Managing Partners at Scale
May 21, 2022
Managing Partners at Scale
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Allbound
Allbound provides Cambum Networks a solution to communicating and engaging with more than 11,000 partners around the globe. The portal provides the one-stop shop for all partners and distributors to find sales & marketing resources, learn about Cambium solutions, access deal registration and MDF, and so much more.
Pros
- Content Management including sales & marketing resources, calendar items, distributor and partner communications, and news for partners
- Deal registration and MDF management--providing an easy to use system for partners and Cambum administrators to enter and review requests.
- Increasing partner engagement--providing an easy way to update the portal frequently keeps our partners coming back to see the latest and greatest resources and benefits
Cons
- I am happy with Allbound and their responsiveness and willingness to listen to their customers to constantly make improvements to their product.
- Providing an excellent tool to engage with our thousands of global partners
- Offering an abundance of resources to help us provide information to partners
- Easy-to-navigate portal and systems, such as deal registration and MDF
- Increasing partner engagement QoQ
- Improving the partner onboarding experience
- Allowing Cambium to manage our partners at scale
Allbound offers everything we want in a PRM and portal experience for our partners at a fraction of the cost and with a much easier to use interface for both the administrator and the partner. Allbound is super responsive to our ideas and helps us implement without additional subscription fees or inordinately high development costs that you may see with other solutions.
Do you think Allbound delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Allbound's feature set?
Yes
Did Allbound live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Allbound go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Allbound again?
Yes
Using Allbound
Cambium Networks has 5 administrators managing our partner portal and workflows. One in marketing and the rest in channel operations. Each specializes in a certain area, such as partner applications, deal registration, etc., but are cross-functionally trained as well. Additionally dozens of sales team members around the globe participate in workflow function for applications and deals to review/approve/deny requests.
5 - Our channel operations team handles functions such as partner applications and deal registration, workflow administration and management, operational resource management, answering partner and internal questions via the Contact Us function on the portal, onboarding new distributor accounts, running reports for informational purposes and analytices, etc. Our channel marketing team handles keeping the portal up to date with news and updated resources; managing Learning Tracks; organizing/managing Playbooks; adding email templates, cobrandable resources, etc.; and managing the cooperative marketing funds and MDF systems.
- Supporting the workflow and administration of partner applications
- Supporting the workflow and administration of deal registration
- Supporting the workflow and administraton of MDF
- Providing a receptacle for all partner resources and benefits
- Offering a means segment resources for specific audiences
- Offering a user experience for both partners and admins like no other I've used (and I've used 5 and tested/demoed even more)
- Creating a customized deal registration experience to deal with our special programs and added benefits
- Creating an easy to use tool for the management of coop and MDF with the ability to track fund usage and ROI
- Offering a way to provide cobrandable email templates and other resources to our partners
- Amazing QoQ increase in partner engagement in the portal
- We will continue to take advantage of the new features and enhancements Allbound frequently rolls out to its customers.
Evaluating Allbound and Competitors
Yes - Allbound replaced Impartner, which we found to be expensive. Additionally, some of the back-end work was difficult to administor or make changes to without incurring large costs. Impartner had replaced Partner Path, which we were happy with at the time, but the company had gone out of business. Before that we had two home-grown versions that worked well, but as we grew, we needed to have a solution that could scale.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
To put it simply, Allbound gives you the most bang for the buck. Not expensive but packed with amazing features and everything we want/need to provide an awesome partner experience. It's also easy to use (and fun to use) as an administrator as well. It really makes my job as a channel marketer so much easier to ensure continued engagement with our partners.
Having been through 4 rounds of evaluation of services between iterations of our partner PRM, I recommend anyone searching for a solution to do the demo. Make sure you feel comfortable with the system and can manage it on your end, and at the same time, look at it through the eyes of your partners. Poll your partners to find out what they need or what they expect from your portal. Ensure that the vendor has solutions in place for your needs so that customization, that could be pricey, are kept to a minimum.
Allbound Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Yes - Initial launch phase included
- Transfering all accounts/users, deals, coop/mdf, and other data to Allbound from the last solution.
- Building our partner onboarding application and workflows
- Building our deal registratin system and workflow.
- Getting all of our content on the portal (near 1,000 items) with proper permissions and filtering categories
Change management was minimal
- Allbound handled our complexities well. Lots of UAT ensured a good experience from the get-go for our partners and admins.
Allbound Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
I don't even know if there is a premium support option, but no, we did not buy a premium support package. Basically, we don't need premium support--Allbound offers awesome support.
Yes - On the rare occasion of a glitch, Allbound is quick to react to solve it to ensure the best possible customer and partner experience. I have no complaints about Allbound support/responsiveness.
Allbound cares about its customers. We had an amazing onboarding and launch with the Allbound support and development team. We had so many partner and user accounts to transfer over from our last PRM, and Allbound did it seamlessly for us and the users. Not only that, they had to ensure our historical deal and MDF data was available to us and partners. It was a lot of work, but we had a great launch and partners are very happy with the portal--which is shown in the increasing engagement each quarter.
Using Allbound
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- Content management
- Portal dashboard management
- Email template tool
- Nothing is difficult or cumbersome--some things are complex on the back end due to our workflow needs, but Allbound was able to handle our complexities to provide us with what we need
Yes - The portal is mobile responsive, but most of our partners are using the portal via computer interface.
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