Innovation in Sales Prospecting: InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti (Part 2)

SM. What was the market landscape like when you founded the company? Competition? Competitive Positioning?

UM: The market landscape did not include any “true” competitors at that time and still do not today. InsideView represents a unique technology that uses Web 3.0-type features to address sales issues in the enterprise. Although they aren’t true competitors, Sales 2.0 companies like Eloqua, VisiblePath, Genius and Jigsaw are often compared to InsideView, as they all aim to provide salespeople with actionable leads and insights they can use.

In terms of competitive positioning, InsideView does not take a stance against these companies – instead, they position the company against traditional data providers, such as Hoover’s, that are becoming replaced by Sales 2.0 models.

SM. Describe the value proposition, including differentiation versus the rest of the market.

UM: The value proposition for us is really about building a better pipeline. We do that in three ways. We help salespeople focus on prospects most likely to be good prospects, aggregate this all together and thirdly, provide salespeople with ideas that might not be obvious.

That’s where our technology comes in. Customers use our technology to strategically target verticals and companies undergoing specific business changes, approach prospects with a customer-centric value proposition, discover decision-makers and leverage introductions to bypass inefficient cold calling efforts. Whereas the rest of the market may concentrate on traditional CRM models, InsideView helps customers reduce cold calling and research, revolutionize prospecting, drive higher sales and build high-performance pipelines.

SM: When I did Intarka, we crawled the web using an Intelligent Agent architecture, and based on specific query structures, we managed to scout the web for qualified companies to target based on verticals, as well as by specific triggers. For example, if I want to sell to all the companies in the world that manufacture Packaging Machinery, the Agent can go find them, and also find people to contact inside those companies. Based on what you have showed me, you do the same. What is different?

UM: We do the same. But we have access to a number of services today that we bring together in one place. If you are trying to sell to an executive inside Cisco, knowing that this person was at Sun before, having access to his LinkedIn profile and network, etc. helps the account manager in figuring out how to approach the person. May be they know someone in common. Furthermore, savvy sales reps always Google people before approaching them, just to understand their histories and backgrounds. We bring all that research as a personalized console.

SM: Yes, what you are describing is a people search engine of sorts, from the Context of Sales Prospecting. I have to say, one place where I got stuck on this was to actually find the email address / phone number of the target. It was impossible at the time to find this information without actually making a phone call. I believe, it is still impossible, since LinkedIn and Plaxo guarantee that they protect users’ privacy. Has anything changed in this regard?

UM: No but, services like Jigsaw are trying to solve the problem by doing a marketplace for contact data and we integrate with them.

(to be continued)

[Part 1]

This segment is part 2 in the series : Innovation in Sales Prospecting: InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti
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