Cornerstone Galaxy vs. Qstream vs. Terminus ABM Platform

Cornerstone Galaxy is a good solution for larger companies that focus on training and want to offer a variety of options to their employees and departments. It is highly customizable. It does require a tech savvy team to set-up, and maintain. This is not a set-it-and-forget-it system. From an LMS perspective, it wouldn't be my top choice for employees who only need a mobile-friendly approach.

Qstream is great when used for reinforcement of training conducted. Especially when that training is detailed or complex, Qstream will help to embed key concepts and drive adoption while ensuring reps are interacting.

Incentivized

Terminus ABM Platform is well suited for organizations beginning their ABM journey. It is easy to implement and there is a great team to help you do so. Ongoing customer success teams ensure you are taking full advantage of the platform and work to help you develop an ABM strategy that fits your business needs.

Incentivized

• Ability to provide multiple customizable access roles from general end user to full system admin and anything in between
• Powerful reporting system in the LMS to track a plethora of data points within the platform (user data, training information, transcript information)
• Great options to customize the look and feel of your "home page" to best meet your company's needs and goals.
• Ability to customize the transcript view for learners (i.e. when Completed training will move to their Archived transcript, what to do with Inactive training on transcripts)

Incentivized

• Gamification: gets reps involved in ways that keep it interesting while bringing in elements of competition.
• Mobile: ease of use and direct access to reps while on the move. The interface is intuitive and able to be interacted with in quick increments rather than lengthy elearning.
• Coaching: provides direct insights into who is coping and who is not so that enablement efforts can be focused.

Incentivized

• Serving account targeted ads across a wide range of display ad providers
• Matching account based browsing data to target lists
• Identifying need and interest in particular accounts with intent data
• Identifying anonymous web traffic on our site from target accounts
• Reporting on ABM activity and metrics

Incentivized

• Sometimes finding the right answer to your support question can be a bit more difficult than it should be.
• I would like to see more OSHA related courses.
• At times, the administrative interface seems to need to be updated, but the tradeoff honestly might be the absolute rock-solid stability of the platform.

Incentivized

• Reporting: we only had access to some of the reports so would have liked to see more detail and have the ability to create custom reports.
• Licensing: we accessed qstream via Growthplay so only had access to limited features. Would like to see this extended so that we could truly experience all of the qstream benefits.
• Content Creation: we were not able to create our own questions and streams but had to rely on the external team. Self-creation and self-directed streams would have been preferable.

Incentivized

• Support times are iffy. We've had slower replies and resolutions to issues since they acquired Sigstr and now support both products.
• Display advertising generally has low ROI, in part due to "banner blindness". If you're not continuously developing engaging creatives, you're going to see very little return with this platform.
• Their UI needs serious work. Some options are locked after you move to the next screen in their campaign wizard (nothing should ever be locked in draft) and unless they've recently changed it, you can't delete dead draft campaigns - just archive them.
• There are a few serious discrepancies in the analytics when it comes to identifying which end companies have people who have viewed your ads (i.e. Microsoft has huge numbers because Azure is their product).

Incentivized

As long as pricing stays reasonable, we will likely stay with Cornerstone for at least one more contract renewal. It would be a large task to migrate all of our content to a new system. However, the LMS landscape is diversifying with new startups that are showing some real innovation.

Incentivized

Qstream is good in terms of gamification and driving adoption. However we are looking for a platform that supports content creation, ILT training as well as gamification. Qstream would meet only one of those criteria. We may still use them again if we are unable to find a compete platform in future

Incentivized

Terminus is a turn-key partner in the B2B Account-Based Marketing space. Their model is flexible and efficient which in turn provides effective results. Their sales staff is great and never tries to up-sell, but rather coach and educate our teams to be better at our jobs. It has been great to collaborate

Incentivized

Easy to use, easy to learn, lots of support during the learning process. There are a few parts of the system we don't use and I'm hesitant to begin using because other clients have said they're difficult and cumbersome (certifications) or outdated (libraries)

Qstream was easy for us to use and gain insights from. Feedback from sales leaders and reps was generally positive. Having greater flexibility about creating custom reports and streams would have increased the rating

Incentivized

I haven't really had any major availability problems. The service is practically impeccable but it is true that at times, due to server and latency problems, the application has been slower. But these have been specific issues that have resolved themselves.

I haven't seen many issues at all with load times. Sometimes learning assignments will take longer then expected but it is still reasonable. They have taken great effort over the last couple years to speed things up like reports and search results so I expect that effort to continue in the coming year.

