CRM WATCHLIST 2010 - PART IIIa, INSIDEVIEW
ZDNet

January 11, 2010

Article by Paul Greenberg - read the original post

This one is about as slam dunk as any company on the complete list - not just this portion. They have been one of the best and smartest and most focused when it comes to providing something valuable to CRM practitioners and vendors that bridges the gap between the traditional CRM needs and social requirement. Providing highly focused social sales intelligence is an art that they seem to have mastered. With their SalesView service, they provide highly focused sales intelligence that is aimed squarely at one thing - supporting sales optimization.

They don’t have a big product portfolio - their sales intelligence product, SalesView is their only product in fact. It comes in three versions - free, Pro (at $99.00/user/month) and Team (customized pricing). It provides two primary features - first it monitors intelligence about what’s going on in accounts and then it sees who you know in the accounts and monitors what’s going on with them (moves to other companies, promotions, etc).  It sources the information from the more traditional data sources such as Hoovers and Reuiters, the contemporary structured data sources like the community driven Jigsaw and the unstructured such as Twitter and blogs.  And that’s about it. But they do it well and they are able to use all the resources of the CRM systems they integrate with to optimize the experience that the sales pro has with SalesView.
InsideView knows exactly what their product is so they, unlike so many of the companies on this watchlist, moved aggressively to integrate with CRM systems. As a result, they have partnerships with salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Landslide, and are the first premium partner NetSuite ever had.

What makes them even smarter is that they’ve created the product so that it can be accessed and used inside whatever CRM system that’s its integrated with. You never have to leave it.
What’s my concern? As good as they are, as focused as they are, they are in the social media monitoring space and that is an expanding and maturing space with nearly 200 companies with SMM products. Someone is bound to come along to compete directly with this smart company.  What will they do to separate themselves from the pack? We’ll see in 2010.