In a recent article about navigating the vast ocean of social media, I mentioned that it can be really expensive to pay a company to sift through all of the information your potential customers are putting out into the social media world.
While having your interns slog through the muck is obviously the cheapest option, if you have a little money lying around you might want to check out InsideView.
Umberto Milletti is InsideView’s founder and his goal is make sure you have all of the relevant information you need to get what you want, whether it’s from your customers or potential investors.
He points out that, in the bad old days before the internet, it took a lot of work to get personal information about people you were doing business with. You had to go to their office, check out the decorations and the photos, maybe take them to dinner a couple of times.
Who has the time for that anymore? For that matter, who has the time to sift through the thousands of emails, Tweets, calls, and texts that a small business that’s taking off the ground is sure to receive every day? We’re swamped with information 24/7 and it can be really difficult to figure out what exactly is relevant.
Just because it’s difficult doesn’t mean you don’t have to do it. The people you’re trying to contact are dealing with the same massive intake of information and calls that you are. Milletti points out that need to make sure you stand out from that crowd if you plan on getting anywhere.
InsideView sets out to simplify the process for you and they’ve figured out how to do it without costing you thousands of dollars. Their pay scale is totally reasonable, even for a small company. You have four monthly options: free, CRM+ which is $29, PRO at $99, and TEAM at $99.
Milletti and his team have developed technology that can wade through the muck for you and deliver it right to your sales team. He thinks that the days of workflow automation—the system by which products used to be produced, like on an assembly line—are over and that each individual customer now needs specific attention.
InsideView can also help inter-departmental communication, streamlining the information so that everyone is on the same page. This means that you’re not only communicating more effectively with people outside your company, but also making sure that everything is running smoothly on the inside; nothing is worse for productivity than a disjointed team.
Ultimately it comes down to this: people want you to know them personally. They want to know that you took the time to figure out their history, their wants, their needs. One of the reasons that social media is so popular is that most people are, at heart, narcissists.
With InsideView you can feed into that desire quicker and more efficiently. It’s one more tool you can use to give your company a step up and make sure you get noticed.
