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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.
We’re excited about a lot of things right now – from the overall big picture, like the increasingly innovative things technology holds for the enterprise to the productive impact that, say, reading an uncovered blog post might have for an individual sales professional. So we are pleased to be featured in the latest newsletter of SmartSellingTools, which takes a keen eye to things that make sales smarter in any and every way.
The question “how well do you know your prospects?” is not just a rhetorical headline, it’s the baseline of good selling. That task, however, becomes increasingly difficult as the amount to know — and what of that amount is important to know — keeps expanding. We look forward to serving this need in an easy and efficient way sales pros everywhere.
Today we announced multiple new partnerships with best-of-breed information providers, including Thomson Reuters, Capital IQ (a Standard & Poor’s company), Cortera and NetProspex. These new content partnerships will further increase the depth of information that SalesView intelligently aggregates and delivers to our users and significantly expands our coverage for international companies as well as small and mid-sized businesses (SMB). Additionally, today we are introducing the InsideView Smart Cloud™, the first sales intelligence solution to allow plug-and-play addition and validation of content.
We are very excited to be introducing these improvements to SalesView’s technology and content sources, as continuing challenges from the slow economy and information overload are making real-time, comprehensive and accurate intelligence more valuable than ever to professionals who need to be able to capitalize on the information constantly being added to the Web.
“The InsideView Smart Cloud makes it easy to tap into practically any content source, and delivers concise, relevant and accurate sales intelligence at the point of need – directly within the SalesView CRM mash-up,” said Gordon Anderson, vice president of content at InsideView and information industry veteran who is also a former VP and Editor-in-Chief of Hoover’s noted in the official announcement today.
The components of the InsideView Smart Cloud include Smart Agents™, Smart Connections™ and Smart Records™ technologies:
• Smart Agents identify compelling business events and key company insights from the thousands of data sources SalesView monitors, and notify sales reps in real-time via email or mobile devices.
• Smart Connections surface the hidden relationships that exist between sales reps and their prospects through colleagues, previous employers, and existing customers. SalesView also integrates seamlessly with LinkedIn and Facebook, letting salespeople tap into their relationships on these platforms.
• Smart Records technology generates a single, composite record – a Smart Record – by comparing similar company and contact profiles from multiple sources, identifying likely matches, and reconciling any conflicting data points.
We’re excited to announce today that the second quarter of business produced record performance for InsideView. There was tremendous growth in revenue, customers and users, which is a strong testament to the value of Sales 2.0 technology. InsideView’s products are now used by over 15,000 sales professionals and 1,700 companies worldwide!
Last quarter was also momentous for product development, as we launched our real-time social media monitoring tool Buzz Tab for SalesView. The Buzz Tab was the first instance where relevant intelligence aggregated from Twitter and Google Blog Search, along with Compete.com Web statistics, became accessible directly in all major CRM applications.
“We are extremely pleased about InsideView’s continued growth, especially over the last business quarter,” said Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView. “InsideView’s Sales 2.0 technology, which enables companies to do more with less by accelerating sales cycles and increasing sales productivity, has proven to be extremely valuable for sales teams in this challenging economic climate. Our team has continued to innovate and produce the industry’s most effective Sales Intelligence application, and our performance reflects that dedication.”
Financial highlights from Q2 performance include:
• 214% bookings growth over same quarter last year;
• 377% revenue growth over same quarter last year;
• 233% customer growth over same quarter last year;
• 260% seat growth over same quarter last year.
I am happy to see the “Free” debate expand to the enterprise (Aaron Levie of Box.net analyzes the applicability of the Free model to Enterprise Software on TechCrunch). The ensuing debate has strong advocates in the Freemium camp, as well as those who believe Freemium is a stupid model.
I believe Enterprise Freemium can work, but not for everyone, and only if executed just right. To be clear on how I define success for the Free model, the two principle reasons I see for invoking the Free strategy are: (1) Cost effective branding and awareness, which hopefully lead to (2) More revenue based on the Free-to-paid conversion rate.
