Tackling the Next Seismic Shift in Sales and Marketing

On the spectrum of important life decisions, the decision to leave the incredible team of Domosapiens at Domo to take on the COO role at InsideSales.com ranked right at the top. And, while I will miss these friends, in the end, my passion for helping sales and marketing professionals and the desire to run another tech growth company won.

Most of my career was built working with sales and marketing leaders during times of dramatic technology transformation to deliver the type of growth that creates business value. When I joined the Omniture team, CRM was a gamechanger, but innovation has not kept pace with the changing buying cycle, advances in AI, and the explosion of behavioral data. Companies want more from their CRM(s) and the addition of AI alone hasn’t unlocked the value they expect and very much need; AI is simply not enough. Once again, I see the industry at a crossroads in the race for digital sales transformation. The struggle is real for enterprise sales leaders who are chasing elusive buyers, battling strong competitors and facing increasing quotas. They are frustrated with the limitations of CRMs and siloed data that only presents a small part of the picture.

This is one of the reasons I believe the industry is ripe for transformation, and my experience tells me that the real value will lie in whomever can tap into the broadest and deepest stores of collective buyer data. The reality is that today, B2B sales and marketing are only applying AI to their own datasets; they haven't tapped into the collective actions of buyers throughout the world.  Sales cannot be informed or accelerated using AI with the data sets of an individual company. Since no one CRM vendor provides enough data to fuel AI, the launches of Einstein and Watson in B2B have been lackluster. One can have all the AI algorithms in the world, and even a platform to run them on - but without critical mass of data those investments will go underutilized.

Today, sales is looking for better insights from CRM and to get it, they need to feed it more and more data. There are literally thousands of tools in the sales and martech space, but there are relatively few rich sources of collective buyer data like the InsideSales.com Collective Intelligence data; more than 100 million global buyers and 120 billion behavioral data points. This will be a big market driver for our business as we have a decade head-start in collecting the global buyer data set to fuel our AI sales platform. I know from experience that Sales leaders need that competitive advantage for digital sales transformation; I’m anxious to work with InsideSales.com to deliver this unfair advantage informed by the behaviors mined from buyers - you can’t get this anywhere else.

Like Domo and Omniture before it, InsideSales.com has the DNA of the next sales and martech powerhouse. As the Data Arms Race heats up, we are in the right place at the right time to deliver on the promise of AI and CI. With our unprecedented stores of global buyer data at InsideSales.com, we help customers win more deals by delivering a better buyer experience. We are working to bring the promise of Amazon-like AI informed recommendations based on collective buyer insights to the world of enterprise sales. With self-learning - “crowdsourced” data that provides fresh contextual insights, we will unlock the value trapped in CRM systems of engagement.

So, as I roll up my sleeves to plot the growth trajectory at InsideSales.com, I want to take one last moment to thank the incredible team at Domo. I remain fiercely loyal to you, and, no matter where I go, I will always bleed a Domo Blue.