Altify

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.

Executive reports are not well designed.

Cannot easily navigate between features. For example, you cannot easily go from the org chart to POV.

Would like to see split or title screens between the "sections" of Altify.

Shows management that we have a strategy.

Forces critical and honest thinking about gaps in your account knowledge.

Customer Relationship Mapping: Altify's customer relationship map, which is available at the account and opportunity level, is incredibly robust and insightful. This tool allows the customer contacts to be mapped in a visual hierarchy. Additional information can be added in to map the sentiment ad lines of influence for each of the contacts. Coaching insights are available for each of the contacts based on the inputted information so that relationships can be improved and the right contacts can be involved in the buying process.

Account Plans: Account Plans can be grouped in both "does well" and "does poorly" for the Altify Suite. I will outline the good in this portion of the review. A fully detailed account plan in Altify can be an incredibly powerful overview of strategic accounts, their associated opportunities existing within Salesforce and planned opportunities to achieve strategic growth. Account plans allow opportunities to be segmented out by different product families (columns) and account hierarchies (rows). This allows a Sales rep or Strategic Account Manager to create a plan on how they will sell into certain key business segments within their accounts as well as identify potential whitespace selling opportunities. Very valuable insights that can open up new business within existing accounts. The tool Altify has created for Account Plans is incredibly robust and detailed.

Generating Executive briefings or PPT: Altify allows an executive briefing (PDF file) or Powerpoint (with their PPT extension add on) to be generated from account Plans, opportunity manager, or account manager. These exports contain the Altify information that was inputted from the respective account Plan, opportunity or account. These can be used to create documents that give an overview on the account plan, opportunity, or account for internal business reviews. One drawback is that the customization options before export are incredibly minimal, requiring significant post export work to meet company guidelines/templates or make the documents customer facing.

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.

Micromanagement (negative): By implementing Altify as the sales process management tool for our company during a change in sales methodology we created a micromanagement storm that left reps not truly gaining the benefit of the buyer-centric methodology. Rather than using the tool as a guide to the new process, it became a series of checkboxes that reps were mandated to fill out by management. This has left us unpicking the process to reengage the reps in a positive manner on how to work through opportunities in a customer-focused way. Sales process manager and opportunity assessment were disabled to try to fix this negative impact.

Account Plans (positive): While difficult for smaller accounts, the account plan feature did create a standard way for sales users to create account plans and manage their accounts better