Incentivized

Its always important to have support when you are facing problems and when you are the main admin of the organization. Cornerstone Support is very supporting when you have not found the answer in the help guide. its very useful to have a team support to guide you.

Incentivized

we use also to admin all our training in person events and sessions. Its easy to admin this kind of trainings and automatize some processes we have. Also de user experience and the integration with other systems helps to the employees to use more. All modules integrated oriented to develop people is the principal reason to have CSOD. The training administration is very complete and allows to automate many processes.

The online modules are pretty good. You can access them at any time, which we have done. You learn a lot in the beginning, but having the ability to retake short lessons when you are working on those items was very helpful.

Incentivized

The implementation was pretty difficult. We felt they (Cornerstone) didn’t properly allocate the resources to complete our implementation in the timetable we wanted.

For example, we worked on Workday and SSO integrations - work that we had specifically contracted for in advance. When we were ready to work on that project, they didn’t have the people ready to help us, so it took a lot longer than necessary. That was my biggest pain point.

The implementation approach we went with was a self-led implementation. We would speak to the implementation manager once per week, and self-trained. We met with implementation manager to discuss issues, review things that we’d learned for 1 hour. We found that wasn’t enough. Other things would come up outside that one hour window that we couldn’t get answers to. We didn’t have anyone to ask about those things and we had to wait to ask during our weekly meeting.

The advantage of the self-led implementation approach was that it was really inexpensive – significantly less than the implementation cost for the other systems that we looked at. I also liked that we could pace ourselves. There were however big roadblocks. We would have to make sure the right resources were available. We had an implementation/project manager with a lot of experience and felt that the person was knowledgeable but missed on a few things.

In hindsight, I would still go with the self-led implementation, but knowing what I know now, I would ask for the integration person to be available more. I would work that into the contract. With single sign-on, we needed deep linking to build direct links through a Single Sign-On tool, e.g. when someone gets an email, it directs them to training. But it has to go through SSO to get them to the correct link. Deep linking wasn’t turned on in our system and they had to activate it. We encountered little things like that – sequencing pre-requisites which were problematic. We tried to troubleshoot ourselves.

I recommend you consider contracting for some extra implementation hours and determine when they are going to be available. Work it into the contract that you have the ability to call tech support during implementation. In addition to weekly implementation meetings, they have technical webexes – 4 every week, but 2 didn’t apply to us – one as we were using SSO. The challenge is they were not always relevant – we had specific questions that didn’t fall into those categories

The user experience is a lot better than using SumTotal as an admin CSOD makes working easy. Without having workarounds. Reporting is a lot better than both platforms. Reporting in CSOD is complex however easy to manage and create when you understand the data points collected

Incentivized

Qstream was selected by default because it was offered by Growthplay as their preferred gamification and adoption tool. We have subsequently looked at acquiring Qstream for other initiatives and are in the process of evaluating options

Incentivized

Drift has banners available in their email tool, furthermore, we are able to mimic a Sigstr banner in HubSpot when we build emails by placing the banner image with a link in the bottom of an email, it's just a more manual process. I can't recommend any other solution over Sigstr, they own what they do and don't try to reach in their product marketing and I respect their product for that.

Incentivized

It is important to be familiar with the terms and annual increases in licenses and other aspects of the contract. I recommend analyzing this from the beginning and the permanence is relevant because Cornerstone updates its modules and brings out new features that may allow you to leave a module to acquire another

It's a great product with some pieces that are set but many things that can be customized as needed for individual needs

Incentivized

As I have said before, I have no doubt that the services of the Cornerstone sales people were very good. In particular, our salesperson spent a lot of time in contact with us to make the process go smoothly. Perhaps being a large company in some cases the times were slowed down but it is something normal to take into account.

• We are in the process of trying to increase employee engagement through content expansion. We are in the early stages of this.
• The Edge Import Tool, in conjunction with Reporting 2.0, has done a great job of helping to automate/semi-automate tasks for huge time savings.
• Maintaining compliance. Achieved through dynamic/automated groups, assignments, communication, and reporting.

Incentivized

• Reps have adopted our new sales methodology quicker and with more rigour meaning we are more successful in the field.
• We’ve been able to create scale to drive adoption. Without technologies like Qstream, we would never be able to meet our enablement and growth targets.
• More reps talking a consistent message means our customer experience has improved at the sales front. This allows us to differentiate versus the competition and ensures we win more often.

Incentivized

• Combining chat, advertising experiences & a very tight contact list - we saw a 684% increase in on-site engagement.
• 900% increase in deal size after using chat with our advertising campaigns
• 50% higher attendance for our events when leveraging our intent data for targeting