InsideView Reaches Out To Data.com Customers To Avoid Data Degradation And Other Risks

InsideView on Thursday launched a series of tools designed to position it as the data provider of choice for firms scrambling to replace Salesforce’s soon-to-be-discontinued Data.com service.

Companies that have used Data.com’s Clean and Prospector products to fuel their customer relationship management (CRM) systems and other applications have about a year before Salesforce officially retires them. (Disclosure: I provide content marketing services to Salesforce in Canada). InsideView, whose mission is to help companies drive revenue growth through understanding and targeting the right sales opportunities, sees itself as a natural partner for former Data.com users, given its products are typically connected to “systems of engagement” such as a CRM.

The San Francisco-based firm’s enhancements include a data diagnostic tool to assess the quality of CRM data and look for potential errors or gaps in information about customers and prospects. Another tool will uses artificial intelligence based on machine learning to analyze a firm’s data and match sales teams with customers based on things like business needs, geographic or industry clustering and other factors. Firms can get even more granular by looking at branch data to do a better job of assigning reps to a particular territory or prioritizing a group of accounts.

Joe Andrews, InsideView’s vice-president of product and solution marketing, said some Data.com customers were already experiencing data degradation — in other words, missing changes in data such as when a company goes out of business or a buyer changes jobs.

“The result is like a backed-up drain,” Andrews told B2B News Network. “You need a better information flow, but there’s a lot of dirt and noise to figure that out.”

Beyond its product enhancements, InsideView will also offer potential customers a free assessment service that can begin with examining a sample file, Andrews said. This will help them score their “data health” in terms of what’s incomplete, missing or inaccurate. InsideView can then help make the change from Data.com, typically within a 30-day period, he said.

“The product, technology and data mapping is fairly straightfoward,” he said. “I would recommend a one-time professional services clean, which will do everything at a deeper level, and then turn on automatic cleansing.”

Of course, other firms will likely step forward to compete with InsideView as a Data.com replacement, but Andrews said it’s important to distinguish what’s meant by “data quality.” he defined it as accuracy around firmographics, relevance and other details.

“‘HBO is officially known as Home Box Office, but it might have been entered it incorrectly using just the letters,” he explained. This could mean opportunities get missed within CRM and other applications. “We can train the marching algorithm to be even smarter about this kind of thing over time.”

Beyond merely matching Data.com Prospector’s capabilities, InsideView is also promoting features such as access to more than 35 million decision makers, direct dial phone numbers, corporate family trees, real-time insights and news alerts. What it calls “fine grain control,” meanwhile, will let sales and marketing teams pick CRM records and set rules around how they are updated and managed.