Oracle Sales guides sellers with intelligent recommendations to help them focus on the most valuable prospects at the right time. These machine learning-based CRM selling tools center around clean, complete customer data from internal and external sources.
Excellent as a customer relationship management tool, sales forecasting, building better sales plan for the entire deal lifecycle using critical and complex data, a 360-degree comprehensive view of vendors, partners, customers. Ensuring high standards and consistency is maintained in pricing so that quotes are competitive for prospective customers. At the end of the day, this is an excellent tool for selling and closing deals while being able to access needed information in one place.
This software is very well-suited to companies who find themselves expanding their footprint, the number of their Sales representatives, their territories, and/or their products and services and need to maximize their ability to both keep up with those demands whilst streamlining their proposal resources. Further, this is a very powerful tool with a lot of features and functionality including CRM plug-in and reporting. Thus, it may be less appropriate for a very small organization with only one product and that is also blessed with lengthy cradle-to-grave turnaround windows. In addition, to better the odds for success an investment in upfront personnel training and either a dedicated periodic window of time and/or dedicated person(s) for content upkeep are prudent. Finally, working with the vendor is a delight as they make every effort to maintain and deliver a product that both meets your needs and on which you can rely.
Using Qvidian as an RFP tool has made a difference in our RFP process, turn-around time, and content development. It's helped us streamline our RFP process so that we are able to produce the majority of the document before the kick-off meeting, which means we have more time to customize and refine the document before it goes to print.
Additionally, it took several hours before to gather all of the basic data we needed for an RFP, but now we can have the majority of the response ready in under 15 minutes in most cases. We are also able to start projects from our phones (iPhone thru Safari) or on an iPad. This has been extremely helpful while traveling.
Finally, our content is centrally located on a searchable database. Previously we had used several free tools to aid in content storage that would allow us access easily via search. It never seemed to do what we wanted, and when we did find something, we weren't sure if it was the most current or usable. The library functions in Qvidian have been a huge help, and has changes the way we collect data, and retrieve it.
I would like to see more integration with other CRMs such as Salesforce.
We have each business unit built into Salesforce and it can track the amount of gross profit that flows through our Oracle database. It then further it trickles to each sales rep and what they've closed during their time at the company. These figures are not always accurate.
It be difficult navigating to accounts and drilling down into each specific customer to understand details.
One area where Qvidian occasionally struggles is feature regression. For instance, the editing option that puts multiple records into one document had always been present in Qvidian; however, when the multi-edit feature that only allows editing one record at a time was released in version 9.1, the original editing functionality was removed. This caused me a lot of frustration, as it severely slowed down my work flow since I could now only see and edit one record at a time. It wasn't until a year later when version 10 was released that the old editing functionality was added back. However, one bright spot of version 9.1 was an added feature that allowed organizing records by simply dragging and dropping them into different categories. This was much easier than having to right click on a record, select Move, then right click on a folder and select paste. However, with version 10, this feature was removed and I'm now back to having to right click on records instead of dragging and dropping. It seems that with each release, I never know if something I like will be taken away or if something I don't like will be added -- sometimes it's both.
A recent change that was added in version 10.1 that I personally view as a negative is that Qvidian now handles all requests server side instead of on the user's computer. This means that if a user wants to export or edit a large number of records, they have to wait for Qvidian's server to generate a report of those records. Depending on the number of records, this can be very quick (a few seconds) or very long (I've waited up to 20 minutes before) depending on how taxed Qvidian's servers currently are. I understand the reasoning behind the move, in that it takes the load off of a user's computer so that other applications they currently have open aren't affected by added memory usage, but in practice I find that it only slows down my workflow. Any somewhat modern PC shouldn't have any trouble handling a large report request from Qvidian.
Although Qvidian is certified for use in several different browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome for Windows), it doesn't offer the same functionality in each one. For instance, in Explorer, when a record is selected for editing or export, it will automatically open in Word. In Firefox, a pop-up dialog appears and a user has to click Open in order for the record to appear in Word. And in Chrome, the file is added to the download bar and a user must click on the file there for it to open, unless they add an exception to .docx file types to automatically open in Word (which I had to do, since I prefer using Chrome). Other simple features such as right clicking on a folder or record to bring up Qvidian's context menu are hit or miss depending on the browser. In Explorer, everything is generally smooth, though the browser itself is slower than the other choice. In Firefox, right clicking generally works but sometimes has some hiccups, and in Chrome, more often than not right clicking brings up Chrome's context menu instead of Qvidian's, which often leads to having to first select a folder and then click the dedicated Actions button in Qvidian to perform the desired action. No matter which browser you use, there will be some sort of functionality that doesn't quite work as expected.
