Postwire is a SaaS product that enables marketers to capture and organize content that salespeople and account managers can use to create a personalized resource page.
Postwire merged with the Social Communications Company in 2015.
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.
Postwire is great if you have longer sales cycles requiring a lot of content sharing. Much better than email attachments. May not be well suited for transactional sales and shorter sales processes. I found it to work really well when sharing video content and large PDF documents.
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.
Uploading documents is very important and I haven't hit a max of megabites being uploaded.
User access to post-wire. You're able allow all parties to see it, you're able to make it private and there are some advanced settings where you can lock it or prevent people from downloading certain documents.
User Interface - it's simple and easy to use. Sometimes, with other solutions, when there are too many options, you get a little overwhelmed.
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.
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.
Unfortunately, the decision to renew does not fall on me. However, I have told the decision maker that I believe that we utilized Postwire incorrectly when we started. I believe that rather than sending links to our Postwire pages to prospective clients in our introduction email, they would be better suited to send after connecting and agreeing to send them additional information. That way, you can explain that it will be in the format of a Postwire link due to it's ease of use.
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
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.
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.
Clearside has less features and is very simple. It's convenient because it comes free with Sales Navigator. There is limited functionality and you can only have a certain number of different clear slides accessible at once. There is also a lot of other random LinkedIn content that shows up on ClearSlide, but I'm not a fan. I prefer paying with Postwire over free with LinkedIn.
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!
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.
