Improving the Sales Process with InsideView
Jinfo Blog

By Jan Knight

Abstract

A good sales intelligence tool can make a huge difference to a company's sales and marketing success. Jan Knight explores how InsideView performs and gives her opinion on the 50 million people and company profiles, trigger event options, and integration with CRM and social media.

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As someone who believes that life is too short for cold calling, I totally enjoyed the experience of reviewing InsideView, an award-winning sales intelligence application. This product can not only turn the often dreaded cold call into a well-researched warm call, but can also help you take advantage of your own social media connections to see how you might be linked to those you really want to prospect. InsideView enables users to contact the "right person, with the right message, at the right time".

With the aid of Smart Agents, a user can customise which companies and individuals they wish to monitor and then choose events (aka "triggers") they believe will represent an opportune time for them to contact those prospects. Examples of event triggers include, for example, hiring of new personnel, product launches, leadership changes, mergers and acquisitions, and funding activity.

InsideView also incorporates a list building feature where searches for companies and individuals can be performed based on industry, geography, company size and other variables. These contacts and companies can then be monitored via the Smart Agents to alert the user when a trigger event takes place, and this information can then be pushed via email to the user.

In addition to helping sales personnel prepare for sales calls by monitoring company and industry events, InsideView can also decrease the sales cycle time, increase lead conversion and provide important business insights to those involved in the sales process. It can also help define geographic territories and qualified leads can be incorporated into CRM tools such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, Oracle, SugarCRM or Netsuite.

The product aggregates over 30,000 online sources, both traditional and social media, and provides over 50 million company and people profiles. InsideView offers an intuitive, mostly seamless user experience and the results are presented clearly and attractively with good amounts of data being presented in small spaces.

The application is used by marketing and sales professionals in corporations and agencies worldwide and has both a US-centric product as well as a UK/Ireland-centric product.

Trigger-based selling tools are not unique and my earlier review of a product with similar features, iSell from OneSource, discusses similar overall benefits. However, one difference is that iSell includes a feature that provides “prospectability ratings” while InsideView affords the opportunity to add one’s own social connections into the mix.

Both products are worth reviewing as they allow a sales person to approach a targeted prospect at the right time and, most importantly, seemingly completely eliminate the need to make a cold call ever again!

FreePint Subscribers can log in to view the report chapters below or download the full report.

Articles in series:

• InsideView: Introduction and FreePint's View
• InsideView: Sources, Content & Coverage
• InsideView: Search & Tools
• InsideView: Outputs, Customer Support, Pricing

Full report (PDF) contains all of the above content, in a convenient package for reference and sharing:

• Product review of InsideView

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