Channelscaler is the product resulting from the combing of Allbound and Channel Mechanics. It is a cloud-based channel sales and marketing platform that allows organizations to give real-time access to sales enablement, marketing tools and resources in one mobile-friendly place.
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ZiftONE
Score 9.2 out of 10
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Zift Solutions Through Partner Marketing Automation Platform is a suite of applications meant to streamline interactions with channel partners, amplify demand, and ease cooperation on co-branded campaigns.
Very well-suited for a rising startup like ours that is rapidly growing its customer and partner base. Very well-suited for needing to make rapid changes to your marketing mix and being able to quickly see it reflected in the portal.
Overall Relayware is a great product. It's many features in a single package lend itself well for working with partners be that channel partners, direct sales, VARs, indirect sales, or most any other type of partner. With the flexible construction and licensing you can activate the parts of Relayware you want and then easily grow the functionality as your partner management needs grow. This is a very nice solution versus adding additional SaaS systems and spending considerables hours building API connectors. That said, Relayware does have a robust API should you need to connect to other systems. There is native support for SSO connectivity, SFDC (Salesforce.com) and a handful of other third party products. Where you might not want to use Relayware is if it's too big for your organization, so like any SaaS, do your research, talk to Relayware, and evaluate the product. The many features and ability to handle lots of partners definitely adds complexity and comes with a decent, but fair, price tag. So, if you're a small organization just starting out with a few partners, or you have very simple partner management needs, Relayware might not be for you. Then again, it may, since I've found it easy to use several of the product's features beyond just working with partners. So again, evaluate, and draw your own conclusions.
Lead registrations. One reason we chose Allbound was for its easy to use deal registration form.
Events. We promote every event that our company will be attending to all of our partners via Allbound.
Prospecting. Our team also creates unique prospecting pages for customers, prospects, and partners to help drive specific information that these companies should have access to across the organization.
Partner tracking and communication - Relayware allows a holistic view of a partner. Since the tool tracks everything a user does, you can easily see when the partner has sent or received emails, participated in trainings, download files, etc. You can also see how and when back-office users such as admins, partner managers, etc. have communicated with partners, updated dashboards, downloaded reports, and much more. The granularity of the history and tracking is exception for seeing how you and a partner are engaging. It's also very helpful for companies who require an audit trail for activities.
Training/eLearning/onboarding - I've worked with a number of eLearning/LMS platforms over the years and I'm stunned by the learning system built into Relayware. It's hands down far and above many existing standalone products and if Relayware was smart, they would offer this as a standalone item. The system supports the typical eLearning/LMS basics- SCORM support, grading, training by module, etc. but it also allows for custom training paths based on learning modules which can be SCORM, video, HTML, files, and any combination of these. The grading system is separated from the training content which allows for highly flexible user cases. You can created quizzes, tests, and certifications based on individual content modules or a full learning path.
Since the LMS is part of the overall Relayware system which is intended for partner management, you can create a range of onboarding processes/paths which are customized to particular types of partners. The system can support both online and offline activities so you can require xxx to be done online, followed by in-person training, etc. It really is an impressive system. I liked it so much, I decomissioned my instance of a Moodle LMS and I now use the Relayware LMS to serve as both partner eLearning and general customer eLearning through a separate portal.
Flexibility - It's hard to believe the Relayware can do so much in a single SaaS. The system allows for connection to SFDC so working leads and opportunities is simple. A manager or admin can add, edit, and remove web pages with ease. Data can be placed on any webpage using a number of "Relayware tags" which are special HTML tags to pull data from the system and use on a page. Customizable workflows for most any part of the system can be handled via a workflow engine. This could be onboarding, partner signup and registration, lead/deal/opportunity management and routing to appropriate users, Legal and Export compliance checking of documents and files, and on and on.
The only real drawback is that the system is so flexible, it helps to have good training and support so you don't get lost. Luckily this is only an issue for those who administer the system and Relayware is keen to provide good support for their product.
Licensing & cost - My observation is that Relayware has several good options for licensing and overall cost. They break the system down into several key modules so if you don't need something, you can remove it and not pay for it. However, that also makes it easy for the product to grow as your needs do. One of their license modules is by back-office users, not front-office. The benefit of this is when coupled with SFDC, you only need a single SFDC license for all of your field personnel and front end users. Since one of the Relayware models is to not charge by the number of front end users, you can save thousands in SFDC licenses. Ie: A user works through Relayware to report/edit/manage leads, deals, and opportunities. The system uses a single SFDC license to connect to SFDC so rather than every front end user needing an SFDC license, you only need one. Depending on the size of your organization, this alone could easily pay for the Relayware system.
Allbound is so easy to use as an administrator and provides human support and a resource for its customers to learn about the features and tools available. Our partners consistently provide feedback to us about how much they absolutely love our partner portal, which Allbound provides the structure and functionality to allow us to over amazing things to thousands of partner globally. Almost every person who provides feedback says some iteration of "this is the best partner portal i've ever used."
It is by far the easiest system to administrator that I have either had experience doing or demoed from other vendors. No coding skills needed. Simple interfaces for everything. And the Allbound University and live support are great!
Allbound has a support team that is easy to contact right through the PRM interface. Additionally, we have a dedicated account manager and development team who are super responsive and helpful. Allbound has a ticketing system for support as well, which keeps you up to date on status of your support requests.
Regular meetings, lots of UAT, quick responses, and adherence to our timeline made implementation a breeze -- even though we had some really complex processes we needed to support.
For our partner portal, we have chosen Allbound. We wanted one place where all of our partners could go to find the information they required, and where some of that information could be made available automatically. Allbound provides us all the necessary tools for facilitating content exchange with our partners, including legally binding contracts, transaction registrations, and everything else we may need. It also helps us empower our partners by providing them with instructional courses and turnkey marketing strategies.
We were also testing the HubSpot Marketing Hub platform at the same time I began utilizing ZiftONE. ZiftONE's data is more reliable than HubSpot, thus we've decided to use it as a backup for systems that need content syndication. However, GetResponse's sales funnel is easier to use for those who are new to a software of this kind. ZiftONE ensures that our campaigns are being managed with the right information and that our products and services are being promoted to the right audience. This medium is useful for spreading your brand's name around and may even yield a few leads.
