When talking about PRMs,
Allbound is one of the first names that come up and with reason. We talked with Daniel Graff-Radford, CEO of Allbound, to know more about the platform, understand the company’s operation and what are the plans for the future.
Please present Allbound to our audience
Allbound is a world leader in the area known as Partner Relationship Management (PRM). We help companies work with partners to sell and market products. Our partner portals—which are usually an extension of our customer’s website—let them collaborate.
Our customers include fast-growing industry leaders like Zoom and General Electric, as well as smaller companies wanting to take their partner programs to the next level. We have had success helping customers drive amazing revenue results by collaborating through these partner portals.
Why should I choose Allbound as my PRM software? What makes the company unique?
For over 20 years, I’ve worked in the B2B software space. When I saw Allbound, I fell in love with the product because it automated so many things that used to be manual in my life. I’d stay up late to co-brand content for partners or would have to fly all over the world to train them. Allbound automated all these activities and created footprints of where these people had worked together, so you could see what worked.
Three things that set us apart from other solutions are:
1) Unparalleled ease of use and implementation, according to users’ reviews
2) World-class security and support. Our specialists support customers with portal set-up and integrations, ongoing training, and consulting specific to their industry and geography
3) Our people. Glassdoor reviews convey team members who are thrilled to be here, which shows through in the quality of service.
How do you find a balance when developing your product between the need to be a generalist to reach many clients and to deliver a custom tool for diverse uses?
That is really important to think about. If you have a referral partner that gives you business, their experience for a partner portal needs to be very different from a reseller or a tech-integrated partner, for instance.
We have an incredibly powerful grouping feature that allows differentiated experiences and it’s unlimited how that grouping works. A reseller in Germany may see something different from another in North America. In some cases, different tiers of resellers may receive different access levels; as partners pass trainings, new parts of the portal may automatically become available.
Point is, customers can tailor the portal experience based on individual accomplishments, locations, industries, company size, etc. Sounds like a lot! But from the platform users’ perspective, it is very simple since you light up the path of what to do next.
Do you have a cut-off for your software?
Allbound is a great resource for planning tools and resources for everyone starting out with their partner programs. However, we firmly believe in the message found in one of our most downloaded pieces, “PRM is Not for Everyone.” A company needs to create an in-demand product and profitable partner program before using software to automate, track, and scale processes.
It is just like buying a CRM system: you would not do it if you never sold anything before. You are better off selling some stuff, building your sales process, and then buying a CRM to batch sales.
These sorts of things differentiate the turning point at which clients are ready to work with us. We have multibillion-dollar corporations as our customers, venture capital-backed start-ups looking to scale their partner programs, and everything in between.
This is a complex platform. How does training work in the beginning?
That’s exactly right. We have multiple teams that help you go live, and it is all included in the price. We have an Allbound University for online training, but we also have an integration team to integrate your CRM to our PRM system, as well as an implementation team that takes a consultative approach to help you build partner portals exactly like what you want to launch to your partners.
We also have a customer success team that trains customers on new features coming out and helps optimize the portal’s user experience for both managers and partners.
What are Allbound’s plans for the future?
People are quickly recognizing our leadership in channel sales, and we are really proud of that. We want to be an authority for people seeking guidance or resources for channel partner strategies. We see massive growth of revenue because the space is growing, and our share of that space is growing.
So, the more we connect with people that are thinking about new channel programs or expanding existing ones, the more success we’ll have. I think that, with 75% of the world’s goods and services being sold through channel programs, we have an amazing opportunity to help a lot of people.
