Making Connections in the ‘Socialprise’ World

By SemanticWeb.com on October 6, 2008 1:31 PM

Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Who are you, what did you know, and when did you know it?

The fact of the matter is that you are probably listed under many titles and affiliations — perhaps ZoomInfo has you as the account rep at a now-defunct startup, while LinkedIn has your most recent information as the VP of sales at a long-established vendor. That creates problems for the folks trying to sell you their services or products — and those problems multiply depending on how many sources have you listed as something somewhere, whether it’s Dun and Bradstreet, Reuters, or filings on Edgar.

What are those salespeople to do to accurately pinpoint where you are now? InsideView says it has a solution for the problems. Its business intelligence application, underpinned by natural language processing and semantic web algorithms, acts as the arbiter of all the information out there about individuals, in order to analyze which information is the most recent and accurate and deliver the true data about what you’re up to to a corporate sales force.

“There’s an exponential growth of content and sources, and increasingly we are living the double lives of LinkedIn and Facebook,” says InsideView CMO Rand Schulman. “It’s the emergence of the social enterprise — the socialprise, where social media and enterprise applications converge, and there’s a mash-up of the information and user experiences of these previously separate universes.”

The InsideView SalesView application monitors some 20,000 data sources, including social web sites and also licensed data sources such as Hoover’s and Jigsaw, and then ‘injects’ the appropriate information into customer relationship management (CRM) applications. Organizations that use SalesView don’t need to themselves subscribe to paid services like Hoover’s to get the benefit of having the technology harvest and filter the appropriate data from those services.

Late last month, InsideView added Oracle CRM on Demand to the list of CRM and sales force applications it supports, which also includes Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SugarCRM, and SalesForce.com. It keeps CRM applications up to date with alerts about changes

to existing contacts; shows connections drawn from the social web between a salesperson and potential prospects (for example, that they worked at the same company once); as well as enables them to create new alerts about information they want to find — such as the appointment of a new CMO to start-ups in the San Francisco area.

“We can set up custom agents that finds events and then alert sales guys to those events,” says Schulman.

“Ultimately we believe that content is obviously becoming commoditized, and also ultimately that CRM applications are becoming commoditized, and that we are the actionability application that many sales and marketing people will work in that sits on top of the CRM app, which is really a dead database,” says Schulman. “We harvest all this information, from paid and unpaid sources, figure out the truth by our algorithms and present it in a fresh and timely basis so people can act upon it with good, relevant data.”

In fact, says Schulman, sales professionals are increasingly being tasked and measured more like marketing professionals.

“Marketing people are more measured by numbers, conversions to leads, revenue and being held accountable to those numbers,” he says. “And sales people are also being tasked with using these applications and thinking more like marketing people in terms of segmentation, targeting and using data to close a deal on an individual basis.” It’s all part of what InsideView calls the Sales 2.0 movement — “that’s using applications and science and metrics to make people more productive and it’s all enabled by the Internet. And so it’s very empirical and measurement based,” he says.

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