Allbound enters the technology field as an industry disruptor in indirect sales for the technology industry. The biggest thing happening in the tech industry now is customer success, according to Scott Salkin, Allbound founder and CEO, who points out that we are moving to a subscription economy. “We are consuming things in pieces, even things that are not technology,” he says. Because people are, essentially, buying time, the issue becomes how to keep the customer once the subscription ends. Yet, for the creators of software and hardware, the best way to scale and keep customer acquisition costs down is through partners such as resellers and referral networks, and Salkin notes, “Often, there’s very little transparency and collaboration — even though it’s a partner channel.” The result is, manufacturers do not have access to important information — how the resellers are selling, what content they’re using to drive deals, and what features are most important to their customers.
Salkin founded Allbound as a software-as-a-service platform specifically for partner — or indirect — sales. Its cloud-based software was created to simplify and accelerate a business’s ability to recruit, onboard, train, measure and grow indirect sales partners by enabling collaboration that ultimately improves the performance of this channel by automating the delivery of marketing content, sales tools and training at each stage of the pipeline. By giving technology manufacturers access to information, focusing on tools and resources to keep in touch with customers, it is challenging the “we’ve always done it this way” mindset.
“A fundamental shift is taking place in the way businesses view and value their channel partners,” Salkin says. “More than ever, content, collaboration and customer success are being linked directly to profitability and growth. At the same time, partner sales acceleration is still a rather new development, so best practices need to be established and shared in order to ‘cross the chasm’ and truly replace partner relationship management as the mainstream discipline across all businesses and industries.”
To that end, Allbound will host its first annual CO:LLABORATE conference November 2–3, focused solely on digital innovation and disruption in channel sales and marketing. At the sales-pitch-free conference, panels of industry experts and customers themselves will facilitate discussions centered on strategies and best practices that help companies accelerate growth through their channel partners.
Ahead of its event, Allbound has unveiled Co/Labs™ to streamline and simplify communication and collaboration between organizations and their channel partners. Part of a larger collaboration suite that includes a curated Team Directory, Co/Labs enables instant file and link sharing, group and one-to-one discussions, and secure collaboration rooms for teams and partners without logging in and out of multiple platforms. The intelligent collaboration tool was created specifically for channel, integrating key features such as the ability to track and search data, and securely archive everything.
