Salesforce CRM Analytics vs. InsideSales.com / XANT Predictive Pipeline (discontinued)

Salesforce CRM Analytics has amazing user interface and very responsive customer services providers.

The product has brilliant artificial intelligence systems that enhance its usability.

Software integration with other tools is perfect.

Ease in setting up and availability of unlimited tutorials and demos.

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.

• Interactive Dashboards, it [consists] of wide variety of charts
• Data from different sources can be easily integrated with it
• Security, it provides easy way to secure and share the information with the users
• Support actions like opening hyperlink etc
• Almost everything can be done from configuration
• Data can easily be managed from dataflow.

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.

• Implementation takes time and resources. It is a heavy lift to implement and at first, it can take a little bit of time to understand what you are looking at. But once it's implemented it's easy to get started.
• Without any BI expertise or resources available to your organization, the implementation of this is difficult. If you aren't used to BI tools and don't have an expert in house, the terminology can be difficult to understand at first.
• Their support is not on hand to help you if you encounter any issues, at least not on all the plans or the basic plans. Real-time support service is an add-on, so you'll need to be patient if you require help or pay extra money.
• More functionality for the tool is needed to compete with other heavyweights in the arena like Tableau, Qlik, and Microstrategy. Still lacks the robustness, functionality, and flexibility other competing products possess.

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 usability is absolutely worth the price. It help me to save tons of time working on raw data in Excel file. It also minimize the discrepancy in data format when there are multiple user inputting the data. Every data inputted in Salesforce is standardized, therefore it is very easy to keep track / generating performance report even though you are having more than 20 projects recorded in Salesforce Einstein Analytics.

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.

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

I have not come across any bad experiences with the support provided. Also, I observed regular updates have been implemented without breaking the tool. But in my opinion, Now Tableau CRM has huge market challenges with tools like Power BI and its spread

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

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

An implementation partner would certainly result in greater output in a more efficient amount of time. However, I have found implementation partners to be extremely expensive for the output received (at least working for a non-profit company they are frequently unaffordable). Internal implementation does help with usable output though since internal knowledge would better know the data architecture and business processes

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.

Compared to Tableau and quicksight, [Salesforce Einstein Analytics (formerly Wave Analytics)] is quite similar and the preference depends on which database you use. Quicksight is more useful if you are using aws service and Salesforce Einstein Analytics is better if you are planning to use the data in salesforce. Also, that is under the assumption no further transformation is needed.

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

• Sales CRM analytics enable us to conduct correlation analytics and real-time performance metrics.
• Use of the product enabled us to drive more revenue by the help of actionable insights leading to informed decisions making.
• The software has made it possible for us to automate administrative tasks and improve performance.

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.