Bombora provides Intent data for B2B marketers. Bombora’s data promises to align marketing and sales teams and enable them to base their actions on the knowledge of which companies are in market for products and services. Bombora’s Company Surge™ data reports on changes in consumption of specific product related topics from within businesses. The source of this data is a co-operative of premium B2B media companies in the world. Members contribute content consumption and behavioral data about…
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Upland Altify
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Upland Altify helps businesses generate value and grow revenue. Upland Altify provides Account Planning software for sales optimization. It combines technology with expert strategy and methodology for account planning, opportunity management and relationship mapping. Built natively on the Salesforce platform, Altify guides sellers with contextual actions, insights, and best practices right within Salesforce. The software aims to help customers grow revenue in key…
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Pricing
Bombora
Upland Altify
Editions & Modules
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Bombora
Upland Altify
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
The best Intent data solution isn't one-size-fits-all. To build a package that works best, we need to know a few things, like:
- The volume of Intent data needed
- Preferred integrations or partner platforms
- The level of support you need to get started
Bombora is the perfect tool for anyone looking to understand their B2B customer and their buyer's journey better. Companies produce tons of content - and pay lots of money creating and then amplifying it too. But is it really what the customer is interested in? Now you don't have to guess, you can know thanks to company surge data.
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.
Intent topics, as well as the clusters tied to them, have enabled our PMMs to be more granular with specific workloads that are based on industry.
The "Account Intent" option within the "Insights" tab allowed us to look specifically into historical data tied to current activities that we were experiencing with that account.
Downloading intent data and trying to use it outside of their environment is tricky because the data is essentially one large worksheet. We want to overlay the data with our own data but joining it all together is tricky. Our data comes from D&B so the names provided by D&B don't always match what we get from Bombora so account matching is not very clean.
Customer service is a bit hit or miss. I worked with an account rep to try and resolve it but she couldn't. However, she did open a ticket with the Bombora help desk to try and get me answers. I waited more than a week and got no answer. I followed up and the reply was the original owner of the ticket is out and the new ticket owner was wondering if I had rerun the report to see if the problem went away.
Despite having a self-service type set up for the dashboards and reports, trying to understand what exactly needs to be filled in isn't always easy. The data doesn't match up with what we download so trying to compare the dashboards/reports to the extract is next to impossible?! It shouldn't be this way.
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.
I give Bombora an 8 as they do intent well for now. Not a 10 because again its a one trick pony where there are other platforms like ZoomInfo that offer intent as well plus so much more. From an end user perspective, I'd like Bombora to build out first party intent data capabilities to combine into the scoring.
Our CSM team is always available for us to meet with via an outreach click to book an invite and we have standing meetings. They met with us on day 1 of implementation and had us up and running that evening. They even go to the lengths of matching industry tenured folks with us to help us move faster.
There is a room for improvement in a layman's perspective as it was difficult for our to understand things during training and had to rearrange sessions.
Bombora doesn't give you a token for the number of accounts that are populated. You can search and request as many as you'd like. With other platforms, they provide you a token, and if you use all your tokens for the month, then you have to wait til next month.
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
Bombora played a big role in us proving the effectiveness of ABM for our organization and had a huge impact on us gaining approval for a full ABM platform.
Bombora helped us identify key target accounts that brought great net new business to our company.
