Image Gallery: Allbound Co:llaborate

About 400 attendees, including SaaS and other subscription providers, gathered at the Phoenix Convention Center for Allbound‘s inaugural Co:llaborate 2016 conference on Wednesday.

Allbound said Co:llaborate “aims to become the definitive destination for the exchange of best practices, venues for networking and career growth, and the celebration of an evolving job function.” Scott Salkin, CEO and co-founder, promised attendees there would be no sales pitches, just sharing of experiences and best practices.

“We’re a SaaS company that’s helping to change how companies do business in the channel,” he said. “We’re really focused on helping to educate why companies need the channel and how companies can be doing channel better. Our company itself is 18 months old, and we’ve grown from three to 22 employees in the last year, and a big piece of that has been focusing on the channel early on. We’ve added $1 million in pipeline in our channel just in the last couple of months. Why can’t other companies at any size being doing that?”  

Allbound, a partner sales acceleration platform-as-a-service (PaaS), aims to simplify and accelerate a business’ ability to recruit, onboard, train, measure and grow its indirect sales partners.

Channel Partners was there. This gallery features highlights and an event recap.

Scott Salkin, Allbound’s CEO and co-founder, gives the opening speech during day one of Co:llaborate 2016.

Tiffani Bova, Salesforce‘s global, customer growth and innovation evangelist, told attendees it’s important to create an emotional connection with customers and that experience, increasingly, is the product.

Failing to meet customer expectations yields a menu of consequences, such as decreased loyalty, lost deals, revenue attrition, wasted resources and missed quotas. It’s important for salespeople to have intimate knowledge of their offerings and a clear grasp of their market, and for the sales process to be simple, she said.

(Left to right) Qualtrics’ Josh Robbins, Riverbed’s Michelle Hodges, Dell’s Kaushik Ram, Avnet’s Tim Fitzgerald and Allbound CEO Scott Salkin discussed what companies should be thinking about when trying to scale with partners.

Robbins talked about Qualtrics’ Innovation Exchange, an online resource with information about the company’s partners, offerings and customer use cases. Ram said when thinking about channel marketing, “we want to think outside the box. You also need to be self aware not only of business and technology changes, but social and cultural changes as well.”

Isos Technology‘s exhibit draws visitors in the sponsors area.