InsideView will be announcing several upgrades to its SaaS social sales and intelligence application in the coming weeks. Some of the changes, including social profile features, have already gone live. The company has been turning them on over the past month, as soon as they were developed, Ralf VonSosen, vice president of marketing, told CRM Buyer.
“We’ll be wrapping that up and formally announcing it next week,” he said.
Also expected to roll out in short order is a new dashboard type of product that maps relationships between and among contacts.
The company declined to describe one of its future changes to CRM Buyer, however: which of the CRM vendors it is partnering with to embed InsideView as part of the application.
InsideView and SugarCRM just announced such an embed. Essentially, InsideView now comes out of the box, so to speak, with SugarCRM.
Other announcements are coming as well, Marc Perramond, director of product management, told CRM Buyer.
Actionable Social Sales Intelligence
The company gave CRM Buyer a robust view of the areas it is upgrading. A common theme to all the changes, VonSosen said, is that they focus on social media and social CRM — all with the goal of providing actionable and proactive information to make a sale.
Perhaps the biggest change will be the embeds, although InsideView has been trending in this direction for some time with its native integrations with partner companies such as Salesforce.com.
Over the years, the company has developed a number of these integrations — what VonSosen and Perramond describe as “mashups.”
They include a data export for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, a partner mashup for NetSuite CRM, a self-service field mapping for Salesforce.com, and an Outlook sync and export data for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which is currently in beta.
Social Intelligence and Profiles
InsideView will be announcing new features to enhance the application’s social intelligence and profile functionality, which it has been turning on in bits and pieces. These tools essentially aggregate social profiles — or the company’s understanding of a contact’s social presence — in order to enable social selling.
“It offers another channel besides email and phone to contact someone,” VonSosen said.
This functionality includes a Twitter profile search, Facebook connections, and more integrated LinkedIn profiles.
Also rolling out is Connections, a product that provides a unified view of relationships between social graphs, VonSosen explained.
As an example, he pointed to a contact he made through a PR rep. That contact would be included, along with the name of the person who facilitated the connection — i.e., the PR rep.
With that information he can score how strong the connection is, based on where the individual fits in the social graph. That gives him a lot more information and insight when he makes his sales approach.
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