SalesDirector.ai vs. InsideSales.com / XANT Predictive Pipeline (discontinued)

It is well suited for any sales organization that is trying to mature its sales process, and continually improve its execution.

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.

• I can easily see if there is communication occurring between the sales rep and the appropriate contacts at the prospect company. I can quickly see if the communication stream is a mutual back and forth conversation or if it is mostly a one-way stream from the rep to the prospect. If it is mostly a one-way conversation, this tells me something isn't right about this opportunity.
• The system looks at this communication and using AI, it highlights if it interprets any negative sentiment from the prospect allowing the rep or the sales manager to dig deeper into the opportunity and see if they can discover the reason for this negative response and correct it if possible.
• The software "learns" from previous successful deals we have closed and uses this information to alert us if a deal has been in a particular sales stage for longer than similar deals. And it learns who is the business decision maker or technical decision maker is for previously closed deals and points it out to the rep that they should make contact with this same position in the target company.
• The software coaches sales reps on actions that should be taken, based on our sales process, at each stage of the sales cycle. And it does so without feeling like its looking over your shoulder, by recommending the rep send a "confirmation of needs" email once the deal is moved into the 30% stage.

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.

• More built in reports and trends

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.

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.

SalesDirector is more comprehensive and advanced than the add-ins I've tried.

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

• Positive. We have better insights into our deals. We can see when deals are getting bogged down, or when a deal may not close, even before the sales rep recognizes this.
• It makes it much easier to accurately call your monthly and quarterly forecasts.
• Our sales managers use it for their weekly one-on-one meetings with their rep and virtually no additional work is required of the rep or manager.

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.