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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 Consequently, innovation and market leadership have been replaced by layoffs and business stagnation.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
Today is a special day for InsideView and the more than 75,000 sales professionals across 1,000 companies currently using our Sales Intelligence technology. Foundation Capital the investor behind great companies like Netflix, Chegg, Financial Engines, Rearden Commerce, MobileIron, Coverity, and SimplyHired is leading this latest round of Series C funding.
Along with Foundation Capital, Emergence Capital Partners, Rembrandt Venture Partners and Greenhouse Capital Partners our existing investors have also contributed to this latest round. Having the backing of such strong investors will help InsideView continue to build upon our leading sales intelligence application, designed to empower sales professionals with actionable intelligence to find new prospects and engage with decision makers.
“Sales professionals are being overwhelmed by vast amounts of customer data, and they need help in distilling this data into highly targeted sales intelligence,” says Umberto Milletti. “Our technology helps sales teams be more productive, successful, and increases company’s top-line revenue by at least ten percent. The powerful sales intelligence we provide enables social selling and allows sales professional to find opportunities, establish relationships, build trust, and close business faster.”
We will use the new funds to expand distribution partnerships, which will accelerate the availability of InsideView to the more than 10 million B2B sales people worldwide. We will also continue to invest in market education, with innovative programs like the recently launched Social Selling University, set up to educate and train sales professionals in how to leverage social media to increase sales effectiveness. Participation in the Social Selling University has been staggering in its first month, demonstrating the need for companies to embrace social media in their sales and marketing efforts.
“The sales process has dramatically changed with the availability and adoption of social media and Web 2.0 tools by both sellers and buyers. There’s great benefit in recognizing the scale and reach of sales team networks, and in the new ways customers are making buying decisions,” said Anneke Seley, CEO and founder of Phone Works and coauthor of Sales 2.0. “Social Selling University is a timely response to forward-thinking sales professionals’ quest to learn about a more informed and connected customer. This program is essential in helping sales executives, managers and reps understand how to use social media to build stronger relationships with Customer 2.0 and as a result, win more business.”
InsideView gives sales teams the most comprehensive, current, and easy-to-use intelligence on any company and individual by aggregating data from 25,000+ news, editorial, and social media sources. This intelligence can be delivered directly and seamlessly into all major CRM platforms (including Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce.com, SAP and SugarCRM) to provide the most accurate, relevant and complete sales intelligence for greater sales productivity.
Always a great event to be a part of, SXSW in Austin is a place that showcases innovation and thought leadership. Umberto Milletti the CEO of InsideView gave a compelling presentation during the event discussing the use of social media for sales teams the title of the session was called “Social Espionage & CRM: Selling to Customer 2.0″
Monitoring. Listening. Tracking. Measuring. No, this isn’t a covert CIA operation: It’s the way brands and businesses are marketing…and selling…to YOU, Customer 2.0. Is it creepy? Regardless, it’s also a reality, and it’s working tremendously, as well as being adopted at a rapid rate by everyone from your local coffee shop to Best Buy to enterprises like Adobe. From social CRM to mobile-social tech to community management, 2011 is the year of full-blown execution after, well, two years of panels discussing ‘the future of social business.’ Come hear about the truly effective processes and best practices around social customer relationship management and intelligence, and walk away with an actual plan for your business in social selling and marketing.
In true SXSW fashion the attendees were very vocal online about the content and session.
There was a lot of interest by attendees to get a copy of this presentation and we aim to please. A couple hours after Umberto was done with the session, we posted the slides on the InsideView Slideshare account and the response was amazing! The great people at Slideshare noticed and we got added into their Business and Management Spotlight.
If you are an Inside Sales professional or a sales leader, you should already know about the AA-ISP Inside Sales Leadership Summit 2011. This event will feature over 30 of the nation’s leading Inside Sales experts who will deliver presentations and discussions focused on the issues most critical to today’s Inside Sales Leaders and Managers.
As the only conference dedicated exclusively to the “front lines” of Inside Sales, this event will bring together Inside Sales Professionals to learn, share, and network. Inside Sales 2011 will deliver informative, thought-provoking presentations designed to help Inside Sales individuals, teams, and organizations.
This one day conference will include a variety of general sessions, interactive break-out sessions, and lively panel discussions featuring some of the nation’s leading Inside Sales experts. Focus will be on addressing issues critical to the success of today’s Inside Sales Professionals while providing key sales tactics and techniques. In addition, the Solution Provider Exhibit will offer attendees the opportunity to meet with leading inside sales vendors.
The conference will be packed full of innovative, practical ideas and best practices. Inside Sales Professionals will leave exhilarated, enthused, and armed with new knowledge, techniques, and tools designed to improve and enhance sales performance.
Umberto Milletti will be a Featured Speaker at the event along with some other great speakers like Tom Scontras of Glance Networks, Steve Richards of Vorsight Sales Training and many, many more.
