InsideSales.com / XANT Predictive Pipeline (discontinued)

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.

The reason for giving an 8 is the platform reliability issue which may cause us to look at other products. Furthermore, we intend to do more forecasting in addition to pipeline management and we may look at other platforms just as a comparison.

The company has recently brought in new executive management which may be a sign that there will be renewed focus on things like the stability issue.

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.