InsideSales Rebrands As Xant To Demonstrate Focus On Transformative AI

InsideSales.com on Monday announced it was changing its name to Xant as part of a marketing campaign that will include a webinar this Thursday to discuss what it calls ‘the new face of sales engagement.”

Based in Utah, InsideSales is best known for offering cloud-based tools that assist with sales, marketing and account management. The rebranding comes less than six months after the firm promoted Chris Harrington, its former COO, to become its CEO, succeeding founder Dave Elkington.

The name Xant (pronounced “Zant”) is taken from the final letters of the word “cognizant,” suggesting the awareness and knowingness of the firm’s products and services.

Whereas InsideSales tended to adopt a light green colour palette, meanwhile, Xant has a more bold yellow on a dark background, with the name preceded by three diagonal bars. The Xant domain name has also shifted from the dot-com of InsideSales to a dot-ai suffix.

In a video to announce the new name and branding changes, Harrington said he wanted to reflect the fact that the firm focuses on the true value of technologies such as artificial intelligence: not in the algorithms themselves, he said, but in the data these algorithms process.

“I wanted it to represent the ever-on and ever-aware nature of our company,” he said of the new name. “It gives you the knowledge and ability to improve the productivity, visibility and effectiveness of your sales team.”

Besides the press release, webinar and landing page, Xant’s rebrand is even being marketed through a chatbot on its new web site, which greets visitors with, “Notice anything different?? (Hint: It’s not my hair. . . )”

Part of Xant’s messaging is an argument that customer relationship management (CRM) applications need to be augmented by other technologies. It’s a matter of picking the right ones and weaving in collective intelligence from customers, however.

“CRM is a dead-end solution with its countless data quality issues, and artificial intelligence hasn’t lived up to it’s promised potential,” Xant says on a landing page promoting its webinar.

In a press release, Harrington compared Xant’s potential impact on sales teams to the way firms like Waze have changed the way cars navigate the roads, promising insights from more than 183 million buyer profiles to close more deals faster.

“The group that’s received the most benefit from the continued world of both digital and data transformation has been the buyer,” he said in the video.

Harrington will be joined on the webinar by Xant CMO Matt Langie.