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

1) The budget process. In QBO the budgeting capability is non-existant, unless you like manually typing in every scenario and not being able to budget by class. Cube houses my budget/forecast scenarios & lets me view and analyze by my company's preferred data points; department, GL account, vendor, & sales campaign. I'm able to run monthly budget variance reports and plan for the future with ease. 2) We've begun using Cube to help analyze profitablity by sales job. We've never had such easy access to this type of info in the past, so this is a benefit I can directly attribute to Cube. 3) We're beginning now to use an integration with our payroll software to work on headcount planning and payroll analysis.

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.

• Push/pull information across any Google Sheet or Excel workbook.
• Budget at a much more granular level (by month by account by the department by vendor).
• Custom mapping to allow for multiple cuts of the same data.
• Bulk range selection within a workbook.

• 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.

• Limited to 8 top line dimensions. Although you can bring in as many attributes of data as you want, but I would really like Cube to increase top line dimensions to 10.
• The ability for cross level interaction within multiples cube would be a major plus once implemented.

• 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.

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.

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.

Cube was just a lot easier to use than Vena. We took some time to look at Vena as well and while their product was impressive, our organization was not yet there. We needed something we could implement quickly, and in today's day and age I think that is a very important quality to have. Start up and early stage companies do not have the luxury of implementation teams and massive IT resources so Cube was a huge help.

Incentivized

Invited by the Vendor

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

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

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

• It has decreased the amount of time it takes to build reports by days
• I can rest easy knowing the knowledge is accurate and there is no human error
• I have been able to create more reports than I ever dreamed of with the new time and ease of use

Incentivized

Invited by the Vendor

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

• 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.