“Data is a hard business to be in,” said Heidi Tucker, VP of Global Alliances at InsideView.
She should know. The San Francisco-based marketing and sales intelligence vendor, which last week announced a major partnership with SAP hybris, hosts around 25 million company and executive records in its B2B database. InsideView’s MTV product–multi-sourced, triangulated and validated data–seeks to offer relevant, real-time profiles of sales prospects, delivered, as Tucker told me, in a way which is “tightly connected to the user.”
When it comes to sales reps, that can mean a window right inside Salesforce, or it can mean full integration with Microsoft Dynamics or, as of December 3, SAP hybris Cloud for Customer.
InsideView came into existence ten years ago, based on the premise that if sales people knew a little bit about their prospects, they might be more successful in their sales calls. Back then, said Tucker, sales reps often did very little research before making a call: “They tended to wing it.” The quantity of available data has, of course, exploded since then–“There’s too much out there,” Tucker said. InsideView’s challenge has been to deliver insightful data to sales reps at the time they need it, as well as delivering profile data to marketers at the top of the funnel to enrich incoming leads. The objective? “To help them outwit their competitors,” Tucker said, “by having more intelligence.”
To build profiles of companies, and decision-makers tied to companies, InsideView purchases data from reputable sources, e.g. Capterra, S&P Capital IQ, Thompson-Reuters. It adds publicly available data to the mix, including information scraped from company websites; and it integrates user-contributed insights. “Triangulation” means using algorithms to automate the weighting of sources for reliability. “We also do a lot of manual validation,” Tucker said.
InsideView’s technology integrates with all the major CRMs, Tucker said, but usually as a plug-and-play app. With Microsoft Dynamics, and now with the SAP hybris commerce platform, it’s a native integration, built-in and ready to go. (With Dynamics, the InsideView feature is included in pricing; with Cloud for Customer it’s an add-on.) The integration also allows users to transfer data directly into SAP Cloud for Sales, eliminating manual data entry of company and contact details. InsideView is striving to partner, Tucker said, with companies that “really believe data is the foundation of sales and marketing.”
