Great management of advocacy program, but with semi-clunky software UI
What do you like best?
The micro-sites feature is fantastic in that it helps deliver (and track, thank goodness) advocacy resources sent to customers and gives a much more white-glove and catered approach than a simple email with links and attachments.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of Upland RO is simply the fact that it can store, manage, and automate the immense amount of files often associated with an advocacy program. Just having a fluid, up-to-date database of all reference resources was a massive time saver and solved many headaches.
What do you dislike?
I think the sales reference request could use some work. Sure, it'd show how often advocates were used to dissuade sales from over burdening our advocates, but I would have preferred a bit more of a "gate keeper" experience. Yes, number of reference activities is a good number to go by, but we had several advocates willing and WANTING to be on more calls. We also had those who really only wanted to be contacted maybe once a quarter. It didn't seem as though Upland RO's limitations on this were enough. There were also instances where a reference, for whatever reason, shouldn't have been called upon, but the rep simply saw they hadn't been used and reached out. Again, I'd just like a little more control over that process.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Clean up your Salesforce data as much as possible and provide training to sales teams/leadership so they understand the ROEs on references.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
Most of what has been solved is discussed in my "what do you like best" response. Tracking a maintaining a fluid database of our references was the most important problem. Sure, sending documents over via micro-sites was a great bonus, but that could have been done via email as well. Maintaining a reference database on excel was a nightmare.
It saved ample amounts of time simply not having to 1) search within an excel sheet and 2) deal with the clunkiness of updating a reference's file (row) within said spreadsheet
