ADDING INTELLIGENCE TO CRM THROUGH MASH-UPS
the app gap

April 30, 2008

Article by Bill Ives, Read the original post

InsideView recently launched a new offering, SalesView, an on-demand Business Search and Intelligence application, designed to bring insight gained from subscription-based and user-generated sources to the enterprise. It integrates with many of the CRM products such as those from Landslide Technologies, Microsoft, Salesforce.com and SugarCRM through mashups. Last week I spoke with Rand Schulman, Chief Marketing Officer of InsideView. He outlined what InsideView sees as the convergence of social media, user generated content and enterprise applications. Putting their new offering into context, Rand explained that “SalesView is born of this trend, and delivers on its promise with a smart, fresh and complete approach to business search and intelligence.”

Rand also introduced me to their concept of Socialprise, a framework for understanding the way in which the rich, unstructured data of social networks and media are being leveraged within the enterprise. Socialprise applications are a convergence of social media and enterprise applications, presented as a mash-up of both the information and user experience of these previously separate worlds. Their SalesView release works within this framework and is designed to mash-up social data with enterprise-grade search and intelligence capabilities, to help sales teams automate prospecting and provide actionable insights throughout the sales cycle. Sales efforts often require relevant business intelligence that used to be accessed from a number of traditional, subscription-based , “walled garden” data providers. Rand pointed that his own identity varies widely across these sources as he has held positions at several firms in the past few years. Through SalesView, which aggregates both traditional business data providers and more recent Web 2.0 content sources, he can find an accurate picture of his current identity.

In the brave new Web 2.0 world, social networks and other user-generated content provide the opportunity to gain deeper insight into personal and professional relationships than was possible just a few years ago. This promise of greater insight can only be realized if the business user can practically digest the massive volume of data from an ever-growing number of free and paid sources. There are social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, but also blogs, job boards, and forums. An individual sales person does not have the time to check all these sources and do this aggregation manually. In fact, it is not even feasible for a marketing department or sales operations team to keep up with all of these data sources. Once again mash-ups can provide a solution to another enterprise and internet data integration challenge, in this case with a focus on sales and marketing professionals. This is the approach that InsideView has taken with SalesView. It does not try to replace CRM and its data management and process tracking functions – rather it integrates within CRM to automatically feed it with current, relevant, and vetted content.

Rand showed me an example of SalesView working as a mash-up in Salesforce.com. It draws on 20,000 data sources to get information about companies, individuals, and key business events. Then it consolidates the data to present recent, relevant insights directly within Salesforce.com’s standard Lead, Account, and Opportunity views. SalesView delivers the Who, What, and When of sales – Where it can be acted upon most effectively, in the familiar contenxt of enterprise applications like CRM.

SalesView can be accessed through native mash-ups within the Salesforce.com andr other leading CRM tools like SugarCRM (and soon Microsoft Dynamics and Landslide Technologies). SalesView is also available as a standalone Web application that can be leveraged by any sales and marketing organization, regardless of what CRM they use.

I have also thought, perhaps unfairly, that CRM was overrated since it was mostly a content store that had to largely be manually fed. I think enterprise 2.0 tools such as SalesView can provide real value to CRM by taking advantage of the increasing overlap and transparency that is emerging between the enterprise and the Web. It can make CRM socially intelligent and therefore greatly magnify its value, making it something actually useful. The same could happen for other enterprise applications. There is great promise here in what InsideView has dubbed “socialprise” applications.

The New York Times recently talked about InsideView and other related products in its piece, “MySpace Mind-Set Finally Shows Up at the Office”. The story begins, “As online social networking weaves itself more extensively into the fabric of everyday life, a new class of technology vendors has set out to make the social Web relevant in the workplace, too.” It goes on to point out the richness of the new data available, “For example, a salesman for a financial services company might use SalesView to get information on a prospective client, from her job history and education to her hobbies and favorite restaurants.” Let’s hope the information is used wisely. That is certainly the objective of InsideView as Rand pointed out in the article. I have found that many people I talk to in a business capacity already know something about me from my blogs. In each case this has been useful to our conversation. Imagine being able to quickly view all relevant information about an individual or company across thousands of sources prior to meeting with them. It looks like InsideView has already done just that.