Oracle Sales vs. InsideSales.com / XANT Predictive Pipeline (discontinued)

In the market for Sales and Service, Oracle CX is the best especially in integrating with other systems. It has a stable and huge database that can handle a bunch of data. It gathers all data of customers, accounts, leads, opportunities, service requests in one place and related in a good way. The tools used for reports and analytics as BI is strong and great to use also it is not hard[.]

Incentivized

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.

• The product is good for tracking leads which can help you acquire new customers.
• The product is good for creating opportunities which can help you convert sales.
• The product can easily be integrated with other applications to make the transfer of data seamless.

Incentivized

• Pipeline management/ pipeline analytics: C9 is great for understanding changes in the pipeline. For example, comparing the sales pipeline today with with where it was at the beginning of the quarter.
• It also works very well for quota attainment visibility. We can easily set and track sales quotas for individual reps and for sales manager roll-up quotas.
• The product also offers some forecasting capabilities which we are not using yet, so I cannot comment on how strong these features are.

• Oracle CRM is incredibly complex making it fairly difficult to learn from scratch
• The original implementation of Oracle CRM was a lengthy and involved process
• We have had outages where we cannot connect to Oracle CRM which leaves us at a loss. I'm not sure what the solution to this is, but less outages would be ideal.

Incentivized

• 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.

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

Overall our organization has completely moved to Oracle CX Sales and now is able to utilize the latest technology backed by AI to provide a much better experience to customers and saving money at the same time. So it's a Win-Win situation. I believe there is a slight learning curve to derive [the] full value out of this but once you are there, you can delight your customers.

Incentivized

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.

Some of the more complex customer reports we have created are slow to run at times.

Incentivized

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

The support the Oracle team gives is generally very good. They are patient, willing to help, and their training methods are collaborative and inclusive. They have conducted multiple support sessions and it’s always been a great user experience. The stellar team [is] always on hand to lend support when the right time comes and their helpdesk is always on hand to help.

Incentivized

In my experience, C9 has been very responsive, and provided access to their subject matter experts for advanced support questions.

Good assistance on set up and detailed training

Excellent online training material. On-demand always helps to access anytime, anywhere. Also, it is essential that in this day and age, video tutorials with actual product screenshots make the learning more useful and fun at the same time. Certifications help test knowledge gained during these tutorial sessions. This was a blessing for fresh users.

Incentivized

Online information and training was done reasonably well compared to other vendors, but would benefit from being more polished and rounded out.

If you have never used a CRM program is is hard to know exactly what you need. We had lots of changes during implementation and even more afterward once the users started working in it everyday. Also the partner we used didn't inform us about Allotments and not being able to Batch delete custom objects (you can now in recent releases). There were so many unknowns, that if I had it to do over, I would educate myself more and ask more questions of the partner that we used for implementation.

Incentivized

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.

As compared to other CRM, this happens to be one of the best and most affordable as there are some cons, but the pros are great, and I have seen an increase in sales by using this platform. It works great for the sales process from start to end, like lead generation to closure.

Incentivized

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!

Incentivized

• It allows you to stay on top of reorder points for your existing customers. We call them attrition calls.
• When you orders flowing in, it makes it easier to follow up with buyers for other business units since you already have pre-existing business.
• As a sales organization, everyone in the company has visibility across the board into what is our profit at any given moment for the day, week, month and year. This keeps up on track for each of our goals.

Incentivized

• 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.