Allbound vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Allbound is a sleek solution that neatly organizes data. Clearly presents useful instructional content. The slowness of the CRM connection is a problem. When it comes to reaching out to our worldwide network of channel partners, we turn on Allbound to streamline our communication and sales enablement efforts. Our reseller partners may use this central hub to register new deals, stay up to speed on product changes, and have access to all relevant product information.

Incentivized

I rated this a seven because I love Salesforce, and it is excellent on the sales side. However, the marketing side has some pros and cons. It is terrific for keeping track of lead, customer, and dealer information, but it is not easy to automate workflows, integrate other software, or create well-designed emails. It is also straightforward to generate reports, which is very helpful in keeping track of lead progression to better market those leads and turn them into customers.

Incentivized

• Content Management including sales & marketing resources, calendar items, distributor and partner communications, and news for partners
• Deal registration and MDF management--providing an easy to use system for partners and Cambum administrators to enter and review requests.
• Increasing partner engagement--providing an easy way to update the portal frequently keeps our partners coming back to see the latest and greatest resources and benefits

• Filter relevant content so you can priorize those that are more relevant and resolve it first
• Measure the traffic in the different social networks, as well as the response rate, average response time and other relevant metrics
• Configure automation rules to order the work of those who must interact with the customer

Incentivized

• The fact that you can't make payouts to partners within the platform itself is super frustrating and that would be a huge improvement.
• The ability to track clicks, page views, etc is not available like on other partner platforms like Tune, Impact, and Cake. It would be awesome to see that tracking data for the content being shared.
• Having more integrations with platforms like Zuora which we use for payments would be great.

Incentivized

• The email builder does not offer any way to catch/check bugs across different email service providers
• Creating SQL is not as easy as drag-and-drop; a lot of technical knowledge is required
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud is sold as a marketing tool, but to be honest, you need a LOT of technical IT support to run the tool
• Einstein metrics are across the board; if you have multiple audiences in one instance of Salesforce Marketing Cloud you can't segment the data.

Incentivized

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."

As of right now we have not seen any other program that integrates as seamlessly into our Salesforce platform. We have barely scratched the surface of all the features and use cases. It would be irresponsible to make a move to another platform in the near future. We have not come up against any limitations that would prompt a need to switch

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!

You won't find another solution that has as many features as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio. We all know Salesforce, we all know how big they are and it's not for nothing... Their tools do most of the things you want, need and even imagine. Using it is complicated, but the usability is infinite.

Incentivized

Upgrades and timing of the upgrades were communicated well and planned during off hours for our work. If we did have a campaign scheduled during that time, it would kick-off after the system was back active. There were a few unplanned system down times, but it was a rare occurrence and those times were also short in duration.

Though the make up of MA apps is not built this way today, it would be nice to see them become more real-time. The integration between Salesforce and Pardot is not a true real-time integration. If I modify something in Salesforce, those changes are not automatically reflected in Pardot immediately. There is a delay of about 15 minutes before the systems sync. This delay, although not long, is less than ideal We would love the systems to be integrated real time such that changes are propagated from one system to the other immediately.

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.

They are really responsive and more than not solve the problem or give you insight to how you can manage the solution yourself. I do find however sometimes a long delay on the more complex issues when they need to loop in other departments. but overall a good experience with support

Incentivized

The trainers at the Pardot user conference (Elevate and Connections) were very knowledgeable and presented the material well. Again, the content was targeted to more of a new user audience, and was not really relevant for folks who had been using the product for 2+ years.

Pardot's online training touches on all topics briefly and vaguely without much indepth exploration into how a final outcome could look, such as Nurturing Campaigns, Email templates, landing page templates, etc... The only true way to uncover Pardot's full capabilities is to have Front End design and coding experience. Without this key skill set, I would not recommend Pardot to another business.

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.

From an IT perspective, once you set up the Javascript beacon and start collecting data there is a waiting game. During this time you can start labeling your site actions which can be labor intensive for a single person, but you don't really have the final end-users on the platform yet. We did a lot of training so users were experienced, but it wasn't until they had their first tasks to accomplish that they started using the system and had questions. I'd recommend setting up some immediate goals for an end-user to start segmenting for the purpose of displaying message campaigns so you can jump start end-user action.

They are different in the sense that Allbound allows you to loop in different parners to a degree that HubSpot doesn't outside smaller extensions and portals. More visbility into interactions with HubSpot, but it's truly built for marketing vs a sales forward/partnership management tool.Extensions from Allbound into Google could be helpful

Incentivized

I think that all of the marketing platforms I have evaluated and used in the past serve different markets and purposes. Salesforce Marketing Cloud was more palatable to our team because of our existing tech stack where we had Salesforce CRM already deployed and in use. Compared to Marketo and Hubspot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a bit dated in terms of the UI/UX and the overall experience but still meets the needs of our organization. Mailchimp, however, isn't even playing in the same arena and is meant for small organizations and companies that don't have a need for a full fledged offering that SFMC brings to the table.

Incentivized

was not involved with this part but i have not heard about clompaints

Incentivized

Prior to this, we had no solution and literally were doing things on paper in a world where technology is outpacing paper. Having this process optimized has made it easier for the sales and marketing people to change information. From the training perspective, it has allowed us to see holes in where we could create additional support training, so the ROI here has been a lot more than just the optimization of a process.

Incentivized

• The sharing of knowledge has a positive effect on the partners who benefit from it.
• Our smaller partners are now able to conduct their own campaigns with the help of our Campaigns in a Box, freeing us to concentrate on our larger clients.
• Our latest products can all be better explained with the aid of our learning tracks.

Incentivized

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to more efficiently reach out to a higher number of prospects.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to nimbly communicate important messages in a timely fashion to facilitate conversion.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to track who is opening our messages so that we can stop sending to those not interested and focus on the most engaged audiences.

Incentivized