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Many of you joined Hoovers with a mission to change the world, and you did just that in the late 90’s. However, in recent years your parent company has not fostered that original spirit. Consequently, innovation and market leadership have been replaced by layoffs and business stagnation.
Meanwhile, at InsideView we have continued to invest in our products and our people, growing our business at over 100% year-over-year. To keep up with our rapid growth, we need to find the most passionate, competent and innovative employees. I believe that many of you fit that bill, and I’m writing this open letter to invite you to join InsideView. You will find a fun, vibrant environment with very bright people, and an open culture that fosters collaboration and innovation.
We are passionate about our products and our customers. Last month’s data.com announcement made it clear to me that D&B has given up on Hoover’s in the critically important sales & marketing ecosystem, and that customers will need to look elsewhere to find sophisticated sales intelligence. I believe most of them will decide that InsideView is their best path to productivity, joining scores of Hoover’s customers that have already chosen to switch to InsideView.
We are looking for talent in every part of our business and in several locations. The positions include Sales, Customer Success, Marketing, and Content. Locations are in the field, at our San Francisco headquarters, and for our soon-to-be-opened Austin office (I love Austin’s entrepreneurial culture, and I see the opportunity for Austin to become a main hub for InsideView).
If you have a passion for innovation, customer success and are looking for a vibrant work environment, please email us at beyondhoovers@insideview.com for a confidential conversation. We’d also be glad to have you talk to any of the ex-Hoover’s employees who now work at InsideView, where they have found new opportunities to grow and delight customers.
We have just begun in delivering our vision, one where customer intelligence makes all customer-facing employees dramatically more productive. If you share my passion, we’d love to talk to you.
Umberto Milletti @umbertom
CEO & Founder, InsideView
I’m having to hold on to the railing as I go up and down steps, as my legs are still recovering from riding my bicycle in the Death Ride over the weekend. It is clearly the hardest athletic event I have ever participated in, and two simple stats make the point:
- 129 miles at a altitude of (6,000 – 9,000 ft)
- 15,000 feet of climbing (like riding from sea level to the top of Mount Whitney)
During the over 11 hours I spent on my bike, I had the opportunity to think about the similarities between participating in such an event, and founding a company.
When I tell friends about the Death Ride, they usually give me the “why the hell would you put yourself through that?” look. I must say I don’t have a very rational answer.
Other friends who are bike riders give me the “good for you, I know it’s going to hurt but I understand why you do it” look. They don’t need a rational explanation; they understand that there is an irrational drive behind pushing oneself beyond “normal” limits (and the Death Ride for a 45-year-old man is beyond those limits).
I get very similar reactions when I talk to people about founding and building companies. If you look rationally at the risk/effort/reward ratios, there are much better and more efficient ways to make a living. If one wants to optimize for compensation, becoming an investment banker or venture capitalist is a much saner choice. If one is looking for good risk/reward ratios, joining an established and proven organization is a much safer way to go. What drives me to start companies is the same “let’s see where the limit is, and push beyond it” desire that puts me on a bike for 11 and a half hours.
Whether it’s start-ups or cycling, one of the elements that make both experiences great is the camaraderie. At InsideView, I am surrounded by people with my same desire to create technologies that increase productivity and efficiency in businesses across the globe. On the Death Ride, I rode with another 3,000 riders from all over the country. For me it’s the opportunity to collaborate and be around like-minded people that keeps me coming back to the office…and to the bike.
Earlier this week I spent the afternoon at Altitude 2010, hosted by HP and Box.net, where I had the pleasure to be around Silicon Valley’s best and brightest to discuss the future of Cloud Computing in the Enterprise.
Every speaker had the same belief, that the move to cloud computing is inevitable, because of its superior value, scalability and availability at a reduced cost. There was also broad agreement that we will continue to see a consumerization of enterprise technology, drawing on the best aspects of consumer products (user-friendly, viral, freemium…) to increase the value that corporations get from IT.
While these trends seem unavoidable, the pace of adoption is likely to remain measured. Unlike consumers who quickly flock to new, better things, corporations are deliberate and often slow to adopt.
Putting one and one together, I thought: what an opportunity! An inevitable trend that evolves slowly gives those who are not timid a competitive advantage. In the world of sales, that advantage is the opportunity to be amongst the first to adopt a new trend, and to show our customers and prospects that we are ahead of the curve. Companies want to do business with people and companies who lead, and not with laggards.
