A salesperson from a major network device manufacturer sells routers to various IT companies using SalesView, a Business Search and Intelligence Application developed by InsideView. Instead of following the traditional process, which involves searching various data sources for all the companies opening up in his sales territory, identifying the possible leads from the collected data, calling the companies, and trying persistently to get a meeting with the company head, he now simply logs on to InsideView. He looks for the details of all the companies starting in the area in the recent past in the InsideView database. In case there are any positive results, he looks for the company details and also the right contact person to approach. In addition to this, he also relies on SalesView for information on the executive, contact details, background, prior employers, and his connections to find a common referral. This makes it possible for the salesperson to approach the right company and the right person at the right time, saving his valuable time and increasing his sales productivity.

Founded in 2005, InsideView is a developer of on-demand business search and intelligence applications. It has revolutionized the way sale and marketing people approached customers, by taking advantage of the convergence of social media and enterprise applications and bringing the insights gained from the subscription-based and user-generated sources to the enterprise. InsideView Business Search and Intelligence applications institutionalize collaborative and repeatable workflows to drive sales productivity - automating prospecting, accelerating sales cycles, and ultimately, resulting in more closed deals.

“The art of deal making has become increasingly difficult, as the amount of data available on the Internet has exploded, magnified by increased convergence of previously disparate ‘professional’ and ‘personal’ sources. So too has the need for sales to be able to harness this data to gain a competitive edge and grow topline revenue. However, traditional business information services don’t come anywhere sufficiently close to help sales professionals sort through potential deals and dealmakers. Subscription databases and list building services can give facts, data, and news, but the filtering they provide is rarely enough to help a sales person identify the most relevant prospects for sales and business development activities. Though the search engines are pretty good at finding basic business information quickly, they cannot scale up to build a powerful business intelligence service. Social networks at least can help the sales person identify specific people in trusted relationships, but they rarely expose their current business activities or needs,” says Sesha Rao, Managing Director - India, InsideView. “This is where InsideView solutions come into play. We address the challenges faced by the sales person. For the past three years InsideView has been delivering on the promise of ‘Smart, Fresh, and Complete’ business search and intelligence. SalesView is all about the new science of deal making; The key to solving this problem is recognizing that it’s no longer just who you know that will make business deals happen but “what you know about who you know” tightly synched with “when and where you should know it”. You need to be able to combine the best enterprise-ready information sources with the best insights from social relationships and buyer behavior to identify the right opportunities at the right time and determine the right people.

InsideView captures business insights in real time from thousands of structured and unstructured content sources, including specialized research providers like Hoovers, D&B, and Reuters, and Web 2.0 social networks like Jigsaw, ZoomInfo, Facebook, and LinkedIn, Web-based news sources, blogs, and job postings. SalesView automatically monitors this information on companies, their activities, and personnel. It delivers alerts on key events and business insights, in addition to identifying the best prospects in target markets and customer accounts. It discovers connections between the user and decision makers in target accounts and presents extraordinarily relevant and user-specific intelligence about prospects and customers, at the point of need.

InsideView does this by delivering smart, fresh, and complete insights through a simple, intuitive dashboard interface. It has ‘smart agents’ that discover relevant personal, professional, and corporate data automatically. And, the resulting intelligence is presented within existing CRM applications and business processes, delivering extraordinarily relevant and user-specific information at the point of need.