Altify vs. Foundry ABM vs. Webtrends Analytics

Altify is very well suited for customer relationship mapping and for use on very large, long term and complex deals. Altify is created and represented as an enterprise-level tool, but even some of its functions are too overbuilt for enterprise level sales activities. Altify is a tool best utilized only for the top level of complex deals within an organization. Features such as customer relationship mapping do have use and benefit for mid to large level deals and is arguably the most valuable tool in the Altify suite. After nearly a year using Altify, my recommendation on its use would be to enable account plans, account management, opportunity management, and sales process manager only to the top strategic account reps in the organization, realizing that they are probably best used purely out of the box as any customizations create other complications. For the rest of the sales teams, the customer relationship mapping feature is the one tool reps would gain the most value out of.

Incentivized

I think it's good for companies who have a built out marketing program. I know our marketing team knows the software very well. As someone on the sales side, I struggle to understand some concepts. However they have a great support team and they help with reports that make things very easy to understand.

Incentivized

Scenarios 1. If you want to use web server log files as input to your web analytics, then Webtrends will provides a good product, with great ease of implementation. Don't even think about being cheap on hardware, and make sure Webtrends runs on real servers, not in a VM environment. 2. If you want to use Data Tagging, similar to Google Analytics or Site Catalyst, Webtrends has a powerful product, just be prepared to pay. 3. If you are new to Web Analytics, but it is the strategic direction, start with Webtrends on Premises. Questions to Ask 1. What are you trying to accomplish? 2. Can you place a dollar value on the benefit that you expect/need from Webtrends? 3.Can you live with Webtrends running SaaS?

• 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

• It has paved the way in creating an audience for our respective campaigns that are easy to set and customize.
• This tool has a high configuration aspect which helps and facilitates [the business thoroughly] in their cases.
• It helps you in interacting with any third-party websites or arbitrators for API calls and web solutions.

Incentivized

• Control privacy, data sharing and competitive industrial knowledge using Webtrends on premises
• Great control over custom reports, custom dimensions and metrics
• Flexible tool which allows multiple methods of data capture. To my knowledge it was the first tool with a Tag Builder / Tag Management function built in via a supporting website.

• 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

• The ability to separate budgets by dept. currently, you have one pot of money but can set limits based on campaigns. This is fine for a single user but gets messy with multiple users.
• Campaigns with multiple steps, I do hear this is in the works.
• It would be nice if each area did not open a new tab, navigating pages within the same page would be nice.

Incentivized

• The big downside, the elephant in the room, is that it does not (as of right now) have on-demand segmenting, drilldowns, etc. You have to think of what you want in advance and create those reports then analyze some data. This is huge. You can, of course, re-analyze old data after creating new reports but you still have to wait. (This deficiency may become obsolete with the release of Webtrends Explore later this month (May 2014).)
• It has fewer mature integrations with other products and databases than competitors do, although I'm told it works with SharePoint better than anything else does.
• Its attribution modeling capability is behind Google Analytics'. In my humble opinion, this could be changed quickly if Webtrends would make some tweaks to its standard visitor history files (i.e. preserve the order in which past visits were sourced beyond the single most recent one, rather than storing all those past sources as a randomized list).
• It doesn't incorporate statistical tests, confidence intervals, or statistical associations. However, this same criticism can be applied to its competitors (other than A/B Testing products). It's a tabulation program, as they all are. In this respect, web analytics tools as a group are relatively primitive. Sorry to bring this up as a criticism of Webtrends but it's my pet peeve about the whole industry and I just have to say it. (p.s. take advantage of the heavy-duty Webtrends Scheduled Export functionality to get really granular data that you can feed to a stats program to get significances.)
• Although the documentation, help screens, phone support and the knowledge base have improved tremendously in recent years, there is still a pretty steep learning curve because it is different from the tools that entry-level users may have already been exposed to. This can be a shock and many users are alienated at first because they just don't get some of the fundamentals at first. I'd like to see much better help screens that are thoroughly interlinked with the KB and documentation. Having superb online support would make a world of difference with the adoption of this basically powerful tool.

We continue to have a good experience with Triblio, and they continue to deliver value for our money. If they would do a better job with analytics, then it'd be easier for me to tie campaign activities to the bottom line.

Incentivized

I would be willing to try Webtrends again AFTER some research from other users. I would need to see that users mention better and faster customer support on questions and issues that arise while using the software. The software is capable of vast and incredible things, but if it isnt properly set up and supported during use, it is just a big hassel and waste of everyones time and money.

The Triblio platform makes it easy for non-technical users to get around and figure out what we need relatively quickly. Of course, a basic training or tutorial is needed initially for you to know where everything is. We paid for managed services which is great since we have an account director who can operate the platform better than any outsider can, and she can also give us recommendations on best practices.

