InsideSales.com / XANT Predictive Pipeline (discontinued)

Score8.4 out of 10

17 Reviews and Ratings

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Reviews

8 Reviews

Account Executive Experience

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 21, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Predictive Pipeline was being used by our sales team. This helped us move from working "old school" to a new up to speed clean system. The biggest thing it did was eliminate our use of spreadsheets. From here, we were able to have more visibility and clarity into our pipeline. This helped me strategically plan which account needed what and when that was to be done. Overall, the biggest thing for us was clarity and visibility.

Pros

Helps forecast your pipeline for you. Overall, this makes your planning and day-to-day tasks much easier.
You get to focus more on your pipeline due to it being easier to deal with and operate. This allows for strategic sales planning, which is vital for an organization.
You can determine what deals need to be saved, as well as risky deals that could hurt your pipeline.
You can look at what's changed in your pipeline and why that changed. This will allow you to grow as a sales professional.

Cons

Small kinks that need to be worked out. This is natural for a feature that is fairly new.

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited for companies using Excel Sheets and out of date systems. Great for startup companies that need clarity and visibility within their sales team. Finally, perfect for new and young sales professionals.

Richard Kersten

Corporate Account Executive in Sales at Bectran, Inc. (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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C9 - a good way to tame the SFDC visibility dragon

Rating: 9 out of 10

November 4, 2013

Pros

Funnel visibility. C9 gives managers a bird's eye view of their SFDC opportunities across their team. Everyone from the global SVP to the local managers can all have the have the same view of the numbers; they may not all agree on the forecast, but they are all starting from the same place.
Product views. C9 was able to develop custom pipeline views by product and by customer. These give our Product Management team a solid overview of what is going to be sold without having to go back to the Sales Reps.
Historical views. Since SFDC is an ever changing view of the funnel, it is impossible to go back in time and see what things looked like in prior periods. C9 has this capability, so we no longer have to have reams of Excel exports saved on our servers.
Reporting. C9 has a powerful query building engine that our adminstrator can use to build complex reports that are impossible to do in SFDC. We can also share them with non-SFDC and non-C9 users.

Cons

Load Time. The application can sometime take a few moments to load. With the recent release, I have noticed an improvement in this area.
Pricing. While the pricing model makes sense for managers/adminstrators, it is a bit cost prohibitive to have all of our Reps using the tool.
Forecasting. The forecasting module took a while to get used to. Unfortunately we lost sales managment mindshare with the effort, so we have to re-start it and see if we can be more successful. I expect the module will be improved when we do try again.

Likelihood to Recommend

Start with a clean sheet of paper and design how you want to interact with the sales pipeline; what you need to see and what you don't, how you would like to analyze the pipeline over time, and how you want others to view the information - when you map it all out, talk to C9 and let them show you how they can get you there.

Jason Myers

Vice President of Business Operations in Corporate at IPC Systems (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

C9. Icing on the cake

Rating: 9 out of 10

October 26, 2013

Pros

Customization. C9 customized their applications to match the fields and data in our CRM. This enabled advanced filtering outside of the standard data filters.
Continuous Improvements. C9 was always adding features and improving performance based on user feedback.
Customer support. C9 listened to our feedback, responded quickly to service issues, and consistently connected with customers via online seminars, an annual Customer Summit, and Customer Success Managers.
Analytics. C9 gave us the power to look at our pipeline at different moments in time, track changes, and measure KPIs we could not do with the CRM alone.

Cons

Their support ticketing system and support page could be improved. They were always responsive, but tracking the status of your ticket and knowing who it was assigned to was challenging.
There were some performance issues that seemed to come with application enhancements, but they were always communicating progress and working to resolve.

Likelihood to Recommend

Decide which metrics and key performance indicators are important for your business and ask C9 how they can help you track your progress. I recommend getting complete buy in from your most senior level sales manager before, during, and after evaluation.

Scott Johnson

Sales Operations Manager in Sales at First Advantage (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

C9 Review

Rating: 5 out of 10

October 17, 2013

Pros

Better pipeline visibility, accuracy, conversion would be goal, but the execution was pretty poor.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Steve Stevenson

Sr Systems Engineer in Information Technology at McMann and Tate Advertising, Marketing, Design and Sales. (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

C9 Analytics for Pipeline Management

Rating: 8 out of 10

September 10, 2013

Pros

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.

Cons

Platform stability: We have been experiencing outages once or twice a quarter where the system goes down completely for differing lengths of time. This has been a significant issue.
Data issues: We currently sync with Salesforce four times per day. However, there have been times where the data is not correct - it does not show the data from the latest sync.
The data is not live. Since there are multiple syncs with Salesforce, we do not have access to real-time data. We could have the system sync more frequently, but there is a cost associated with this.

Likelihood to Recommend

The company has recently brought in new executive management which may be a sign that there will be renewed focus on things like the stability issue.

Kristin Lucas

Sales Operations Manager in Sales at DocuSign, Inc. (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

C9 / Cloud9 lives up to its name

Rating: 9 out of 10

July 22, 2013

Pros

It gives you the ability to see where your pipeline was in the past and compare to how it is now. You can set queries that will allow you to show at risk deals, committed deals, etc.
This gives much better visibility for management to coach.

Cons

Writing the queries takes some skill. The wizard will walk you through it but it will take some time to learn.
Since it is outside of Salesforce, adoption is harder to drive.

Likelihood to Recommend

User Conference at Dreamforce is a must!

Brendan White

Sales Operations Manager in Sales at inContact (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Effective tool for managing forecast.

Rating: 8 out of 10

December 29, 2012

Pros

C9 helps sales and operations managers answer the question: What Changed?
It does this extremely well through ad hoc queries in the GUI, or through automatically emailed Excel reports (this had to be set up by C9 at the time)
It helps sales and operations manage the team's pipeline and forecast.

Cons

While the GUI was sufficient to work with day-to-day, exporting charts (i.e. to insert into PPT) was not supported at the time.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Director in Sales (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

Does a good job of sales forecasting.

Rating: 6 out of 10

October 27, 2012

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Director in Sales (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

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C9 - a good way to tame the SFDC visibility dragon

Rating: 9 out of 10

November 4, 2013

Pros

Funnel visibility. C9 gives managers a bird's eye view of their SFDC opportunities across their team. Everyone from the global SVP to the local managers can all have the have the same view of the numbers; they may not all agree on the forecast, but they are all starting from the same place.
Product views. C9 was able to develop custom pipeline views by product and by customer. These give our Product Management team a solid overview of what is going to be sold without having to go back to the Sales Reps.
Historical views. Since SFDC is an ever changing view of the funnel, it is impossible to go back in time and see what things looked like in prior periods. C9 has this capability, so we no longer have to have reams of Excel exports saved on our servers.
Reporting. C9 has a powerful query building engine that our adminstrator can use to build complex reports that are impossible to do in SFDC. We can also share them with non-SFDC and non-C9 users.

Cons

Load Time. The application can sometime take a few moments to load. With the recent release, I have noticed an improvement in this area.
Pricing. While the pricing model makes sense for managers/adminstrators, it is a bit cost prohibitive to have all of our Reps using the tool.
Forecasting. The forecasting module took a while to get used to. Unfortunately we lost sales managment mindshare with the effort, so we have to re-start it and see if we can be more successful. I expect the module will be improved when we do try again.

Likelihood to Recommend

Jason Myers

Vice President of Business Operations in Corporate at IPC Systems (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience