A New Name in Sales Prospecting: InsideView

In older times, marketers had limited ways to reach their buyers. They would travel miles to the common marketplace, set up elaborate shops, move around far flung towns spreading word about their products, and still not be able to reach the right people. Advertising was formalized only in the beginning of the seventeenth century with the developments in Printing Technology. Over the years, advertising took on an all new shape with the advent of the Internet, Telephone, and many other such media which could connect millions of people at one go.

Though these media provided marketers with the Reach they wanted to achieve, they were still far from reaching the right audience. The whole Sales approach had to be looked at in a new light. A small company called InsideView (IV), somewhere in the US, decided to take on this challenge and change the way marketers sell.

“Sales” has always been considered as an "art", something that a person is born with. The innovators of InsideView wanted to break away from this myth and provide a more logical, and scientific solution to this. They wanted to reduce the complete sales cycle and bring more efficiency to it. The whole idea was to do the time taking part for the marketers in a more organized and technical way, and leave the Sales guys to do the selling.

SalesView, InsideView’s web 2.0-based online application, currently covers information of about 650,000+ companies spread across the US. The Company realized that it was important for marketers to be well aware of their prospects’ movements before they approached them with an idea. IV sources information from the best information providers including Reuters, Hoovers, Moreover, Jigsaw, etc, classifies them in to separate categories called Selling Agents and filters in only the relevant and up-to-date business information. Over the years the geeks at IV realized that it was not enough to simply give “information”, there had to be something more to it to make the Sales approach more informed and personal. I personally feel that the whole cold call approach to marketing is more time taking than fruitful. Isn’t it better to approach any company if you already know someone there or maybe if you know someone, who in-turn knows someone there? This is the same thought that led IV to devise the idea of “Connections”. Marketers could now see if they already knew someone in their target companies. This was done by tracking the user’s previous employments, and mapping it with the professional history of the executives at the target company.

Just when IV thought they had done it all, they saw the dawn of the various online Social Networking communities that were helping people come closer, and communicate with each other at a totally different level. Websites like Facebook, Orkut, LinkedIn, etc. gave users the freedom to sign up for free, and network with millions of people all over the world. IV realized that this could further revolutionize the way marketers connect with their target executives. They decided to bring the power of these social platforms to their application, so people could better identify their contacts. This gave rise to “SocialPrise”, a combination of social networking and the enterprise.

Users can now log In to Facebook, orfind their LinkedIn connections, all without leaving the IV application. With a frame instituted in our webpage, people can directly log in to their Facebook or LinkedIn account and find out who they know at their target companies.

As IV stands today, a user can log in to see all company details, his/her connections through their prior employments, connections through their Facebook accounts, connections though their LinkedIn profiles, News related to the respective companies sorted by agents, email addresses, phone numbers, executive profiles, basically everything and anything imaginable about that company.