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Are you headed to DreamForce next week? The InsideView team will be there, demoing, speaking, and most importantly helping attendees learn more about using social data to drive ROI in their businesses. The show this year is packed with interesting companies, sessions and even fun contests. If you’re interested in the confluence of social media and the enterprise and how it all mashes together at Dreamforce, we’ve gone ahead and picked some of the more interesting ways to fill your Dreamforce dance card.
- Sales 2.0 Night – Get cocktails and network with Sales 2.0 leaders Thursday, November 19th, 6pm – 8pm at the Sculpturesite Gallery – RSVP here: http://tinyurl.com/y8nfbec
- Attend InsideView’s panel “How to Tap into Social Media to Drive Sales Results” Wednesday, Nov 18th @ 3:30 PM, at West Mezzanine 254
- Follow the #DF09 hashtag on Twitter
- Check out some of these cool vendors’ booths: Genius, Xactly, BlueWolf
- Party in the Cloud Tuesday 8-10pm at Two Bar. RSVP here: http://bit.ly/2pCMjV
- Get on the Napa Valley Wine Train: Dreamforce attendees get a special deal
- Enter our contest to win an Aston Martin for the weekend: Register here
- Join the mosh pit at the Black Crowes concert
- Share InsideView’s James Bond-themed Dreamforce video:
The tide is changing in the sales intelligence industry. Hundreds of businesses have moved on from legacy sales data providers such as Hoover’s and OneSource to InsideView’s Sales 2.0-powered Sales Intelligence solution, SalesView. And the pace of companies switching to our Sales 2.0 solution is accelerating. SalesView customers are achieving higher sales productivity, identifying additional customer engagement opportunities as well as realizing broader CRM adoption across their sales teams.
The recent proliferation of data sources is making it difficult for legacy data providers to keep up with this accelerating trend, leading to scaling issues. Data explosion is also resulting in conflicting or incorrect information between providers. Legacy sales data providers typically use a difficult-to-scale, editorial-based approach to offer static company and contact information. As a vendor-neutral intelligent data aggregator, InsideView is in a unique position to leverage its Smart Cloud platform to address these problems, ultimately delivering the most relevant and accurate sales intelligence.
Independent research corroborates the higher productivity levels of InsideView customers. According to Peter Ostrow, research director for sales effectiveness at The Aberdeen Group, “InsideView customers are achieving 32% better performance than non-customers, in terms of current lead conversion rates and hitting quota, and year-to-year growth in revenue and win/loss ratios.”
Check out what people are saying after they switch to our SalesView application:
“Our decision to switch to SalesView from Hoover’s was driven by our desire to consolidate multiple data sources into a single stream as well as improve the quality and relevance of the intelligence our business development team relies on daily to formulate target account strategy,” said James Warren, director, global business development at RightNow Technologies. “Another key factor in our decision was the accurate prospect information SalesView delivers.”
“Since our switch to SalesView earlier this year, call preparation has become much more efficient, and conversations with prospects a lot more informed,” stated Eric Johnson, vice president of worldwide sales operations at Serena Software.
“The primary reason for our decision to replace Hoover’s with SalesView was its tight, easy-to-use integration with Salesforce.com,” said John Knotwell, senior director of sales operations at inContact. “The single point of access is a significant sales productivity enhancer, enabling fast and effective prospecting and account planning.”
“After an in-depth evaluation, we selected SalesView as our standard sales intelligence platform primarily due to its breadth of company and contact coverage as well as the tight integration with Salesforce.com,” said Neil Florio director of marketing for Qlikview. “The watch lists and associated smart alerts deliver the sales team timely and relevant information about our prospects. And, as an added bonus, the Salesforce.com integration has helped increase CRM adoption within our team and improve our overall CRM data quality.”
