Innovation in Sales Prospecting: InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti (Part 4)

SM: How big is the market? How do you calculate TAM? What is your business model?

UM: One way to calculate TAM is by the money available to spend today on sales intelligence. This includes licenses to database information, such as Hoover’s. There’s about $5-10 billion spent today on this in the US market alone. Our business model concentrates on a proceed per month licensing model. We start at $100 per month for a seat, and offer volume discounts to large accounts.

SM. What are your top target segments?

UM: From a vertical perspective, we target the technology segment first and foremost. We also concentrate on the business services sector, outsourcing, HR recruiting and financial services sectors. The companies we target span all the way from 10 employees to 20,000 employees. Lastly, we target the VP of sales at companies, that’s the entry point for us.

SM. How did you penetrate the market and get early traction?

UM: We penetrated the market in our early stages through a direct sales effort. We worked very closely with customers, building the first 20 customers who have been very key for us. The AppExchange listing has also helped, as it enables customers to write reviews. They’re saying InsideView has been a game-changer for them. Overall, the Salesforce.com / AppExchange channel has been extremely effective for us.

SM. What stage are you at now? Revenue? Profitability? Customers?

UM: The key metric we track is customers. There are 25 well-known names, including CISCO, WebEx, SuccessFactors, Rearden Commerce. Gaining these companies as customers is success to us. How well they adopt InsideView is also success to us. We don’t disclose revenue details as we are a private company. But we judge success through the acceleration of customers we’ve had from Q1 to Q3.

SM. How did you finance the different phases of the company?

UM: The company is privately held and venture-backed by JDM Capital (an associated fund of Greenhouse Capital Partners) and Rembrandt Venture Partners. InsideView announced on June 5 it had secured $7.4 million in Series A funding. Emergence Capital Partners, a leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm focused on early and growth stage Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies, led the round.

[Part 1]
[Part 2]
[Part 3]

This segment is part 4 in the series : Innovation in Sales Prospecting: InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti
1 2 3 4