I recently went through a demonstration of insidesales.com’s newest product, Playbooks – a major player in the outbound marketing software space. As most people know in the industry, insidesales.com is a leader in inside sales technology. The insidesales.com core platform started as a power dialer but they are quickly adding on incredible new functionality. The power dialer directly integrates with CRM’s like Salesforce and provides an analytical way for inside sales people to prioritize who they should be calling.
Their newest product, Playbooks, includes much of the same dialing technology but also has powerful integrations from an emailing and research perspective. The overall premise of the platform (at least in my opinion) is that mass outreach doesn’t work, and to stand out inside salespeople to need personalize each and every message.
The platform uses a Google Chrome plugin that overlays on various sites and provides information on the specific user and company to make the personalization process easier. So while researching a company the system brings up the latest news and other industry information, so inside sales can incorporate what they find into their messaging. It also brings up information on the people the inside sales group is targeting, such as social media accounts.
The tool also has cool add-on functionality such as attempting to guess the email address of specific users being researched. Currently the tool doesn’t have mass email capabilities and according to insidesales.com that was on purpose. Once again, their belief is that mass email doesn’t work and messages need to be personalized to be relevant. I agree with their statement for the most part, although I do think there are times when mass emails make sense for inside salespeople.
For example, if you have an upcoming webinar you are trying to fill. After personalizing messages with your warmer contacts, it might make sense to send a mass email to hundreds of people seeing if there is interest. My guess is this feature will be coming in the near future and because it’s a newer product it just wasn’t a high priority.
You can also bring contacts directly over from Salesforce individually or via a CSV bulk upload. My guess is there will be a future enhancement where contacts can be brought over in bulk without having to use a CSV.
Overall, this is one of the more promising platforms out there. If they could bulk up the email functionality it could compete nicely with your more typical email plays like Salesloft, Yesware, and Toutapp. Plus, I could see this scaling into the enterprise much better than some of the aforementioned products. Six months from now, after a few additional enhancements, I could see this being the premier inside sales tool on the market.
At OutboundView we help B2B companies scale via outbound marketing and inbound marketing. Contact us if you are interested in finding more qualified sales opportunities.