“Our trial with InsideView demonstrated significant value over Hoover’s based on head-to-head tests in several active campaigns. The depth of contacts was far superior to Hoover’s and Smart Agents™ brought relevant news about target accounts directly to our sales team,” said Glenn Haertel, executive vice president at SynQ Solutions. “SalesView’s tight integration into Microsoft Dynamics CRM was another key factor in our decision-making. We adopted SalesView even though we still had six months left on the Hoover’s contract.”
We’re pleased to announce that Innotas, an on-demand IT governance solution, has successfully deployed SalesView. In the year since Innotas began utilizing SalesView they have registered incredible results, including a more than 150% growth in year-over-year revenue, a 200% increase in call volume, 240% increase in transactions and nearly 1,000% increase in customers contacted!
Kevin Kern, Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Innotas noted about SalesView, “Before deploying SalesView, we were experiencing the all-too-common problems that sales teams face: Inaccurate and incomplete data, conflicting customer list information, and insufficient and redundant prospecting activity meant there was no single source of ‘truth’ in our data. SalesView has corrected these issues and contributed greatly to our tremendous revenue, transaction and pipeline growth over the past year.”
SalesView has helped Innotas create a systematic way to manage sales territories more effectively and deliver improved information and visibility into opportunities. The application also simplified the prospecting process and improved cross-selling with Innotas’ existing customers.
As Kern also noted, “Simply put, better data means warmer sales calls — and that’s huge.”
It’s tremendous to see what Innotas has been able to achieve in its target market with SalesView. We’re looking forward to hearing more about their continued growth and SalesView’s role in achieving excellent results.
What a year it’s been! We’re really excited to announce today that InsideView has experienced significant growth since the same quarter as last year, including a revenue growth of 294% over the third quarter of 2008. It’s been an extremely busy quarter with the announcement of partnerships with top tier information providers, such as Thomson Reuters, Capital IQ (a Standard & Poor’s company), Cortera and NetProspex, as well the launch of the InsideView Smart Cloud™platform.
The InsideView Smart Cloud is the first sales intelligence solution to allow plug-and-play addition and validation of content, a critical component for keeping up with the constantly changing information sources across the Web. To read more about the platform, check out TechCrunchIT’s article on the launch here.
Overall, we’ve seen great growth across our business during the third quarter. Some additional financial highlights include:
– 163% bookings growth over same quarter last year
– 294% revenue growth over same quarter last year
– 250% customer growth over same quarter last year
– 235% seat growth over same quarter last year
And we’re moving right along. Be on the lookout for exciting news coming from us soon.
We’re here at the Fairmont Hotel in Chicago for the Sales 2.0 Conference and just listened to the ‘Sales Lead Management 2.0 – Best Practices for a Profitable Lead Pipeline’ session. Panelist David Fitzgerald, executive vice president of sales, marketing and services for Brainshark, gave an engaging presentation on Brainshark’s very successful performance last quarter and savvy use of Sales 2.0 technologies, such as SalesView.
Some of the business challenges that Fitzgerald noted that Brainshark had been experiencing prior to their accelerated sales growth included:
- Increasing Sales Productivity – how to achieve more effective sales prospecting.
- Increasing Marketing Campaign effectiveness
- Improving the quality of the data in SFDC
- Named Account Management – Brainshark had a need for hierarchy information, access to named account information and demographics for territory account assignments
Brainshark made the decision in February 2009 to begin using InsideView as their sales intelligence provider and during its first six months of SalesView deployment they have achieved more than a 320% return on investment (ROI) and a 12% increase in their pipeline! Some of the specific reasons that he attributed SalesView helping to increase Brainshark’s sales productivity included its easy-to-use integration with SFDC, as well as the quick access the application provides to high level contacts, social media buzz, competitive news and account hierarchies. He also noted that SalesView increased their marketing campaign effectiveness through the improved quality and quantity of leads and demographic data it provided.
