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,…
$20
per month
Yesware
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Yesware, from Vendasta since the October 2022 acquisition, is a service for salespeople that helps them close deals faster. An email service tracks email, templates responses and syncs to CRM.
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.
It works for my company and my problems. If you need a Sales CRM you can go for higher-end products that will give you what Yesware gives along with other stuff. Wherein we had specific problems we wanted to solve. -We needed a solution for a smaller team within our bigger sales team. -We needed a solution to be easy to use point and click and did not require any setup. -We needed to have a better solution to YAMM.
Tracking open rates, link click rates, and reply rates. This allows us to compare different templates in order to see which allows for the most interactions and meetings set directly from email engagement.
Seeing exactly when someone opens an email and whether it is in their normal location. Also if they are opening on a mobile device versus a computer to be able to organize the set up of the email in a more beneficial way.
Being able to save Templates for Mail Merges to avoid the duplication of effort that other mass email systems utilize.
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.
The ability to unwrap iframe embeds on email (e.g. if I send a Vimeo link over email, have that video thumbnail show and link out to a video)
Removing recipients from a campaign. If my ruleset is to remove a contact from a sequence after he/she replies, sometimes a person will reply from another email and Yesware doesn't recognize it. (e.g. if I add jeff@amazon.com to my campaign and jeff.bezos@amazon.com replies to my thread, Yesware will still send an email to jeff@amazon.com unless he is manually removed)
I like the product, but due to the limitations I don't love it. I'm curious to revisit other options, particularly in lieu of Yesware's recent price increases (although I'm on a legacy plan). Some of my challenges to be browser related (I'm on an older computer) -- I'll have to see how things go when I receive my new computer. If the glitches (especially with regard to tracking accuracy and send later feature) go away, I'd be much more inclined to renew
Pretty good overall, but again it needs some tweaks to ensure user frustration is kept to a minimum. This would go back to the autosave feature I mentioned which would immediately be a value add but not something that should need a user to move into a paid tier.
Because it deserves this rating. The features and functionality provided are great. Our Sales team is very satisfied with this software as it integrates very well with our other software like Outlook, Salesforce, etc. Yesware provides great follow up with customers, which is essential for sales. Meeting scheduling is also flawless.
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
All of these tools do what Yesware does, and more; but Yesware does the follow-up email portion best, in my experience. It is reasonably priced and is regularly adding new functionality to make it a sticky license for us to have. Yesware does not have predictive analytics or a particularly strong dialer solution, but it does provide team-wide and template efficacy tracking, and a basic dialer.
I think net positive ROI from generating meetings that lead to closed deals. Ultimately very difficult to quantify the ROI since it is essentially automating a lot of the manual prospecting done by BDRs/AEs - so ROI is likely higher than just that quantifiable number around deals closed.
