Improvado is a marketing intelligence platform designed for medium to large enterprises and agencies. Improvado integrates, simplifies, governs, and attributes complex data from various sources, delivering a unified view of marketing ROI and performance.
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.
This solution helped us when we were stuck trying to explore data deeper and didn’t have enough resources to prepare data for further analysis. The software solves data integrity problems bringing more granularity to all insights. Integration with data visualization tools and well-arranged insights shows how each of the company’s marketing channels performs in real-time. Improvado is also useful for risk mitigation when launching or adjusting marketing strategies. It may also become a valuable tool for businesses, who are aiming at automation and the elimination of routine processes. ETL processes automation unleashes marketing analysts’ potential granting them more time for research of marketing reports.
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.
ETL processes. Once adjusted, Improvado never fails to streamline data from our advertisement platforms to the data warehouse.
Variety of data sources. Improvado extracts data from over 200 sources, including both well-established platforms and the ones that are rapidly gaining momentum.
Full-cycle support. Improvado provided us with a dedicated manager available 24/7. Any issues that arose during the product integration were settled in a matter of minutes.
Flexibility and client-focused approach. After the integration, we adjusted our marketing campaign and needed new ad platforms to be integrated. The vendor allocated the development team ASAP to add new connectors to our existing network.
Professional services package. The company doesn't provide dashboard views by default. However, we had no time to figure out how to do it ourselves, so we hired a team of Improvado's analysts that set everything up for us.
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.
Improvado didn’t have all the integrations that we needed. However, they offered full coverage and quickly found ways to extract data from the sources we required.
The user interface for BI tools may be confusing to inexperienced users. Personally, I didn't have any problems. However, some of the junior marketing specialists from my department needed more time to adapt to the UI. Otherwise, the interface is great.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