To illustrate the success that Brainshark has experienced with InsideView, David gave the example of a significant deal that one of his reps used to close a deal with Wolters Kluwer, a five billion dollar information and business intelligence company. Tim McDonough, strategic account manager at Brainshark, recorded a 2-3 minute testimonial (using the Brainshark technology of course, very cool idea). In it he highlights how SalesView helped him quickly find key executives’ contact information and build a customized executive presentation based on intelligence found by SalesView Smart Agents and the new ‘Buzz’ tab. Throughout the 10 week sales cycle, Brainshark also continued to receive automated alerts via SalesView, keeping him informed about any key events at the company.
InsideView testimonial by Brainshark strategic account manager Tim McDonough
Brainshark’s success with SalesView is reflective of the type of sales productivity and performance gains that we are seeing across InsideView’s client base. We are very excited to see our clients utilizing SalesView in such effective ways and turning the potential of Sales 2.0 technology like ours into solid success metrics.
They are all improving the CRM industry, according to CRM Magazine’s 2009 CRM Market Awards, which were announced today. InsideView was recognized in a short-list with Google and Facebook as ‘Rising Stars’ for the CRM industry.
InsideView named CRM Rising Star
We are very happy about this recognition of the impact that our Sales 2.0 technology is having on the CRM industry. It’s exciting to be among such acclaimed company and rather fitting, as InsideView has been one of the key players to make relevant data from Facebook and Google’s properties accessible and useful to CRM users through our sales intelligence application, SalesView. Facebook and Google have been instrumental in opening up broad new opportunities to better inform salespeople and we are committed to continuing to build the best system possible to aggregate the right data from these and many other sources and delivering it to CRM users when it is most useful to them.
Lauren McKay’s recent article on destinationCRM.com, “Mashups Make You Smarter” , hits on a lot of interesting and important points for the future of Business Intelligence (BI) technology. McKay based much of her post off a recent research report titled “Mighty Mashups: Do-It-Yourself Business Intelligence For The New Economy,” written by Jim Kobielus, senior analyst with Forrester Research. The report details some of the ways that BI mashups are improving busy professionals’ ability to get the information they need faster and in the way they want it. Kobelius notes in the post “People want the power to get all the intelligence they need, and they want it all ASAP.”
It’s great to see this type of attention being given to the convergence of Web 2.0 and professional intelligence technology. We routinely see our users improving their workflow and performance through the speed, accuracy and relevance of the information delivered through our own Sales Intelligence mashup, SalesView, and certainly agree with Kobelius’ observations about the benefits of intelligence mashups. Some of the key advantages that Kobelius recognizes from mashup BI technologies are:
- Unclog the BI bottleneck: Delivering traditional analytical applications is expensive and takes time — both for IT and for end users.
- Cut BI costs: Self-service BI reduces the need for report requests and for maintenance. Also, it provides a less expensive option for small companies without a lot of IT resources. Users can tweak pre-existing report templates that come bundled within BI environment
- Enhance BI decision support: “Drag-and-drop visualization tools to allow users and build new reports and make modifications from data already there within the corporate data warehouse,” Kobielus says. “Basically the user can have what he or she needs with very little muss or fuss and extremely low costs.”
There are some great real-world examples of how Web 2.0 can be leveraged to improve business prospects in Barney Beal’s recent article “Social sales emerging as an opportunity within social CRM”. The article references Jellyvision Labs, who uses SalesView to find business opportunities from across the social media hemisphere. One particular example that Josh Braun, vice president of business development for Jellyvision, gave was when a CMO at one Fortune 500 company was blogging and tweeting about some demand generation ideas he was considering, which then popped up in Josh’s SalesView account.
“We started a campaign, said ‘hey we noticed you were working on these initiatives, here are some thoughts, and a taste of what we do,’” Braun said. “He wrote back immediately within 15 minutes. We’re in the door, so to speak.”
It’s clear that how information is being distributed, consumed and utilized is changing drastically with the advent of social media. This is an exciting time for professionals who have ever craved better, faster information. There are some amazing ways that companies are now figuring out how the constantly increasing amount of information on Web can best be identified, filtered and delivered to the right people at the right time.
