InsideView Offers Strong Sales Triggers and Social Media Viewing, but Limited Company Coverage
Software Version
Pro
Overall Satisfaction with InsideView
- Sales Triggers -- 18 sales trigger categories which are displayed on profiles, included in alerts, and available for Build a List Prospecting (e.g. Show me companies in my territory that have recent product introductions)
- Executive Alerts -- News mentions and Tweets
- Social Media "Buzz" -- In product social media viewer that displays Facebook, Twitter, and RSS Blog postings by a company. Users may filter by feed type or keyword.
- CRM Support -- They support a broad range of CRMs including second tier players. They have an OEM deal with MS Dynamics that provides the service out of the box.
- Data Hygiene -- They now offer a separate set of hygiene services for enriching and updating content within major CRMs and Marketing Automation platforms
- Who Knows Who Tool -- Users can identify the best path to prospects including through colleagues. Users may upload contact lists to help supplement the path.
- LinkedIn links -- InsideView has broad availability of LinkedIn profile links for executives. Either they mined LinkedIn for this information or licensed the dataset from a LinkedIn miner. While they offer Twitter and Facebook links, they are sparse.
- Technographics -- InsideView just added technology vendor and product data to their service as a premium (pricing unknown). The coverage spans a half million companies. [I have not licensed or seen this data as yet]
- API and Connectors - InsideView has invested in developing a broad set of MAP and CRM connectors as well as a Developer's API.
- While the company now supports 12 million global companies and 30 million executives, this is significantly below that of their primary competitors. Other sales intelligence vendors provide up to 10x the company coverage and up to 3x the contact coverage. Coverage of AsiaPac and Latin America is quite limited.
- Family Trees are limited to subsidiaries so it is difficult to identify local opportunities for leveraging an MSA or targeting local branches.
- Most US profiles are thin Equifax profiles providing little detail (e.g. no family tree linkage, business descriptions, or contacts).
- Financials limited to public company Income Statements. For some reason, they never added the Balance Sheet or Cash Flow Statement.
- The company has not rolled out any significant enhancements to their sales product since 2013 with the exception of adding more profiles. They have shifted their focus to marketing and an API.
- While they offer some industry content, it is significantly weaker than that found in Hoover's and Avention.
- They have moved to limit the number of downloads in the service as they sell an InsideView Target service to marketers. Competitors provide few restrictions on company and contact download (though most limit the number of downloadable emails).
- There is no way to target executives by function across a company and download the prospectinglist. This is becoming a key requirement as firms move to Account Based Marketing and Account Based Sales Development. Competitors such as Hoover's and Avention provide screening across the family tree by job function and level. They also have a deeper set of company linkages than InsideView.
- Improved Customer and Prospect Awareness via Alerts
- Quick company and executive profiles for account planning
- Easy to share triggers and news with colleagues or to social media
Hoover's Online -- Deepest set of global companies and contacts. Best global family trees. Now includes FirstRain company news and alerts.D&B360 -- CRM connector for MS Dynamics, SAP, and Oracle on Demand. Includes Hoover's content, prospect list building, stare and compare updates, and batch updates. Top tier service includes the FirstResearch industry overviews.
Avention (formerly OneSource) -- Best prospecting tool on the market with a strong set of sales triggers. industry overviews, and SWOT reports European coverage includes financials and very deep UK coverage (financials, filings, credit scores, linkage, directors and shareholders profiles). SFDC integration supports prospect list building and management, stare and compare updates, and batch updates. New features include Business Signals (Predictive Scores), Ideal Profiles (Customized Predictive Scores based upon user weighted Business Signals), Conceptual Search (list building based upon ideas such as fracking or Obamacare), and SmartLists (dynamic company lists). Recent enhancements include the addition of risk profiles and SalesQuest Technology profiles (they acquired SalesQuest in 2014).
At the freemium end of the spectrum, Owler provides alerting and more limited company profiles.
Sales Genie is worth considering if you require both business and consumer prospecting.
Using InsideView
At larger companies, InsideView would require only a single administrator to handle user ids and passwords. They would also be responsible for reviewing the usage reports to make sure the product is being used as part of each rep's sales process.
If you have a CRM, then the CRM admin would need to install the application. I did this myself in SFDC and it took about 20 minutes. The steps were fairly straightforward and mostly involved setting up the I-frames and custom fields
- Company and Executive Alerts
- Company Research
- Executive Research
- Prospect List Building
- SFDC Integration
- They have a feature that automatically tracks companies and execs that you have heavily researched in the past few weeks (the user sets the threshold rules). This works as an alerting system around companies and execs that I probably won't be interested in long-term, but around which I have a near-term interest.
- The Buzz Tab provides an in product view of Twitter, Facebook, and RSS blog feeds. Unfortunately, LinkedIn does not permit their feeds to be integrated into other services.
- I receive a feed of personal tweets from top industry execs in my daily alert
- I don't use the connections tool as my company is too small to properly leverage it.
- I don't have team alerts (again due to company size), but if my firm were larger, it would be used to setup shared alerts for tracking key competitors
- List Building from within SFDC (this feature is not available)
Evaluating InsideView and Competitors
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Prior Experience with the Product
The freemium offering provided a decent set of content and features, but I was looking for broader alerting (they limit the freemium alerts to three sales triggers) and list building (the freemium does not provide list building). The expanded alerts cover 18 trigger categories and include a (somewhat Kludgy) custom alert builder. I have found the alerts to be accurate with few articles not related to a company and topic.
The list building is also robust with a broad set of firmographic and biographic variables
No. The fact that this was a freemium offering gave me a long window to use a limited version of the product and become comfortable with their usability, data quality, and alerting precision.
If my firm were larger, I would be more concerned about their limited coverage of smaller companies (The Equifax profiles for smaller companies are quite thin -- basically little more than yellow page listings).
InsideView Implementation
- Implemented in-house
- No issues -- this is a cloud based information service
- They provide a set of scheduled training webinars and an online knowledge base to help with training.
- The SFDC connector is no longer displayed on the AppExchange (I believe it is still supported, but SFDC wasn't happy when they partnered with MS Dynamics).
InsideView Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
Using InsideView
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- Setting up companies and executives to be watched
- Looking up a company or executive
- List Building
- Social media viewer
- Creating Custom Alerts
- Loading Connections Data
- Peer Lists (Not Supported) -- The user needs to write down the key peer variables and then go to Build a List and rekey them. Other vendors provide direct peer lists from company profiles.