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

Frankly, if I can do something in Scratchpad instead of Salesforce, I prefer Scratchpad because it's faster, easier, simpler, with a much more readable and useable interface. Salesforce has been getting requests to allow font size modification for over a decade and hasn't even done that. That's what sent me looking for something like Scratchpad. I sort of view it as a much more user-friendly UI to layover SF. It's faster and less frustrating than SF for frequent daily activities. It's great for creating notes and tracking tasks at a basic level in a much more user friendly environment than Salesforce. But it interacts w/ SF, which is great!

Incentivized

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.

• Scratchpad notes are super easy to use and link to Salesforce Opportunities.
• Allows you to update all the necessary Salesforce opportunity fields without going into Salesforce.
• Easy to use Task manager that helps you stay on track through the day.
• Extremely easy to use and their CS team is always willing to provide training and help.

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.

• When pulling in Salesforce reports, it doesn't have full ability to do grouping/sorting.
• When looking at pipeline view there's not an ability to expand the default view to see more than 5 people per group.
• It'd be nice if comments would go as a task rather than a buzz.

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

So intuitive and user friendly

Incentivized

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.

It doesn't. Scratchpad is more agile and much easier to use as a seller managing a large patch with lots of opportunities. SAP is robust but is far more complicated and involves a lot more inputs to get the same outputs that you can get with Scratchpad in half the time and effort.

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

• I save many hours a week using Scratchpad to simply manage my tasks.
• I no longer waste time waiting for SFDC to load.
• I can easily create opps, adjust the pipeline, and check to see if someone is already prospecting into an account.

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.