Inside View: The Ultimate CRM Mashup?

Summary

Inside View is an amazingly useful tool. It’s a subscription web site that aggregates up a number of marketing/prospecting databases (jigsaw, hoovers, D&B, zoominfo). They’ve got a great pricing model, the tool can sit inside an IFRAME on your Account or Lead forms, and if you need to prospect, I highly recommend you check it out. (And if you don’t need to prospect, please tell me  how you do it!). In a minute I’ll tell you the funny story about how I learned to use it, but first, why it’s the ultimate CRM mashup.

Here’s how it looks embedded in an IFRAME on an Account form:

It’s got seven tabs. “Analysis” and “Key Info” (showing) provide basic account information, and the other five aggregate information from lots of different databases to show them in context. Inside View has deals with all of those databases (some of which I mentioned above but there are lots more), so as long as you subscribe to Inside View, you don’t have to individually subscribe to all of the other ones.

You can probably guess what the other tabs expose, but I’ll show you the “Buzz” tab since it’s one of my favorites:

It might be a little hard to see, but the Buzz tab is a search on the account name exposed as a Twitter feed. To test it, I loaded up one of my favorite account records, switched to a Twitter session and tweeted something about the account, then switched back to the account form, refreshed, and there it was –  pretty cool! You can even see the account’s web site traffic courtesy of Compete.com. (the numbers are in thousands of unique visitors — www.kraftfoodscompany.com gets a view more visitors than the Trick Bag!) 

Prospecting with Inside View

There’s a free version I’ll tell you about below. I tried it, liked it, and purchased a subscription. A single seat subscription is $99/month, which might sound like a lot until you realize you get unlimited exports from Inside View’s account and contact/lead database. Most of the other prospecting databases I’ve subscribed to have a pay-per-lead model, or an unlimited subscription that’s much more expensive than $99/month.

You can search in lots of different ways to identify prospects; for me the best option has been to identify people with specific job titles (e.g., CRM Project Manager) at specific accounts. After identifying the records, you can export them to a CSV then import into CRM.

I’m jealous of the SalesForce.com integration, since they can do an automagic import, no CSV file required! The Inside View people tell me this is coming soon to the Dynamics CRM version — I hope so!   

How it Works

One of my sales reps received an email from a rep at Inside View a couple weeks ago. I copied and pasted the following text from it:

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 Customize Account Entity 

• Double-click “Account”
• Click “Forms and Views”
• Double-click “Form” (The main application form)
• Click “Add an IFRAME”
  • Name: INSIDEVIEW_ACCOUNT_CONNECTOR
  • URL: javascript:false
  • Check the box for “Pass record object-type code…”
  • Label: InsideView
  • Check the box for “Display label on the form”
  • Uncheck the box for “Restrict cross-frame scripting”
  • Section: Account Information
  • Click “Formatting” tab
  • Scrolling: Never
  • Uncheck the box for “Display border”
  • Leave all other default values and click “OK”
• Click “Form Properties”
• Select “OnLoad” event and click “Edit”
• Check the box for “Event is enabled”
• Copy and paste the code provided for the Account connector (I’ll email you the code if you fill out the form I link to at the end of this article)
• Click “Save and Close”

From the “Customize Entities” view, select “Account” and click “Publish

———————————

In the normal course of events, I’m not able to lift perfectly good blog copy from an email, and I have to admit, seeing these perfectly good instructions on how to customize the Account entity in an email to Kim prompted me to check her security role and make sure she wouldn’t actually be able to DO this. She can’t, and anyway she has the good sense not to try it, but I thought it was interesting that somebody would send a sales rep instructions like that!

Anyway, those are your step-by-step instructions if you want to try the free version out on your own CRM — works with both CRM Online and on-premise. The free version gives you the same sweet integration, but you don’t get to pull contacts & some other things you’d expect to have to pay for. All you need to get it to work is the jscript code that goes into the Load event of your account form. The Inside View people will send it to you, but I checked with them and they said it was OK if I did also.

So, to get the Account form Load Event code for my current pick as the Ultimate CRM Mashup, click here and fill out the form.