This article was published in the Winter 2019 issue
by Chris Harrington, CEO, XANT
Why should a company rebrand? The Harvard Business School answer is to shed an old image, reposition yourself in a market, or when a company outgrows its original mission. In the case of InsideSales.com, all three were true.
In recent history, we found that InsideSales.com could be a confusing name. Is it the sales function within a company? Is it our software solution? We realized enterprise companies knew the InsideSales.com name but didn’t understand who we really were and what our team of incredible product and engineering professionals have built. Our name failed to capture the breadth of our solutions and larger vision for the future of B2B sales. We needed a better representation of our ideas, mission, and vision.
When the Board of Directors asked me to join InsideSales.com in October 2018, I knew the company had the opportunity to build an unrivaled platform and lead the sales engagement space— fueled by the right story, the right team and the right brand to reflect the opportunity that our employees share. The market is red hot with enterprise companies trying to navigate an increasingly challenging sales environment. After becoming CEO in June 2019, I wanted to focus on telling this story, executing on our platform strategy, and putting the right operational groundwork in place to support continued scale, growth and innovation. It was time for a long-overdue refresh and a new brand expression to amplify it.
To make that a reality, I made a number of changes to our robust leadership team; adding a new SVP of Data & Analytics, CCO, CMO, SVP Sales Operations & Go-To-Market Strategy, SVP Client Success and finally our new CFO. We started with our redefined company vision: to pioneer the future of growth. This was the foundation for our refresh. We’re changing how B2B enterprises buy and sell to each other, and InsideSales.com didn’t capture that. Our new brand, XANT, tells a much more powerful story of who we are and the value we deliver to our customers.
Like our products, we wanted our name and logo to be aspirational, forward-looking, and human-focused. A play on the word cognizant, XANT embodies how our crowd-sourced data and SaaS platform makes sales organizations “all-knowing.” Our name reflects the hyper-aware, informed sales organization that our solutions enable.
By leveraging the power of our exclusive collective user experience framework, we are showing customers how to improve sales interactions; think Waze for Sales. Companies need to know when and how to contact customers, and XANT provides customers the data and insights from more than 10 billion sales interactions to close bigger deals faster. It’s like having thousands of sales reps whispering in your ear about their experience selling to the same customers you are selling to.
We are thrilled to build on some of our greatest strengths: our people and the Silicon Slopes community. We are proud to build and grow this company in Utah. In fact, we will be moving right into the heart of Silicon Slopes this spring when we occupy space in the amazing Podium 2 building in Lehi. So please come drop us a line. We may have a new name, a new location, new faces and a new vision, but XANT is prouder than ever to call Silicon Slopes home.
Chris Harrington is the CEO of XANT. Harrington steered widespread SaaS adoption for digital sales and marketing powerhouses Omniture, Adobe, and Domo. During his time at Omniture, Harrington served as President of Field and took the company from $3.5M to $500M in ARR in seven years. While at Domo, Harrington served as president and helped create one of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies in the U.S.
Read the rest of the articles in the Winter 2019 issue of Silicon Slopes Magazine
