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Does a good job of sales forecasting.
October 27, 2012

Does a good job of sales forecasting.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review

Overall Satisfaction

  • C9 does a pretty good job of blending tools that can be used by sales managers and sales teams with a data warehouse and light BI Quite honestly, it was the only product we ran across that tried to do both.
  • The main processes it supports are sales forecasting, pipeline reviews, forecast reviews, and other business Basically, it helps you to build a sales cadence by rendering pipeline information in an easy to use format and pushing analytics to sales managers.
  • It can act as a true BI tool and pull in data from more than one CRM, but wouldn’t have same functionality.
  • 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.
  • Better pipeline visibility, accuracy, conversion would be goal, but the execution was pretty poor.
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.

Product Usage

6 - 2 people in sales ops and 4 sales managers used the tool.
0.5 - We had two people supporting it, but less than an FTE in terms of time spent.
  • Pipeline trend analysis and forecasting
  • Sales management account reviews

Evaluation and Selection

Excel - were not using an application for pipeline trend analysis prior to implementing C9.
Lucidera, Pivot Link, and several other AppExchange program for pipeline management.

Implementation

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.
  • Vendor implemented

Training

  • Online training
  • Self-taught
The product was fairly easy to learn from an end user (sales manager) perspective, so it would be reasonable for the administrator (sales ops) to receive training and pass it on to the end users.

Support

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.

Usability

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.

Reliability

• 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.

Integration

  • Salesforce.com
It pulls data from it into the data warehouse.

Vendor Relationship

Fairly easy to work with given above caveats related to support.
Price, number of refreshes per day.