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.
We like sellsy. Its not perfect and as other users have pointed out, there is and always will be, room for improvement.
If you require deep integration with Google apps and Microsoft Office 365, then Sellsy may not be for you. Sellsy just about manages to work with google in so far that it can sync contacts, calendar, sales docs and incoming email with google. There is currently no way to make sent email appear in the sent items section of sellsy unless you compose the email within the sellsy app. The O365 integration is not nearly as powerful as sellsy does not sync sellsy contacts or calendar with microsoft (in its current form).
I believe that one of the primary functions of any business management app should be the capability to centrally manage all of a company's business clients, contacts etc. and sync this data to all employee accounts with the 2 biggest players for business email (Microsoft and Google) as a minimum. This data should never be an island stored only on 1 application. The Discovery that sellsy does not currently sync contacts and calendars with O365 was a disappointment. If Sellsy started supporting exchange sync for Microsoft Office 365 we would immediately dump google and switch over. In fact Sellsy is the only reason we continue to use Gapps as we need our contacts and calendars synced to our mobile devices.
We have built up a list of small little things that do not work as expected since we started using sellsy and continually pass them on to the development team. Many are small trivial things from an engineering perspective but are still annoying nonetheless, especially to users who wish to get the job done. Employees are easily frustrated if they have to fight with software to do certain tasks. Annoyances in the user experience (no matter how small) can lead to lost productivity which in turn costs money in the business world. However based on our experience with Sellsy support we believe that they do listen carefully to their customers concerns and are on the path to deliver a quality experience to their customers through the process of frequent updates to the software. You can easily establish how good a SAAS provider is by measuring their ability to fix problems soon after they are initially reported.
In simple terms Sellsy is an incredibly feature rich application and is way ahead of the competition. It represents good value for money and is backed up by free support.
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.
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.
Training. The only real issue I have with Sellsy is that its got so many features its hard to understand them all. I looked for training videos and they are all in French. Thats a big problem for a guy who grew up in NJ.
I would embed training videos directly into the software. This way as you add services, you get a full tutorial immediately.
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.
Sellsy ticks the most boxes for us. While it could still do a lot of things better there is no other single app that offers the same spectrum of features at a comparable price for SMEs.
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.
Based on our experience. We have submitted a large amount of tickets and they have proven the Sellsy development team have the ability to respond fast and implement changes reasonably quickly. (Updated July 2015) It took sellsy a number of weeks to solve an issue with the billable hours section of their application. This delayed us from being able to invoice our client for completed works. Lots of small things like email tracking timestamps have never been fixed even though we highlighted this issue months ago. Though small it is growing more and more frustrating to be reminded every time we try to see what time a client read or opened an email from us.
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.
If you are importing data from a CSV, Sellsy recommends you use OpenOffice. OpenOffice is an absolute disaster on Windows 8 and crashes every few mins. While no fault of Sellsy they should not recommend software which makes an already challenging task even more difficult. A small gripe in hindsight but during the process was deeply frustrating. For any users looking to format your CSV Google, try importing CSV data into Excel and your life will be much more easy.
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!
The license model once you understand it is very flexible allowing you to select from the modules within sellsy. This gives small companies control of the cost facilitating them with the option to only pay for the features they use.
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.