Are you spending enough time to understand the trends in your market (in my case they include Sales 2.0, Customer 2.0, Social Media for Sales, Social CRM, Data vs. Intelligence)? Do you have an opinion on how they will impact your market? Do you make your opinions known (via email, blogs, twitter…)? Do you know how to translate those views into a relevant outreach that will get the attention of your prospects and customers?
If you want to be viewed as adding value to your prospects and customers, the answer has to be resounding yes for all of the above.
The B2B sales and marketing landscape is shifting, adjusting to the rapid advancements in social networking and online buyer behavior. From start-ups to multi-billion dollar organizations, the industry is facing the hard fact that traditional, old school methods of marketing have become largely ineffective. Traditional online marketing tactics are losing traction at increasing rates. It’s now all about trust and “heartfelt marketing.”
Traditional tactics are being replaced by new approaches designed to catapult prospecting and retention efforts into never before seen realms, connecting with customers while providing more transparent access to information. As part of this shift, marketing must focus on sales enablement, to help sales professionals better communicate with and understand whom they are selling to.
The dramatic changes in online buyer behavior are driving a need for adaptation – as the Customer 2.0 spends more time online engaged with social media and networks, they create more information about themselves and the products they use, which can really help sales organizations engage more effectively with this new type of prospect. The Customer 2.0 will always lead the way, but savvy Sales 2.0 professionals can keep pace with efficiency-driven solutions.
At InsideView, our sales productivity technology allows sales teams to gather real-time insight about their prospects and customers. Information is aggregated and organized from thousands of sites, providing any and all information about a company and the employees within, including new hires, employee transfers (or termination) and news. With this information, the sales and marketing teams can drive sales through social media, tapping into social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to keep pace and communicate with the Customer 2.0.
The fact is that “old ways” of marketing are dying.
The impact of mass marketing and mindless telemarketing is drying up. Those that will find a way to enter the same playing field as their (increasingly social) customers will thrive. Those that stick with archaic methods will wither.
John Blossom, probably the smartest analyst to follow the convergence of technology and content, has written a very thoughtful analysis of Salesforce.com’s Content as a Platform (aka Data as a Service) strategy.
John poses an interesting, and I think fundamental, question: who will own the content (e.g. professional profiles, company intelligence…), the platform companies or the information companies? I think the trend clearly points towards the inevitable conclusion that business content is quickly moving from information providers (editorial models like Dow Jones, D&B) to platforms, mostly user-generated and user-controlled (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Profiles, Jigsaw, Netprospex).
The next question is, in my mind: who owns the content, the platform vendor or the user? And if it’s the user, which platforms will they choose? I think it’ll be the platforms that people trust, and the corporate trust factor will become a bigger issue in the user-generated content world.
One inevitable conclusion is that business data will become more and more abundant, which will force the market to focus on the next two areas: which data is most accurate, and what is relevant to me from this boiling ocean of information? The companies that crack the accuracy and relevance challenges (the latter is likely to be job/context-specific) will be the ones that create real value in a world where data is abundant and attention is scarce. And this is where all our focus will continue to be.
Today Salesforce.com announced the intent to acquire Jigsaw. These are two great companies, and two of our best partners, who are coming together to provide better access to and management of data. With this announcement, two disruptors are joining forces, and this will accelerate the inevitable trend towards business and contact data becoming a commodity.
Jigsaw has been shaking up the data world since its inception, using crowdsourcing to make available for free contact and company data that historically companies have paid for. Jim Fowler, Jigsaw’s founder & CEO, talks about the inevitable commoditization of data in this post.
Salesforce.com also has a long history of disrupting traditional markets like SFA and CRM, by bringing the SaaS delivery model to the market and reducing costs. Through this acquisition, Salesforce.com and Jigsaw will accelerate the commoditization of data by lowering distribution barriers. Other traditional data providers will be forced to enter the data-in-the-cloud marketplace, increasing the quantity and availability of data.
What does this all mean for you? It means that contact and company data will become easier and cheaper to get. As the title of this post hints, this marriage will ” help free data” not only in the sense of “freely available” but also “available for free”. That’s the good news. It will also accelerate the proliferation of different, often conflicting data. That’s the bad news. And it’s the reason we believe that making make sense of it all will become increasingly important – which is the basic premise of our Smart Cloud platform.
For the world InsideView lives in (sales productivity and sales intelligence), the medium term impact will be an increased focus on effective aggregation and relevance filtering. Attention scarcity, rather than data scarcity, continues to be the major limiting factor for sales professionals. More data does not drive sales productivity, relevant intelligence at the right time in the right place does.
This announcement marks an important day for the Sales 2.0 market and validates our belief that the answer to the productivity challenge revolves around intelligent aggregation and relevance filtering.
