ConnectAndSell vs. InsideSales.com / XANT Predictive Pipeline (discontinued)

If your organization relies on outbound leads through cold calling, this is a great tool for you. ConnectAndSell definitely made the associate's jobs easier at our company and allowed them to produce greater output than they could have done manually without such a tool. This tool is less appropriate if cold calling isn't a big part of your company's lead generation efforts.

Incentivized

C9 is a good and economical solution for what it does. If evaluating them today, I would want to clearly understand their product roadmap and their ability to execute against it.

• Builds lead lists.
• Maximizes connections with prospects.
• Provides guidance for how to approach future prospects.
• Leaves strategic voicemails for prospects.
• Sends emails based on programmable metrics.

Incentivized

• It gives you the ability to see where your pipeline was in the past and compare to how it is now. You can set queries that will allow you to show at risk deals, committed deals, etc.
• This gives much better visibility for management to coach.

• One thing that's been difficult about Connect and Sell is some people can tell you've been patched through so if you can work past the initial conversation it ends up working great.
• The system has worked great with outreach which we've integrated our contacts directly into the system. Because of this the connection between outreach and connect and sell don't always communicate calls and metrics which are crucial for us to know conversion rates.
• We had a hard time getting the system implemented quickly and working the way we wanted it to. Because of the implementation specialist we were working with problems weren't solved quickly rather they were worked through quickly however they were solved.

Incentivized

• We had uptime issues, weird error messages, sluggish performance, and bad data. I hope that some of this can be attributed to growing pains as the company was relatively new when we signed our initial contract.
• It was not dependable enough to trust the data and to count on accessing the app when we needed it.
• It actually was unavailable at EOQ one time.
• I also did not care for the lack of real-time pipeline information. If someone was doing a pipeline review, there was no instant gratification i.e. to see changes in pipeline occur as an AE made a change to an opportunity.
• You couldn’t do any configuration at all. Even if you just wanted to change a field or add a filter, you had to go through their services team. It was a recognized challenge and I saw roadmap addressing it.
• The query tool is a little hard to use and we have found that queries are very slow and lock up.

For the right reps who are good at talking to prospects who aren't expecting their call, this is a no brainer.

C9 is now part of the sales management culture here at IPC. There is no longer any guesswork about the funnel or the forecast. C9 does something that SFDC does not...it increases significantly the value of the information in SFDC by unlocking the meta data that we all need to run the business

From a sales manager’s perspective it was fairly easy to use the base
functionality (just viewing current pipeline) and much harder to look at
analytics (pipeline changes over time). C9 made this easier by allowing sales ops to publish views to sales managers. The query tool was harder to use than it had to be. For example, there were no out of the box relationships set up between Salesforce.com tables (e.g. accounts to opportunities), so I had to create those relationships myself.

In 2 years we have only had 1 uptime issue for around 45 min.

We have experienced sluggish performance.

We have found that queries are very slow and lock up.

I have had a few support calls with their people. They are totally reachable and helpful, sharing screens, controlling my screen, showing why things happened, not just correcting it. If you have an issue with the software, let them help. They are there for you, and they are friendly, accessible, and happy to do their job.

Incentivized

C9 cares about their customers and responds quickly. However, the ticketing system could be better and there is no easy way to track the status of your requests.

Good assistance on set up and detailed training

Online information and training was done reasonably well compared to other vendors, but would benefit from being more polished and rounded out.

Very simple implementation. They basically set up the imports and then they configure the tool per customer requests.

I wish there had been more consultation during the implementation, but it wasn’t bad given the effort expended. We ended up re-implementing after about a year and a half.

We have moved to Salesloft. Salesloft gave us greater visibility into performance metrics and integrated with more software which in turn helped streamline our business.

Incentivized

Zoho CRM is less up to speed and much more out of date. The support at InsideSales.com Predictive Pipeline have been very helpful during the initial roll out face. Overall I was very happy!

Incentivized

• It gives you greater potential to lock in a client, but I'm not sure from my end if this ROI is worth the headaches. It has a lot of work before it can become a truly reliable source for outbounding.

Incentivized

• The product provides a single source for pipeline and forecast data and has scaled well with our organization. We have grown from 10 sales reps to 100 reps and we really needed a tool to to manage data and do roll-ups etc.
• It's also important to provide senior management visibility into the pipeline, and the tool works well for this.