Increase Inside Sales Productivity with Social Intelligence
Cold calling is changing to warm calling, as prospects are demanding more relevance from sales reps. Find out how to harness social intelligence to increase your sales productivity and accelerate sales cycles. Learn how to bring social selling into your sales organization to improve prospecting effectiveness and close rates.Time: Thursday, February 10 from 4;15 p.m – 4:45 p.m
The AA-ISP Inside Sales Leadership Summit 2011 is less than two weeks away and it’s not too late to register. InsideView will also have a booth at the event and we look forward to talking with you about our product or ways that we have maximized our sales productivity internally to double our revenue in a record breaking year.
What will the software industry look like in 3, 5, even 10 years from now?
Cloud computing and social media are the two very significant trends that will shape the future of the software industry for years to come. Core cloud applications (email, CRM, ERP, etc.) will become an “operating system” that nearly all companies will have in place. These business applications focus on workflow automation – bringing in process efficiencies – and are sufficient to run a manufacturing or process business. However, businesses are increasingly delivering services, where employee knowledge and intelligence are the keys to success. This is where social media, business intelligence and collaboration technology becomes relevant, and crucial. It is designed to make employees smarter and more effective, not just to automate their jobs.
The big challenge with social media & collaboration is that it creates very, very large quantities of information. If you include systems-generated streams, the amount of information and data quickly becomes overwhelming. Software companies need to effectively tap into this growing source of “social intelligence,” developing technologies capable of monitoring the information stream for important and relevant intelligence. For example, a social conversations about their brands, products and people that might give users new insights and detail otherwise not available through traditional news sources. Software companies then must tackle the quantity-versus-quality problem by effectively filtering and analyzing the large quantities of available information. Lastly, they need to deliver the most relevant and useful intelligence to end-users in the easiest-to-consume manner: directly within the workflow of the business applications they enrich.
Of course, end-user technologies have to be just as easy to deploy as they are to use, both for the end-users and IT decision-makers. The days of hard to use, difficult to implement software, will quickly fade. A new, two-pronged software distribution model is emerging to improve adoption: first, make the application as widely available as possible, promoting ‘bottom-up’ adoption, which in turn drives ‘top-down’ implementation. As an example, at InsideView, we created a free version of our sales intelligence application to facilitate broader adoption and distribution. I believe the “Freemium model” will become more and more prevalent in the software industry. But even without the universal availability of an app, the single-most important principle is making it easy for a decision maker to deploy with little effort across the target user base – and making it seamless, customizable and most applicable to the organization.
And what customer demands and business trends will drive changes in software products, how they’re developed, and the industry that provides them?
Social media is driving significant change in software, which is only going to accelerate over the next decade. Let’s start with the buyer. We are now selling to a new breed of prospect that I call Customer 2.0. These are socially engaged and well-informed buyers. They have abundant visibility into the companies they consider doing business with (products/services, pricing, competitive strengths and weaknesses, customer satisfaction, etc.). They’ve done their homework. And not surprisingly, this new breed of buyer expects vendors to be more educated about their business, too. They want to be engaged in targeted and relevant conversations about how to solve specific business challenges and urgent needs, not just receive a generic pitch. Social media changes the dynamics with prospective employees, business partners and vendors, enabling significantly greater visibility into business and personal aspects that can shape relationships and drive business decisions.
By listening to social media, companies have the opportunity to learn what is being said about and by their various stakeholders and audiences. This provides unique insights that aren’t available through more traditional sources. Of course, it’s a huge task to monitor the social conversation, filter out the noise to hone in what’s relevant. That’s why I believe any “external-facing” business application that targets customers, partners, vendors or employees will have to incorporate social intelligence directly into its workflow.
Unfortunately, many of these solutions have remained mostly in the ranks of workflow automation. This makes them useful for automating structured processes and reports for management, but not for enabling effective relationship building and engagement with their intended audiences. I strongly believe that the next-generation of software applications will have to tap into social intelligence within application workflow to bring in a new level of engagement and authenticity into the relationships these applications are intended to manage – and in the process improve business productivity. Next generation apps will also need to associate these new social insights with what we already know about our customers, prospects, vendors and employees to create a 360-degree view of these relationships.
This need for greater intelligence is a key tenet upon which to build any successful business application for sales, marketing, customer service, finance or human resources. All these professionals need to “get smarter” in their interactions with their constituents. Put simply, integrated social intelligence becomes an essential enabler for successful businesses engagements as we enter the new era of social media.
Original post made on the SIIA blog written by Nate Phillips. The Software & Information Industry Association is the principal trade association for the software and digital content industries. SIIA provides global services in government relations, business development, corporate education and intellectual property protection to the leading companies that are setting the pace for the digital age.
