Quip vs. Upland Altify

Quip is an excellent program for pulling all writing together under one roof. Some may argue that you could just use the Google suite of products (which is technically true), however, I think Quip is easier to use and bring all document types together with better organization. The searchability is top-notch (I solely use ctrl+j and the search pane to move through Quip). For any company that does a lot of writing for multiple clients, or has a lot of projects going, it provides solid organization. It also is great for allowing visibility into project status without someone potentially causing a conflict (corrupting a document). If you are looking for a full-scale project management software - Quip could probably do it, but it would likely take a bit more internal work to get your system setup.

Incentivized

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

• Our experience with Quip has been nothing short of astounding; I love everything about this collaboration tool.
• I love that it is cross-platform and works so well on mobile devices; it makes it unhindered to make progress on to-dos, take notes, export spreadsheets and documents, and have all my information organized within one environment.
• I also love that it notifies me when someone has done something in shared documents and the incredible ease of linking documents in chats.
• Quip's user interface is friendly and comfortably navigable; it feels right.

• 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

• Update frequency - it feels like I need to update the application about twice a week. It's important to push new functionality and address bugs, but it often feels like the Quip team doesn't have their release schedule planned out very well. Constant updates are disruptive and counterproductive.
• Automatic date reminders - Quip will automatically set a date into a reminder as you type it, which could be a useful feature, but it just ends up being annoying. More often than not I'm just typing today's date in a document to track meeting minutes, or potentially adding in an expected delivery date, for which I really don't need a reminder.

Incentivized

• 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

It is the best collaboration tool in my company. Through it, the organization has achieved better connectivity and efficiency in its communication. Primarily, the docs feature of this software is the most utilized in the company. Slowly, dash-boarding and project management features have also been utilized. Generally, it is the best tool, very easy and fairly streamlined

Incentivized

I have never used Quip's support. To be fair, we hired someone who used to work for Quip before working at our company, and he implemented it and pushed it with the team. He was very biased toward the product, and yes it was better than Google Drive, but by how much?

Incentivized

We no longer use Teamwork but when we did, we tried to house documents but we'd always forget where they were. They weren't easy to access. Dropbox we still use sometimes, but if all our clients used quip, we would no longer need to use Dropbox except for audio and video files so Quip could improve on importing audio and video files.

Incentivized

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

• Quip allowed collaboration and communication between Salesforce team and the rest of IT as well as business users.
• Quip allowed collaboration on documents that was very interactive and helpful to the creation process.
• Quip frustrated us because we had so many documents that we already had but they did not work well inside of Quip.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized