Altify vs. Pipeliner CRM

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

Pipeliner CRM is amazingly flexible to your business model. For example, in addition to tracking movement of leads through your sales pipeline, Pipeliner CRM can be used to track internal processes, like RFQ and RFPs through your organization. It's highly adaptable across your organization.

• 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

• Clear and easy visualisation of Sales Process
• Great capability in reporting both in-app with 'filter' and reporting module built-in is easy to use
• Reporting into pivot table is also easy and very useful
• Mobile app has always been very good and easy to use since 2015

• 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

• Pipeliner CRM needs to create a video chat room where you can see exactly where your employee is working in the field.
• Pipeliner CRM needs to integrate a command where a user can use his voice to command what he wants.

Currently the company is using the Pipeliner CRM because we believe it is a tool that puts the customer as the main focus of business processes in order to understand and anticipate their needs, and then serve them in the best way.

I gave that rating level because it reflects both my satisfaction and expectations about PipelinerCRM.Plus, the adoption rate of this software. I mean the usability rate is very low. It just takes, for learning, a couple of hours less than three days roughly. Return on time investment is low also.

The support from Pipeliner CRM is superb; they have instant customer support and they are on time. They also give enough knowledge of sales and other material for the knowledge. They also have AI in the support by talking with customer support directly from the web or app and so on.

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

I will always select Pipeliner CRM because it is very flexible, easy to work with, data capturing is at its best, its integration to other major software’s and it aids in the monitoring of the core work process. One distinctive feature is it is very easy to learn without extensive training.

• 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

• As a VisualCRM tool, our clients sales teams seem to accelerate their deal closes.
• The visual tools allow those "no good deals" to be spotted and resource usage limited.
• A great tool to manage those "pipelines" within the company. A pipe is really a series of actions that constitute a planned result.