Managing Partners at Scale
May 21, 2022

Managing Partners at Scale

Karyn Pastorino | TrustRadius Reviewer
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.
  • 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
  • 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

The PRM and portal are extremely easy to administer. Allbound staff is responsive and helpful during initial setup and launch to ensure a smooth transition for partners. Our customer account manager and team meet with us regularly as we work on improving our partner portal by adding new features and resources. Training resources are abundant and the portal user interface is visually appealing and easy for partners to navigate.

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.
Allbound is so easy to use as an administrator and provides human support and a resource for its customers to learn about the features and tools available. Our partners consistently provide feedback to us about how much they absolutely love our partner portal, which Allbound provides the structure and functionality to allow us to over amazing things to thousands of partner globally. Almost every person who provides feedback says some iteration of "this is the best partner portal i've ever used."

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

Regular meetings, lots of UAT, quick responses, and adherence to our timeline made implementation a breeze -- even though we had some really complex processes we needed to support.
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
2nd phase included rolling out coop/mdf systems.
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

Allbound has a support team that is easy to contact right through the PRM interface. Additionally, we have a dedicated account manager and development team who are super responsive and helpful. Allbound has a ticketing system for support as well, which keeps you up to date on status of your support requests.
ProsCons
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

It is by far the easiest system to administrator that I have either had experience doing or demoed from other vendors. No coding skills needed. Simple interfaces for everything. And the Allbound University and live support are great!
ProsCons
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.