INSIDEVIEW: MARKET INTELLIGENCE FOR ENTERPRISE 2.0
FASTforward

October 31, 2007

by Bill Ives

Here is a focused application of Web 2.0 that makes a lot of sense. Last week I spoke with Umberto Milletti, CEO, and Rand Schulman, Chief Marketing Officer, of InsideView. They have tool that aggregates the stuff available on the Web together with some top subscription services to bring, what they call, "opportunity analysis" to sales and marketing. They aggregate information from such Web sources as LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, and press releases and such traditional sources as D&B, Hoover's, and Reuters. Today, the good news/bad news for sales and marketing is there is much more information available on people and organizations. Why not leverage the accessibility of this information and the ability to select, distill, and aggregate it to obtain just what you need to be more effective?

InsideView also goes a step further and provides integrated mashups with a number of the top SFA/CRM providers. I saw an example of accessing data from InsideView through salesforce.com. Why not make these old style tools provide you with some intelligence rather simply feed them information? Traditional CDM tools tend to be passive storage vessels for data that you provide. With a Web 2.0 tool like InsideView you add a service that proactively offers you market intelligence in the context of your CRM data. It does not replace CRM tools, it becomes an active layer on top of them.

Having spent much of the past 25 years supporting sales and marketing functions within enterprises of all sizes, the value of InsideView resonates well. As they indicated, you can use InsideView to target companies undergoing specific business changes that relate to your offerings, approach prospects, find decision-makers, and make productive introductions to bypass inefficient cold calling efforts.

Like a number of enterprise 2.0 tools, InsideView grew from the personal challenges faced by some of the founders coupled with the new opportunities on the Web. Umberto was a founder of Digital Think, an eLearning company started in the 90s. They had high turnover in the sales area. These cycles continued, until they realized it was not just about hiring the right people, it's about giving the sales people the right information to be more productive and efficient. There have always been some information sources on potential clients but Web 2.0 opened many more possibilities. After Digital Think was sold, Umberto focused on this business issue with several partners and InsideView was born. They now have an InsideView blog, along with their website, to document their story in more depth.

There are some additional benefits from taking an enterprise 2.0 approach. Since there is a now a common, easily accessed source for market intelligence, the lines between marketing and sales get blurred and collaboration is easier. Sales people have a greater capability to get their own leads and do their own market research that then can get shared back up to the marketing organization. Salespeople can become an intelligent arm of marketing bringing back stuff from the field that is meaningful to them and thus to many of their colleagues.

WebEx is one user. Here sales people can set InsideView to look for things such as training initiatives, large employee hiring cycles, and off shore development, that can benefit from WebEx services. They can also look for more general indicators like leadership changes and good or bad financial results. Once they access this filtered information, becomes easy to share it with the rest of the organization. By looking at the selling triggers that sales people use, marketing can better understand what the sale people are seeing. They can also add suggested new selling triggers based on new marketing initiatives and what they learn from other. The enterprise 2.0 approach enables a more connected organization.