Sendoso is a gift sending platform designed to support B2B sales and ABM, and provide a sales accelerant.
N/A
Altify
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Upland Altify helps revenue teams grow and retain revenue in their key accounts through technology-led account-based selling best practices and tools. Upland Altify combines technology, strategy, and best practices to enhance account planning, opportunity management, as well as insight and relationship mapping, natively within Salesforce. Altify guides sellers with contextual actions, insights, and coaching to build intimacy with customers, uncover new pipeline,…
For the most part when we have been curating our own swag and having it sent to the warehouse we have had great luck at keeping our costs minimal and then curating a holiday or themed swag box for our staff to be sent. The ease at which we can set up a build your own box and have it curated how we like is fantastic and super helpful. We love the touch of the "handwritten" notes as well! Our team always say they love these. There have been a few instances where we had issues with Sendoso and how something was handled. One example is when we created and ordered glass travel mugs from KeepCup to be sent to our team. Some of them arrived damaged and they were rejected before we could even do anything about it, we were told after the fact and not given any ability to work with the Vendor for replacements and Sendoso with a plan to use the cups that were still in tact. Through this we lost 4 boxes of inventory and hundreds of dollars of swag for our team and clients - which doesn't sound like a lot but w are a small company and this has a bit impact on us. Not to mention resolving this issue then took 5+ months of admin power and time. In the end we didn't get much resolve and being the customer in the situation felt like we were in between two companies and their policies, KeepCup did all they could to work with us for a resolution but Sendoso didn't. We felt like we got the short end of the stick in this instance
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.
The Custom Brand Shop has been a real game-changer.
Easy to place curation requests and quick responses.
The ability to send items through Amazon but also include inventoried items is great for higher value gift bundles and lets you avoid having to source items that you may not be 100% sure about the quantity needed.
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.
We're very sticky with Sendoso and would prefer to not train the entire sales org on a new platform! That and we've already sent up a plethora of gifts the team can send out (eGifts, physical branded items, treats, plants, etc.).
The platform is continually being upgraded to make sure the platform is usable and prevents unnecessary errors. Once you get used to the platform you can get in there and build eGift touches, physical gifts, etc. quickly. You an also send quickly and in a variety of ways. The address confirmation feature makes sending when you don't know where your recipient lives is very helpful
Sendoso occasionally has downtime, but it's usually isolated to a single feature and doesn't effect the entire platform. They are responsive when it comes to intaking these outages and are quick to work to resolve them
Their platform doesn't take a long time to load, and it typically isn't too buggy once a new feature has been out for a while. Reports are pretty quick to generate and are emailed to the user on file for use typically within ten minutes or so. I have not noticed Sendoso slowing down any of the software it integrates with at all
They listened to the problem with delivery times but did not present a reasonable solution. Again, the shipping costs consumed too much budget. On one bulk send their support team agreed to take over a project for a few of the reps which is encouraging to see.
Our in person trainings were on zoom, but they are not recordings which is why I listed them as in person. You get a live person to walk you through integrations, how to use the platform, sendings best practices, setting up other users, etc. The customer success team will help you training staff users too. Ours even ran a contest for them to encourage them to send to prospects and they provided the prize!
These were CSM and Onboarding team zoom meetings where they hand-hold you, which is nice especially compared to other company onboardings. After that they have Zen desk articles and regular check-ins where you can get the training you need. I also am on a slack channel with Sendoso staff where I can ask additional questions or look for best practices.
Get Sales and Marketing both involved in the implementation so you can strategize on how you'd want to use it across your organization. This will help your CSM roll it out the way you want instead of trying to piecemeal it after you've finished the onboarding process. Also I would recommend using a mix of Sendoso Direct, Inventory and eGift sends. Relying all on one or the other will not serve you well
Local vendors, including print & mail houses, are the only thing I can compare to Sendoso for similar services. Local vendors are good for ordering a bunch of swag to have at the office or [giving] away at conferences but if you are looking to send items to clients/prospects on-demand then a tool like Sendoso is a must.
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
Sendoso has really improved here. Along with helping you train your staff, you can now clone gift touches, sync them with salesforce from the platform directly, and send out address confirmations using your own or their email sending platform - they also just released an option for you to white-label your own domain. helping you save time and get a lot off the ground quickly
