Altify’s suite of Salesforce native solutions guide and coach sellers to identify and map key relationships, uncover business insights, align sales processes to buying processes, qualify, manage and execute deals, and grow wallet share in accounts.
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Gong
Score 9.1 out of 10
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Gong helps people and companies reach their potential. The Gong Revenue Intelligence Platform™ enables customer-facing teams to take advantage of their most valuable assets – customer interactions, which the Gong platform automatically captures and analyzes. Gong then delivers insights at scale, to empower revenue and go-to-market teams to determine the best actions for winning outcomes. The vendor boasts companies like Morningstar Inc., Paychex, LinkedIn,…
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.
Gong is really well suited for giving users a full view of activity around accounts—things like emails, calls, and overall engagement. It allows you to review that activity, analyze it, and even build scoring based on what’s happening. It’s great for understanding the full picture of what’s going on with a deal, account, or customer. It also has solid dashboards that show how deals are progressing, pulling all of Gong’s insights into one place so you can quickly understand what’s happening. Where it can struggle a bit is with renewal visibility—though that’s often dependent on how well your underlying systems support and structure that data. It’s also not the strongest tool for pipeline visualization compared to platforms like Clari or Tableau. That said, Gong has started rolling out its Forecast feature, which is promising—but it’s still pretty early and not as mature as dedicated forecasting tools.
The history is quite useful in many aspects of my daily work, as I have a complete and detailed view of transcribed calls and email summaries of previously exchanged emails.
It's like an assistant; I can receive email reminders about things discussed during a video call, such as the upcoming date of a scheduled meeting or notes on certain key aspects the client needs for their order.
I can share calls through Gong with my clients. This gives me an added advantage, allowing the client to have reminders or a record of what was discussed without having to worry about manually taking notes.
The interface is complex but easy to learn, has many assistant-like features, and can also be integrated into many calling platforms, such as Zoom.
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.
Gong is one of the best if not the best tools we have in or tech stack in terms of ROI and ease of use. The ai features that have been released over the past year have continued to add value and are not just shiny new features that don't get used. It is also an easy to use platform for our sales and customer success reps, takes very little time to become proficient in. The deal boards also provide great visibility into opps for management and leadership
It does great for all the things I've mentioned. I didn't give it a 10/10 because I still think there is room to improve as far as improving the quality of the insights that are more actionable. I.e. this happened so you should think about doing this thing as a next step.
I give them a 10 because, I have been using Gong for over a year now and have never had issues or concerns go un resolved in a day or two. Their communication is impeccable and their tech support is very hands on and prompt
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
Gong has by far the most comprehensive information about each call, and integrates the best with our CRM: Salesforce. Not only that, but the call recording itself is the least intrusive, and it is automatically added to every external call that our team creates.
saves a lot of time, mainly thanks to call summaries & next steps as well as workflows allowing to automate communication
I could say that generally speaking it does increase revenue because you can do more work in the same period of time > more leads, more opportunities, more sales