Incentivized

If I could give it a 0, I would. Not having an intuitive user interface made it impossible to convince non-analytic business users to use the tool on their own. Even as a seasoned analyst, frequent calls were needed to get what should be simple tasks done. Account managers don't understand the tool either, and have to refer you to technical support

The platform has always been available, and the occasional system updates aside, there have been no downtime issues with Triblio. The platform has always been available when I needed it, and campaigns were launched timely

Incentivized

It is much better than average. Down time usually occurs because of a need to refresh the server on our end.

Triblio pages, campaign performances, and platforms have not slowed us down at all. If anything, Triblio has enhanced how we engage with our target accounts. There has been no speed performance issues, or lag due to system limitations. Triblio tracking on our site has not slowed our page performances significantly, so there has been on effect on speed

Incentivized

The v9 admin interface and v10 reporting interface work as well as expected, but have a tendency to be pokey, especially for bulky reports and whenever you're connected to wifi. I much prefer using the REST API for all reporting for this reason, which simply dumps out the data and doesn't bother with the user interface.

Triblio makes it possible for a small SaaS company without a lot of manpower to implement ABM strategies to help compete in a world where the sales motion is now very different - requiring more targeted messaging and education before prospects are willing to engage with a salesperson. We believe that as we continue to spin up our ABM strategies, Triblio is helping us be in the right place and at the right time for the right audience for a reasonable CPC.

Incentivized

I once went on to Twitter to ask for help from my network of analytics people, and Webtrends themselves responded. They have been an excellent partner in making sure that their product is being used to the best of it's ability and I greatly appreciate that. Both Omniture and Google Analytics, do not have that level of support over social media

The in-person training was comprehensive enough to get you started, but I strongly recommend having a more experienced person when beginning with the tool.

We had our Account management team online to provide training to the marketing team, ADR team, and the AE team, which was helpful as each team had their own sets of questions and needs from the platform. Having the Triblio experts on the call and knowing that they are available for questions later on was reassuring to everyone in the trainings.

Incentivized

Webtrends provides several free webinars over the course of the year, many of which I would expect to pay for. The people providing the webinars seem to have a good feel for real-world application of the product.

Definitely have a dedicated technical team work on the implementation full time with the Triblio team. There are requirements on both ends of the pipe that needs to be done. It is much easier to have both teams work together full time as opposed to part time duty; it would take much longer than doing it all in one shot.

Incentivized

Careful planning and patience. Use a non-public test site to fine tune tags and reporting. Despite best laid plans, there will be surprises when you collect the data, run the analysis and begin generating reports using the tool. Perform a tag audit to ensure tags fire as desired.

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

Terminus appears to be the cheapest on the surface but with the least amount of capabilities, clunky (lots of manual stuff they have to do on the back end to launch your campaign), very low CTR due to the DSP they use (TradeDesk) which also carries a media upcharge. Terminus also cannot figure out their analytics - they are out of whack across various screens in the tool. 6sense is expensive and very limiting (you get X of this, and Y of that - nothing is unlimited, feels like being nickeled and dimed). A very pushy sales team, you are under pressure to book the next meeting or to provide a date when you will sign. The tool appears to have nice capabilities but it is the people, at the end of the day, you will be working with - and I got concerns with that experience. Metadata - nice sales team, low/no pressure to buy. The demo of their platform also looks like it has interesting capabilities. The team appears to be very small, the communications from the salesperson were random and I had to take the lead asking for the next call to see more. This is concerning when it comes to supporting - will they have enough people to support their customer base if they drag their feet in the sales process? None of these tools had ANYTHING EVEN CLOSE to Triblio's orchestration capabilities, so none of them were strong competitors.

Incentivized

Webtrends has its work cut out for itself considering you have the behemoth Google Analytics and Google Analytics Premium having a strong offering and brand recognition for the price of free. After reviewing the paid service I'd suggest you start off with GA as a cheaper alternative that is just as robust, if not much more flexible in regards to the reporting and goal tracking needs for our company.

Incentivized

The Triblio platform works fairly reliably since we have implemented it into our instance. There are the occasionally wishes that they have more functionalities, but those are feature requests which can be accommodated in future product enhancements. In terms of flexibility and scalability, we chose Triblio since we wanted to scale our ABM efforts, so that was a big part of our consideration.

Incentivized

• Shows management that we have a strategy.
• Forces critical and honest thinking about gaps in your account knowledge.

Incentivized

• Triblio is extremely powerful in terms of increasing conversion rates and we've tripled conversion rates using their targeted modals versus less targeted approaches with less sophisticated products, such as HelloBar.
• Though it is hard to quantify, Triblio has increased the speed to market with which we can introduce targeted promotions. Campaigns can be spun up with Triblio in less than one day.
• There have been no negative impacts to ROI from Triblio.

Incentivized

• Webtrends has had a positive impact on site visitation because it allowed us to understand the sources by domain for site traffic and find out ways to increase visits from those domains.
• Webtrends has also allowed us to understand areas of optimization on the site, which has had a positive impact on the overall user journey on the site, likely leading to longer site duration and engagement.