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InsideSales.com / XANT Predictive Pipeline (discontinued)

Score8.4 out of 10

17 Reviews and Ratings

What is InsideSales.com / XANT Predictive Pipeline (discontinued)?

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.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Account Executive Experience

Pros

  • Helps forecast your pipeline for you. Overall, this makes your planning and day-to-day tasks much easier.
  • You get to focus more on your pipeline due to it being easier to deal with and operate. This allows for strategic sales planning, which is vital for an organization.
  • You can determine what deals need to be saved, as well as risky deals that could hurt your pipeline.
  • You can look at what's changed in your pipeline and why that changed. This will allow you to grow as a sales professional.

Cons

  • Small kinks that need to be worked out. This is natural for a feature that is fairly new.

Return on Investment

  • Many cold deals have become hot
  • We don't lose track of customers any more
  • We have the ability to track and monitor when we contacted a customer.

Alternatives Considered

Zoho CRM

Other Software Used

Slack, Salesforce Analytics Cloud, Ring.io

C9 - a good way to tame the SFDC visibility dragon

Pros

  • Funnel visibility. C9 gives managers a bird's eye view of their SFDC opportunities across their team. Everyone from the global SVP to the local managers can all have the have the same view of the numbers; they may not all agree on the forecast, but they are all starting from the same place.
  • Product views. C9 was able to develop custom pipeline views by product and by customer. These give our Product Management team a solid overview of what is going to be sold without having to go back to the Sales Reps.
  • Historical views. Since SFDC is an ever changing view of the funnel, it is impossible to go back in time and see what things looked like in prior periods. C9 has this capability, so we no longer have to have reams of Excel exports saved on our servers.
  • Reporting. C9 has a powerful query building engine that our adminstrator can use to build complex reports that are impossible to do in SFDC. We can also share them with non-SFDC and non-C9 users.

Cons

  • Load Time. The application can sometime take a few moments to load. With the recent release, I have noticed an improvement in this area.
  • Pricing. While the pricing model makes sense for managers/adminstrators, it is a bit cost prohibitive to have all of our Reps using the tool.
  • Forecasting. The forecasting module took a while to get used to. Unfortunately we lost sales managment mindshare with the effort, so we have to re-start it and see if we can be more successful. I expect the module will be improved when we do try again.

Usability

C9 / Cloud9 lives up to its name

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • Writing the queries takes some skill. The wizard will walk you through it but it will take some time to learn.
  • Since it is outside of Salesforce, adoption is harder to drive.

Return on Investment

  • Helps push deals through faster by giving better visibility. As far as a actual dollar amount I am unsure.

Usability

C9. Icing on the cake

Pros

  • Customization. C9 customized their applications to match the fields and data in our CRM. This enabled advanced filtering outside of the standard data filters.
  • Continuous Improvements. C9 was always adding features and improving performance based on user feedback.
  • Customer support. C9 listened to our feedback, responded quickly to service issues, and consistently connected with customers via online seminars, an annual Customer Summit, and Customer Success Managers.
  • Analytics. C9 gave us the power to look at our pipeline at different moments in time, track changes, and measure KPIs we could not do with the CRM alone.

Cons

  • Their support ticketing system and support page could be improved. They were always responsive, but tracking the status of your ticket and knowing who it was assigned to was challenging.
  • There were some performance issues that seemed to come with application enhancements, but they were always communicating progress and working to resolve.

Return on Investment

  • C9 enabled us to track our sales pipeline changes over time which ultimately led to a 17% increase in win rate.
  • The product paid for itself in months because utilization is dependent upon the managers, not the salespeople. Managers have the license, but the benefits are applied to the salespeople. Most subscription based products are under utilized when every person must hold a license.
  • 1 on 1 conversations between managers and salespeople were more meaningful because they were discussing long term pipeline growth and health, not short term status reports.

C9 Review

Pros

  • Better pipeline visibility, accuracy, conversion would be goal, but the execution was pretty poor.

Cons

  • 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 actually was unavailable at EOQ one time.

Return on Investment

  • Better pipeline visibility, accuracy, conversion would be goal, but the execution was pretty poor

Usability