it's a Win-Win situation. I believe there is a slight learning curve to derive [the] full value out of this but once you are there, you can delight your customers.

Incentivized

Some of the more complex customer reports we have created are slow to run at times.

Incentivized

The support the Oracle team gives is generally very good. They are patient, willing to help, and their training methods are collaborative and inclusive. They have conducted multiple support sessions and it’s always been a great user experience. The stellar team [is] always on hand to lend support when the right time comes and their helpdesk is always on hand to help.

Incentivized

Excellent online training material. On-demand always helps to access anytime, anywhere. Also, it is essential that in this day and age, video tutorials with actual product screenshots make the learning more useful and fun at the same time. Certifications help test knowledge gained during these tutorial sessions. This was a blessing for fresh users.

Incentivized

If you have never used a CRM program is is hard to know exactly what you need. We had lots of changes during implementation and even more afterward once the users started working in it everyday. Also the partner we used didn't inform us about Allotments and not being able to Batch delete custom objects (you can now in recent releases). There were so many unknowns, that if I had it to do over, I would educate myself more and ask more questions of the partner that we used for implementation.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

As compared to other CRM, this happens to be one of the best and most affordable as there are some cons, but the pros are great, and I have seen an increase in sales by using this platform. It works great for the sales process from start to end, like lead generation to closure.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• It allows you to stay on top of reorder points for your existing customers. We call them attrition calls.
• When you orders flowing in, it makes it easier to follow up with buyers for other business units since you already have pre-existing business.
• As a sales organization, everyone in the company has visibility across the board into what is our profit at any given moment for the day, week, month and year. This keeps up on track for each of our goals.

Incentivized