Innovation in Sales Prospecting: InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti (Part 3)

One of the things I did when I designed the Intarka product was that I went and interviewed tons of really good sales people to understand the various kinds of tactics they use to prospect. To this day, this experience has always helped me in my various business development activities, and has today become second nature. However, during Intarka, this was all new. And it was very important to capture and encapsulate these time-tested sales techniques to be able to design the product.

In speaking with Umberto, and in listening to his pitch, I see a lot of these encapsulated best practices showing up as product features. So, even for a relatively less experienced sales person, the product has built-in ways of steering him towards a rich and productive pipeline.

At this point, it would be helpful to look at a visual of the product, so here it is.

What you see is a view of the product integrated inside Salesforce.com. You have a record for your contact person, and the system tells you that he used to work before for one of your reference customers. That means, introducing your product as one that Cisco uses would be an effective positioning / referral selling mechanism.

Then, there is something really cool, which is a feature called Sales Triggers.

Imagine.

You are trying to sell software services to a $500 Million manufacturing company’s IT department. InsideView’s Sales Trigger feature can keep track of the job postings on its web site, as well as on other vertical search engines such as SimplyHired, and when it picks up software job postings, it alerts you that the opportunity may be ripe for you to pursue.

Now. When you are dealing with one such opportunity, it may not be an issue. But when you are dealing with hundreds of accounts, and trying to keep them adequately monitored and prioritized, “triggers” are extremely helpful. And triggers vary from business to business. If you are selling Forecasting Software to CFOs, your trigger may be that the prospect has had a CFO change. Or,

InsideView, it appears, does an excellent job with Sales Triggers.

(to be continued)

[Part 1]
[Part 2]

This segment is part 3 in the series : Innovation in Sales Prospecting: InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti
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