InsideView Provides New Insights Into Sales Leads

InsideView earlier this month debuted a new marketing offering housed on its InsideView CRM Intelligence Platform. This first iteration of InsideView for Marketing focuses on automated lead enrichment capabilities, said Marc Perramond, VP of product.

“One of our working premises is that even with the massive amount of spending companies do on CRM automation, the products still do not fully address the needs of understanding the customer and the new buying process,” he told CRM Buyer.

Built for Salesforce

InsideView for Marketing was built with an eye to enhancing a company’s lead records with social, media and financial information, said Perramond. It offers information on which leads are most likely to convert to active deals in the sales pipeline. It also provides lead scoring and prospect targeting.

InsideView for Marketing is designed to be integrated with other CRM systems. Currently, it is available for Salesforce.com.

Once installed, it populates the CRM record automatically with information InsideView has aggregated from some 30,000 sources. This data is filtered based on its relevance to the account, and it’s validated with an algorithm developed by InsideView. There is editorial oversight to further ensure accuracy.

The system doesn’t need much information to set up a profile, Perramond said.

“Even if there is just an email address, it can use that to determine where you work,” he noted.

If the lead has provided a Gmail or Hotmail account, the system can work with that as well, according to Perramond. “It can match based on other information it might have gathered, such as the state or ZIP code.”

InsideView for Marketing adds what Perramond referred to as “unique insights,” such as a new product launch or the fact that a company just expanded in Asia, or that it just missed its earnings projections, for example.

From there, the system scores and routes the lead.

Identifying Future Customers

Generally CRM systems are not geared toward adding value to leads as they enter the pipeline, Perramond noted.

Typically, a lead process focuses on the deals that are already in a salesperson’s sights, he continued. “That is how the current contact management, forecasting and other sales features are typically built — but they don’t help with identifying and targeting your next customer.”

That will change as chief marketing officers increasingly are held accountable for revenue, predicted Perramond. “What we do is tell the marketing and sales staff whether a prospect is a good fit or not.”