Crossbeam vs. Rithum vs. Traction Complete

I would definitely recommend Crossbeam to others, and frequently bring it up early in conversations with potential partners as a first step in evaluating a partnership opportunity. Crossbeam allows you to easily see overlaps for current customers, prospects/target accounts, and open opportunities. Being able to quickly and easily assess the business opportunity with a partner, and find mutual customers that would benefit from a combined offering is a huge value add. The integration with Salesforce makes the tool easy to use and scalable, without needing to constantly update account lists. Being able to view the overlaps within the Crossbeam UI and easily export the lists makes the tool really easy to work with.

Excellent for marketplace sellers with a lot of products - or those with a high turnover of SKUs. Not well suited to the small seller with only a few SKUs to promote. Also probably not suited to someone who only cares about a single marketplace. The real strength of it comes from managing multiple marketplaces through a single system.

Incentivized

Traction Complete is very well suited for lead to account matching and for automatic, criteria based lead routing and processing. For example, when a lead is created, it can be matched to an account, and Traction Complete can populate account demographics like Industry or Annual Revenue. And once the lead's score reaches a certain threshold, Traction Complete can then evaluate any of the leads data (including the industry and annual revenue that the lead was previously enriched with), route the lead to a person or queue , and at the same time update the lead status and or enrich the lead with information to track funnel progression (e.g., MQL Date, Assigned Date, etc.).

• Frictionless onboarding and easy to get started with new partners
• Intuitive reporting of overlapping accounts - flexibility to export to CSV
• Ability to connect with Salesforce to keep account lists dynamic, while also allowing the option to use CSV uploads

• Complex, Yet Simple Navigational Interface: ChannelAdvisor is a beast, but navigating through their platform is relatively straightforward. The overall heirarchy is very well put together.
• One Feed to Rule Them All: With ChannelAdvisor, all we have to do is connect our inventory to their system once. Instead of having to construct and connect dozens of different product feeds to our internal inventory system, we simply connect to ChannelAdvisor and use the same single feed to build out all others' website templates.
• Product Mapping Made Easy: Mapping product attribute data across a multitude of unique online marketplaces and digital marketing sites can seem like a daunting task. ChannelAdvisor does a great job of simplifying this process, providing easy-to-understand and manage feed templates containing helpful descriptions and categorization.
• Business Rules and Lookup Lists: I use these all the time when "transforming" our raw inventory data to the specifications of any given feed. They are extremely helpful and super easy to build.
• Efficient Product Optimization: Instead of having to deal with the time-consuming task of making minute changes to thousands and thousands of skus, ChannelAdvisor allows you to automate these changes in a matter of minutes. It's much more scalable for our business.

Incentivized

• Lead to Account matching
• Lead Routing
• Easy to configure and maintain in visual interface
• Many advanced functions to support different types of round robin, scheduling etc.

• Establishing sharing settings for each specific partner could be more intuitive and easy to check.
• Some of the navigation can be slightly confusing as it seems there are multiple ways to view the same information within the platform.

• Lack of customization, documentation, tutorials, support for the premium webstore
• Lack of innovation. My client was told that the basic web store was being replace by the premium web store so they needed to upgrade. In my opinion the basic web store was actually much more flexible and robust than the premium web store. Now (it has been less than 2 years) they are making my client switch from the premium web store to "Shopify" and they are charging more money for this. My client was charged to upgrade each time and the process to upgrade was expensive, time consuming, and very convoluted. ChannelAdvisor needs to invest in their technology and migrate data for ChannelAdvisor changes technology. But the experience as an end user is very frustrating since the way of doing things keep changing and not always for the better result for the customer.
• Channel Advisor needs better support. Help Desk, knowledge base, etc. there are a lot of things you can do with ChannelAdvisor but it is my experience that nothing is very straight forward and there are many different potential problems you will run into and ChannelAdvisor points the finger at "Google" or "Amazon" or "Ebay" instead of helping solve a problem from end to end.
• It is quite expensive for what it does. I would not have advised my customer to use their product but they were so entrenched that they had no other choice.

• Functionality for flow version management, e.g. properties / description fields
• Popup windows for flow elements are sometimes hard to move (but could be isolated to Safari)
• Broader self-service customer portal/knowledge base (but the support and customer success functions are very good)

Without ChannelAdvisor, our business wouldn't be where it is today so the idea of NOT renewing is out of the question. By not renewing we would have to hire more employees and have more of a workload for existing employees. By keeping costs low and employees effecient we have been able to grow exponentially.

Traction Complete continues to improve and innovate, and their staff does a great job of informing us of new functionality and how we can use it to get more value from Traction Complete. And at its core, it covers a gap inherent in Salesforce CRM - the fact that leads are a standalone object and not connected to the other main CRM objects like accounts, contacts, and opportunities. Traction Complete bridges that gap without requiring us to convert leads to contacts and degrade the data quality of the contact records. This functionality is key to a holistic process from initial inquiry to MQL, SAL, SQL, New Customer, and repeat business.

It's very usable overall and much easier than using native functionality. If there is anything I'd want to improve, and I'm being critical here, there are a few minor items. 1) It would be nice if the initial load time of flows was faster, but I understand that given the number of elements we have in the assignment flow, I should not expect a two second load time. 2) It would be great if the different flow versions had fields to capture properties/attributes like a verbose description to make version control better. My sense is that it will be available in a future version. 3) When editing flows, every now and then, the pop-up windows of elements are a bit sticky on the screen when trying to move/drag them - however, I usually experience this only in Safari and am often too lazy to fire up Chrome.

The support team at Traction Complete has always been responsive, knowledgeable, and professional. They took the time to understand our business needs and helped us during the initial implementation, as well as with configuration changes when needed.

Better control of scope between the resources on both sides involved would allow for better change management.

I've been part of 3 implementations, and the Traction Complete team has always met or exceeded expectations and delivered on their commitments/promises.

Our brand is growing online at a rapid clip, and we wanted a platform that would scale accordingly. The feature that really sold us was the automatic workflows. If we want a certain type of product that's going to a customer in a certain state to ship a certain way, we could make that happen automatically without any human touch! Wow!

Incentivized

Traction Complete offered more ease of use, less complexity, and an overall lower cost of ownership compared to other options. And while Salesforce can handle some of the automation, which requires more technical skill to configure, it does not provide the lead to account matching.

• Crossbeam allows us to quickly assess opportunities with potential partners and feeds directly into prioritization for our integration and partnership strategy.
• It solves the challenge of keeping account data private that you don't want to share and enables us to easily share the information that is beneficial to both parties.

• This is an expensive tool that takes time to implement properly. You have to be ready to absorb costs and in downtime not selling.
• Once set up well, it has some advantages that help with sale increases and fewer headaches.
• We now use the same amount of people but have absorbed about 25% more business coming in.

Incentivized

• Faster actioning of leads by routing them to the correct user without manual review
• Improved lead segmentation based on matched accounts demographics
• Lower maintenance of lead assignment and automatic processing