Altify vs. Showpad eOS®

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

Showpad Content works well to provide a central hub for all document hosting. The interface is simple and easy enough to use. Our sales team likes that you are able to see when a user has opened your file once it has been shared with them and how long they spent viewing it.

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

• User-Friendly. The ability to easily customize to fit your needs
• Delivering content easily and quickly, reducing cost for print, and out of date information
• Reporting. Providing the analytical function to track what content has been utilized or not utilized and become more efficient in the type of information you share
• Offline Use. The ability to be able to view content offline

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

• Not truly a limitation, but I would love it if I could customize the design a bit further within the shared spaces that I create.
• Loading large resources sometimes takes a few seconds - not particularly long and not an issue, but it is not instantaneous in some cases.

Incentivized

I have not been involved with support from Showpad so I am not entirely sure. However, we have received some emails from our help desk about an outage and it seems like it didn't last very long so I would say that it was pretty effective support to that extent.

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

Honestly, I have yet to see another service similar to Showpad. You might have email trackers that tell you when your clients opened up an email or which links from your email were clicked. Showpad has it all, in addition to having a hub of resources where you can easily share with your clients. The level of engagement tracking from using Showpad is next-level.

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

• We are not limited by what physical catalogs and literature we get - we can send out any piece of literature to a customer.
• All of our content is centralized in one place.
• Our marketing department has the ability to view what content is shared the most and viewed the most, so they can focus on those items.
• Gives our sales reps visibility into what our customers are looking at.

Incentivized