SymTrain vs. InsideSales.com / XANT Predictive Pipeline (discontinued)

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.

• 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.

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.

• 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.

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.

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.

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

• 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.