Allbound 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.