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

In my opinion, Salesflare is an excellent CRM for small businesses. It includes everything a small business needs to manage leads, deals, and contacts in one convenient location. When a client needs more information or something done, I can quickly record it in their account—perfect for B2B SaaS and small businesses selling B2B in general.

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.

• Zero learning curve, one-minute setup and dead easy to integrate with complementary tools.
• Powerful data automation features so everything you do has maximum bottom-line impact.
• Stellar customer support: response is quick and the team really goes out of their way to solve your specific problems. Up to setting up custom solutions for you.

• 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.

• It works wonderfully as a CRM for freelancers, consultants and small teams but feels like it would become more difficult to integrate with larger teams
• Sometimes have issues with email syncing with missing emails or having to reconnect my email to Salesflare
• Emails are sent from the app using their own servers, I would prefer to send via my own email system (Gsuite) for better delivery

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

The pipeline, which is the core of the platform, is very clear and full of features. On top of that Salesflare added automations, integrations, plugins and emails. You can easily get your leads there from any platform and nurture your leads until you get the deal done. I think any business can benefit from using this sales CRM.

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.

Hit them on Chat support, and you are gonna get a response within a few minutes (if not in a few hours, during weekends) But they are gonna keep following with you till they make sure that your query has been resolved. Keep it 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.

Salesflare does its own thing compared to the others I've tried. It's unique even though it shares many of the main features a CRM should have. Salesforce Lightning is amazing and feature-packed but can often get overwhelming depending on your use case. I never experience any slight lag or load times with Salesflare. Lightning can sometimes hang depending on your browser etc.

Incentivized

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

• So far, as optimistic as I am about using the CRM, I've seen a short and speedy return on my investment.
• Our sales process will quickly become more focused and effective. It's part of our operations and saves us time, but we've never tracked the financial impact.

• 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.