Groove is a sales engagement platform that enables sales leaders to execute their strategy in a smarter and more adaptive way. With Groove, revenue leaders can use automation to do more with less, with the goal of driving greater efficiency and effectiveness across the customer lifecycle. Groove states they enable more than 75,000 users at ADP, Google, Uber, iHeartMedia, Capital One, and other large enterprises.
Predictive Pipeline kept track of every change in the sales pipeline and predicts quota attainment boasting 80% accuracy, with Neuralytics, the XANT predictive engine. The product was based on C9 Predictive Sales, owned and supported by XANT (formerly InsideSales.com) since May 2015, and no longer available for sale.
Groove is excellent for the use case of improving sales representative and customer success representative productivity and data quality when used alongside Salesforce. It is a Salesforce focused tool. You should definitely consider Groove if you are a current Salesloft / Outreach user and you also use Salesforce.
Groove would not be a good fit for an organization not using Salesforce.
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.
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.
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.
I actually don't have any complaint regarding groove. It's just that I will give 9 since I confidently believe that there'd be updates in the future which would be more optimal not just for us users but for the business as well. The only regret I have with groove is I was not able to use it before the current company that I'm employed
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
Groove has been an awesome platform to use for sales pipeline management. I really enjoy how it integrates with my Salesforce, Gmail, and Google Calendar. It makes my job easier by helping me keep track of the progress of each sales contact that I have. Leads are able to reply and notify us using Groove.
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.
My company has a team dedicated to supporting our implementation of operative tools and business systems such as Groove. For this reason, I feel that we have ample support for Groove, although I have not personally contacted Groove for any support issues.
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.
At Nearpod, I have been impressed with the internal expertise and support around Groove as a key tool for the Sales and Customer Success business systems and operations.
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.
Groove is simple. Like their competitors, they give you the ability to create templated "Flows" (sequences) of calls, emails, and LinkedIn touches. Some of them can be automated, but it's also simple to personalize outreach. Ultimately, my decision to purchase Groove over some of the competitors was based on their Salesforce integration, as well as white-glove customer service.
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!
Reduced several hours a week of logging time in Salesforce that either wouldn't get done or would have been done to the detriment of more value add activities.
Saves hours per week by delivering actionable/useful info from Salesforce into Gmail
Gives me valuable insight on what emails are being opened and read. This helps plan targeting.
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.