The tool provides us with the functionality we need to perform more efficiently and we have not identified another product that offers enough "nice to haves" in addition to the "must haves" to warrant a compelling reason for changing tools.
Overall our organization has completely moved to Oracle CX Sales and now is able to utilize the latest technology backed by AI to provide a much better experience to customers and saving money at the same time. So it's a Win-Win situation. I believe there is a slight learning curve to derive [the] full value out of this but once you are there, you can delight your customers.
The shift they made in architecting documents from content to outline, is now reversed allowing outline creation first, then content which is more natural. But, due to the fact that we went through a migration of content to get to the new version, it feels less optimized than if we would have re-implemented.
End users having to configure settings more often than desired
The support the Oracle team gives is generally very good. They are patient, willing to help, and their training methods are collaborative and inclusive. They have conducted multiple support sessions and it’s always been a great user experience. The stellar team [is] always on hand to lend support when the right time comes and their helpdesk is always on hand to help.
They are very much in support of great customer service. They respond quickly with emails and in some cases phone calls to resolve any issues and often times user questions in the past when I could not figure something out.
Live instructor training is expensive, though we have had instructors come to our offices for a ‘refresher’ before. The refresher was more of a “let us fix that for you” than a training on how to do it ourselves.
Excellent online training material. On-demand always helps to access anytime, anywhere. Also, it is essential that in this day and age, video tutorials with actual product screenshots make the learning more useful and fun at the same time. Certifications help test knowledge gained during these tutorial sessions. This was a blessing for fresh users.
If you have never used a CRM program is is hard to know exactly what you need. We had lots of changes during implementation and even more afterward once the users started working in it everyday. Also the partner we used didn't inform us about Allotments and not being able to Batch delete custom objects (you can now in recent releases). There were so many unknowns, that if I had it to do over, I would educate myself more and ask more questions of the partner that we used for implementation.
As compared to other CRM, this happens to be one of the best and most affordable as there are some cons, but the pros are great, and I have seen an increase in sales by using this platform. It works great for the sales process from start to end, like lead generation to closure.
We have been using Qvidian for years, when Compass was introduced in our company. Having spent over a year using Compass, I would not recommend it for writing proposals. In all fairness, that is not Compass' strength. Compass is ok for general document sharing for informational purposes. It does have a Presentation Builder function for creating PowerPoint presentations, but it is cumbersome and not very flexible. Specifically, the linkage is awkward and files may have to be re-linked when they are updated. In addition, the architecture only allows you to create a couple of levels of content. The search function is very limited. Compass is a newer project and has not fully matured.
When we purchased this system it was one of the more expensive options in the market. However, with an adjustment in service and a relative price structure, this has become a lot more cost-effective over the past few years. It’s now more of a middle-ranking in the pricing structure and I would definitely say this is value for money.
We can very easily pull up a customer's order and provide any detail they need. The time this saves compared to manually tracking customer orders and accounts is incredible.
Knowing exactly who is contacting customer service and what their orders status is before answering the calls makes the customer service reps job much easier than before.
The positive impact has been to know we have a system that can house legally-approved responses to questionnaires. The good about this is that if we have a simple RFI that does not require a lot of response customization, we can draw upon previously-approved responses and create output MUCH quicker, without the need of laborious and time-consuming legal reviews of RFIs or DDQs we produce for prospective clients. Quicker, easier output with less internal review = efficient RFI process and quicker turnaround time to respond to our client/prospective client base.
The negative impact has only been the time it takes to orient oneself with the program, and REMAIN oriented. As we do not do RFIs on a daily basis, it is easy for us to become rusty, or to take short-cuts because we do not have time to re-train on the program. Those shortcuts and workarounds tend to cause us not to use the program to its full potential and lead to counter-productivity in some cases.
