InsideSales.com / XANT Predictive Pipeline (discontinued)

Start with a clean sheet of paper and design how you want to interact with the sales pipeline; what you need to see and what you don't, how you would like to analyze the pipeline over time, and how you want others to view the information - when you map it all out, talk to C9 and let them show you how they can get you there.

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.

Great service!

It is a cost effective enhancement to the CRM, providing sales operations professionals the tools necessary to deliver relevant data to sales leaders. The product is easy to use, evolves, and generally exceeds expectations.

Decide which metrics and key performance indicators are important for your business and ask C9 how they can help you track your progress. I recommend getting complete buy in from your most senior level sales manager before, during, and after evaluation.

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.

We had two people supporting it, but less than an FTE in terms of time spent.

It was helpful at first. Later in the relationship, cases were completely dropped or I had to work too hard to convince them that there was actually a problem.

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.

Usually there when I needed it, but not always, and sometimes not at key times.

We have found that queries are very slow and lock up.

Fairly easy to work with given above caveats related to support.

Great product and helps our management with pipeline visibility

User Conference at Dreamforce is a must!

I wasn't here for the implementation but I have heard it went smoothly.

Good assistance on set up and detailed training.

Timely and thorough when I have used them.

Day to day it is very easy to use. Set up and admin work has a learning curve

In 2 years we have only had 1 uptime issue for around 45 min.

Works well, it is Cloud so it's based on your internet speed.

Very easy, Great vendor, very good to work with.

We have already chosen to not renew. I had been wavering on renewing, as I had consistently been getting bad data. What ultimately led me to not renew, was because we got acquired by a company using a different CRM to us (we use Salesforce.com), and the data view from just one system (Salesforce.com) became less valuable as sales managers needed to see trending data from two systems. While it was possible to do this, it would not have worked the same.

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 was helpful at first. Later in the relationship, cases were completely dropped or I had to work too hard to convince them that there was actually a problem.

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.

• Usually there when I needed it, but not always, and sometimes not at key times.

We have experienced sluggish performance. We have found that queries are very slow and lock up.

Fairly easy to work with given above caveats related to support.