This article appears in the Winter 2019 issue of Silicon Slopes Magazine.
By Dave Boyce, Chief Strategy Office, InsideSales.com.
With eyes keenly trained on the future, it’s rare for the team at InsideSales.com to look back. To borrow a phrase from philosopher Marshall McLuhan, “We don’t want to be driving into the future looking into the rear-view mirror.” For better or worse, traditional Business Intelligence (BI) tools are made for exactly that — analyzing the past. But our world is the world of AI, where we analyze data to predict the future — for ourselves and others.
At InsideSales.com we are shaking up the industry. Each day we set new high water marks of Collective Intelligence (CI) data, used to power sales. Our CI database now contains over 200 million global buyer profiles and billions of sales interactions. Coincidentally, the overall technology theme for 2018 was data, data, and more data. 2018 marked the launch of The Cloud Data Wars, triggering an ‘oil rush’ as tech giants’ M&A signaled a voracious appetite for the data needed to deliver on the promise of AI-based services. Data is the new oil, and data rights are the new mineral rights.
Some may be surprised to learn that InsideSales has amassed the world’s largest set of B2B sales interaction data right here in Utah. That particular data — information on billions of interactions between buyers and sellers and the outcomes of those interactions — is the fuel for our powerful AI platform that recommends more of what works and less of what doesn’t. This represents a seismic shift in the way sales teams engage with and sell to prospective buyers.
Powering the Next Generation of AI-Driven Sales Growth
Using AI to uncover customer preferences, forecast the results of certain actions, and translate those insights into actionable recommendations is not just a vision for the future, it’s transforming the world of sales today. And, at InsideSales, we are leading the way. With a sustainable supply of the rich and highly accurate data needed to power AI, we’ve been busy evolving our platform to transform sales prospecting, opportunity management and now account management too.
In August, we unveiled our next-generation AI sales platform to 120,000 attendees at Dreamforce. The new platform delivers predictive and prescriptive insights that optimize all five major phases of the sales process, helping sales professionals build a larger pipeline and close more deals. We also revealed the new NeuralMap™, an Amazon-like feature that discovers net new contacts using collective intelligence along the lines of “people who called X also called Y.”
Teaming with Tech Giants to Accelerate AI Value
No single company can undertake a mission as bold as ours without the right leaders and partners. This year we launched and strengthened partnerships with world-class technology leaders like Microsoft, SAP, LinkedIn, and Vidyard to serve thousands of customers worldwide. Leveraging Microsoft’s unique social, email and business solutions, along with Microsoft’s Azure and Common Data Service, we are able to accelerate the impact of our AI on sales and bulletproof our infrastructure.
Enabling the Intelligent Enterprise to Grow
Sales and marketing innovators at global brands like CenturyLink, Cisco, American Express, LogMeIn, Infor, and First Data are rapidly expanding their use of our AI platform across multiple continents. Excitement is palpable at the C-Level customer events we’ve hosted across the globe, where hundreds of attendees share how they use AI to transform their sales organizations and grow their businesses.
Broadening the Bench to Scale
As demand escalates for AI-powered sales solutions, InsideSales is scaling up to meet that demand. In October we welcomed Chris Harrington as our new COO. Harrington is one of the founding fathers of SaaS and a digital sales and marketing pioneer. Chris previously served as president of Omniture, and president and board member of DOMO. Earlier in 2018, Suaad Sait joined InsideSales as President of Growth. Suaad was previously CMO at both SolarWinds and Rackspace.
Ready for the Future
As we race into 2019, we are ramping up momentum with new ways to tap into Collective Intelligence to deliver additional advantages to the sales teams using our platform. We will also extend the dramatic benefits of AI and CI beyond sales and marketing and further into the realm account management.
