InsightSquared Offers Sales Pipeline Analytics on Salesforce’s AppExchange

InsightSquared, a provider of sales analytics tools, announced today the availability of Sales Pipeline Analytics on Salesforce's AppExchange. "It's our responsibility to take our best stuff and give it away for free," says Fred Shilmover, CEO of InsightSquared. "This is some of our best stuff. Our customers care about growth: They want to figure out how they are going to hit their numbers this quarter or this year, and the way to figure out what's going to happen in the future is by looking at the past."

Sales Pipeline Analytics gives sales managers a better understanding of their existing pipeline efforts and  guides them as they move ahead. Drawing from the data that is stored in a company's CRM system, it offers a defined view of the previous year's activity, highlighting trends and pointing out correlations that might not have been obvious otherwise. With the tool, for example, companies can determine any imbalances in their pipeline during particular stages of a sale, or whether there is a strong enough pipeline intact to help a company meet their end-of-year goal.

The product is best suited for companies with incentives or expectations for growth, Shilmover says—companies that just received investment funds, for example, or that did not meet quotas and wish to correct that moving forward. "When you shine a spotlight on sales performance, it helps everyone in the business understand how their contributions are resulting in sales performance," Shilmover says.  In addition to benefiting sales managers and reps, the product can come in handy for marketers and CEOs as they determine whether a pipeline is "real"—a problem that is fairly common, Shilmover says.  In many cases, the sums generated through closed deals don't match the pipeline's potential revenue. With better insights, marketers in charge of generating leads can see where the process might have gone awry, and why those leads didn’t translate into revenue.

For InsightSquared, which prides itself on offering smaller businesses the tools usually only affordable for larger outfits, this is another step toward helping small enterprises become more "data-driven." "Our mission is to offer million-dollar insights for teams that may not have those million-dollar budgets," Shilmover says. "[Smaller] sales teams previously had no alternative to get the kind of insights we deliver. They were priced out of the market."

The company's ties with Salesforce are central to achieving this mission. "CRM offers a great repository [that helps you] understand what's happening right now. … [but] one of the challenges with CRM systems is they're not as strong at predicting or telling historical trends, and that’s where we built a great partnership with Salesforce to help them round that out."

Sales Pipeline Analytics is not the first of its products to be featured on the AppExchange; it will be placed alongside a "core paid product," InsightSquared Analytics, as well as a Free Sales Funnel and Free Sales Leaderboard.

InsightSquared plans to institute improvements drawn from the feedback and reviews it receives on the AppExchange. Shilmover could not offer any comments on what the feedback has indicated so far. 

Related Articles

Salesvue Launches Prospecting-To-Pipeline Solution on Salesforce.com's AppExchange

Customers can now use prospecting tools within Salesforce to help increase the daily call volumes of any sales team.

InsightSquared Partners with OpenView Venture Partners

OpenView gains access to key business analytics and benchmarking tools