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Cloud9 Analytics has made its debut with a pair of on-demand sales analytic applications that promise to "boost sales team effectiveness and increase sales," including a service that delivers key sales reports directly to sales managers' mobile devices, company officials say.


Already in use by over twenty Salesforce.com customers, Cloud9's analytic applications are billed by company officials as able to "transform Salesforce into a selling machine that accelerates sales cycles, uncovers new revenue opportunities, promotes
team selling and improves revenue predictability."

 

With "half of all reps missing their sales quotas and a 40 percent annual turnover rate," said Jim Dickie, Managing Partner of CSO Insights, "the sales function in most organizations is clearly broken. Though CRM systems were supposed to help, four out of
five sales VPs say CRM alone does nothing to increase sales."

 

Dickie characterized Cloud9 as "enabling CRM to finally deliver on
its original promise to increase sales."

The free Cloud9 Messenger application automatically generates weekly "What's Changed?" reports and sends them by e-mail to mobile devices. Cloud9 Messenger keeps sales managers up to date by detailing changes in forecast and pipeline, and calculates percent pipeline coverage for each team member, all without the need to install or configure any software.

 

In July Cloud9 announced that it closed a $5 million round of Series A funding. InterWest Partners led the round, with participation from Leapfrog Ventures.

 

The financing will enable the company to bring to market a family of on-demand applications in the burgeoning Sales Performance Management (SPM) category, company officials say.

 

The idea behind Cloud9 is for sales teams to learn from the past and predict the future to accelerate sales cycles, uncover new revenue opportunities, promote team selling, and improve revenue predictability -- "all without IT involvement," company officials say.

 

The company also announced that industry heavyweight Bruce Cleveland, a partner at InterWest Partners, has joined its board of directors. Directly prior to joining InterWest Partners, Cleveland held senior executive positions at CRM leader Siebel Systems.

 

At InterWest, Cleveland concentrates on investments in the software and services sector with a focus on analytic applications and software as a service (SaaS). "This company will do for analytics what Salesforce has done for CRM" Cleveland said.