There are many predictions being made about whats going to happen in 2011. Social Media Today has posted the B2B Marketing Predictions of 2011, Social Media B2B has even given their predictions on B2B Social Media in 2011. There is even a prediction on the End of B2B Sales & Marketing as We Know It. With all of these predictions focused on the marketing side of B2B we wanted to go over some predictions about the changes to be found in 2011 in a B2B sales environment.
Recently Greg Brush, InsideView’s Vice President of Sales spoke on a webinar with the TAS Group. You should listen to the entire webinar for some great insights of how sales cycles have changed over the past couple of years and how to adjust for them.
One of the trends we see growing quickly is the desire for using social media during the sales process. 68% of the companies that attended this webinar said that their social media approach for sales needed a lot of work. There is a fundamental shift taking place in the sales world in the context of customer 2.0.
This is very compelling since we already know that customers are not going to their vendors for information as much as in years past. Social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter and others have given the power to the customer to have conversations with peers and other customers about what products work and which ones fall short.
Social media will be a tool used by more sales teams in 2011
It’s more important than ever to have a sales team using technology to identify new opportunities and get involved in conversations that can turn questions into customers. LinkedIn is a tool most sales people are already using in some capacity but their profiles are rusty and they are not engaging people who are asking for advice. Sales teams that make an effort to use LinkedIn as a tool to find and help new prospects will see a much greater return than 100 phone calls becuase all of these conversations are visible to hundreds of thousands of people that may need the same advice.
Social media training will grow in 2011
After years of social media training being thrown around marketing departments with new experts being created daily it seems, very little has been done to bring this to sales teams. There are some great thought leaders out there that have been talking about Social Selling for a while and its about to be their time to shine. Sales managers are looking at their training budgets and prioritizing for more education on using social media. We will see more sales people engaging on LinkedIn, creating Twitter profiles and producing web videos in some cases. This is evident internally as well as with conversations with our customers that have approached us.
Sales Intelligence will be a focus of more sales teams
Data is becoming a commodity. Between Jigsaw, email lists and other providers, contact data is something that most companies now have relatively easy access to. A few years ago this was more than enough to throw a few sales people at and start having conversations. Times have changed and sales people are not having the same success with cold calling and email campaigns. Sales intelligence is the difference between being just another sales person or being the person contacting a prospect to solve a problem they are already having. Sales people will know who is having what problems based on the intelligence gathered from the thousands of news sources, blogs and social networks connected with that company or employee. Hear Umberto Milletti talk about this at a VIP event.
We see most of this already happening especially in the technology sector. There will obviously be laggards in certain industries that don’t implement a social selling strategy and unless their markets don’t use computers, they will be feeling the financial belt tighten as sales screech to a halt in the not to distant future.
Are you already using social media for sales? Tell us about it or ask some questions in the comments below.
After a little wait and some help by people voting up the topic, InsideView was accepted as a speaker at the 2011 SXSW Interactive conference in Austin TX. We believe we have some very compelling content based around the subject of social selling and how to take the creepy factor out of using social media to engage with customers. Here is the synopsis of the topic.
Social Espionage and Selling to Customer 2.0
Monitoring. Listening. Tracking. Measuring. No, this isn’t a covert CIA operation: It’s the way brands and businesses are marketing…and selling…to YOU, Customer 2.0. Is it creepy? Regardless, it’s also a reality, and it’s working tremendously, as well as being adopted at a rapid rate by everyone from your local coffee shop to Best Buy to enterprises like Adobe. From social CRM to mobile-social tech to community management, 2011 is the year of full-blown execution after, well, two years of panels discussing ‘the future of social business.’ Come hear about the truly effective processes and best practices around social customer relationship management and intelligence, and walk away with an actual plan for your business in social marketing and selling.
Questions Answered
- What are the BEST PRACTICES of social CRM that matter today?
- What are the SUCCESSES and FAILURES companies have experiences in the past two years?
- If you could employ just THREE social CRM tactics at your company, what should they be?
- Where should you NOT put your money and time when it comes to social CRM?
- How can you really get your teams to ADOPT any social CRM tools and processes?
Are you attending SXSW 2011?
We have seen a great response to a series of posts by Umberto Milletti the CEO of InsideView. Starting with a post from September where he discussed the difference between sales data and sales intelligence. He explained that Customer 2.0 is much more internet savvy than most companies want to believe and therefore companies need to rethink the way they attract and nurture new prospects. Sales people that used to rely only on data (company name, revenue, size…) are falling behind companies that have learned how to harness this data and turn it into actionable intelligence.
In a recent post on Social Media B2B by Umberto following along this topic he goes one step further to explain how a companies CRM should be playing a larger role in sales enablement. A companies entire sales methodology needs to make a shift to include intelligence from social media into driving more revenue.
InsideView is determined on building products for sales people and companies that can make this transition easier. Sales teams that have relevant information right in their face through the CRM they are already accustomed to using makes dealing with Customer 2.0 a lot more seamless. You can learn more by downloading a free copy of SalesView or watching one of our SalesView demonstrations.
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.