While there are a number of promising companies that have adopted an Enterprise Freemium model (37Signals, Google Apps, Box.net, InsideView), it’s too early to be sure that they will all live up to the promise of highly scalable business with lower sales and marketing expenses. Lacking the proof of time, just like in the early days of SaaS (DigitalThink, a company I founded in 1996, used a multi-tenant SaaS architecture before the term SaaS even existed), the debate will revolve around opinions and vision. And that’s the beauty of the technology space, where the winners are those that bet on trends that are highly debatable.
I believe Freemium is a game-changing opportunity for Enterprise applications and platforms, but it won’t work for everyone. There are two basic requirements for Freemium to work:
- Scale: the market has to be large, millions of users with TAM value of $10B+/yr
- Conversion: The Free and Premium offerings have to be designed to provide enough value to Free users to avoid high churn, but also enough value in the Premium offering so that at least 1% of the Free users are willing to pay for it.
Scale
The Enterprise market is more segmented than the consumer market, since there are fewer employees than consumers, and companies are highly structured (by vertical, size and internally by job function). The Freemium model won’t work for companies serving a smaller enterprise segment. Let’s see why.
Freemium offerings tend to have a majority of users in their Free offering, with a much smaller percentage willing to pay for the Premium offering (anywhere from 80/20 to 99/1). The simple math is that to build an interesting business ($100M+ of annual revenues) one needs at least 100k users paying $1,000/yr or 1M users paying $100/yr.
Conversion
A lot of Enterprise applications will find it challenging to create a valuable Free version without cannibalizing their paid services. This is why the market has mostly focused on free, time-bound trials of the full-featured application, but free trial models have a number of limitations:
➢ Many users don’t want to invest time in setting up a free trial and learning a new application, knowing that they will lose access to it if they don’t convert to a paid account.
➢ Many users don’t have budget right now, so they walk.
➢ Many users don’t want to deal with sales people, they just want to try out the application before having conversations with the company. Most free trials are set up to require sales interaction (or trigger sales follow-up).
In other words, free trial models eliminate a large percentage of potential users, when compared to freemium models. Companies that can design a freemium product set that satisfies free users, but also drives meaningful conversions to premium services will have a clear scale advantage over those that only use a free trial model.
To be continued
In the next post, I’ll take a look at the current challenges and limitations in executing an Enterprise Freemium model.
by Umberto Milletti, CEO InsideView
We are thrilled to announce that SalesView is now the overall most popular and top-rated application available on the Force.com AppExchange from Salesforce.com.
SalesView was the first Sales 2.0 application integrated with Salesforce CRM and launched on the AppExchange on-demand application marketplace in March 2008. Since then, there has been more than 1,400 installs and 400 joint Salesforce.com customers. Our place as the top application on AppExchange is a great testament to the value of real-time access to relevant news alerts, relationship analysis as well as intelligently aggregated research results from both traditional editorial sources and social media, within the CRM application.
In the announcement released today, Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView noted that, “The fact that adoption has increased to 1,400 installs and customers are seeing tremendous results from SalesView highlights the value and ROI Sales 2.0 technologies provide.”
The Force.com AppExchange is a premier Web marketplace for cloud computing applications, to learn more about it please visit: www.salesforce.com/appexchange
SmartSaaS posted a lengthy Q&A with Umberto Milletti today, as well as a profile of InsideView. The article covers issues such as key emerging trends in the SaaS industry and 2009 outlook, as well as historical anecdotes about InsideView. You can check out the full piece here.
If you are not familiar, the SmartSaaS blog is written by Kevin Dobbs, Owner and Managing Partner at Montclair Advisors. Montclair Advisors provides personalized Software-as-a-Service advisory services designed to help SaaS-based and non-SaaS-based software companies to optimize their business models, improve revenues, control costs and deliver world-class software – check them out at www.montclairadvisors.com
Check out this week’s eWEEK podcast hosted by Mike Vizard, which features InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti. The conversation, entitled, “Melding Social Media into CRM,” focuses on ‘the critical role social networks and media will play in creating a new approach for generating sales leads that can easily be managed from within CRM applications.’ Its a great conversation about the role of social media within CRM and how InsideView’s new Buzz Tab is helping facilitate this convergence. Enjoy!
