Umberto Milletti, former CEO and Founder of InsideView (now part of the executive team at Demandbase) chats about the company’s (new!) journey as part of the Demandbase family in this quick catch-up with MarTech Series:

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Tell us about yourself Umberto, we’d love to hear about the story behind the InsideView platform, how has the overall journey been…till now!

Thank you for having me! I started InsideView with a belief that it is important to increase the importance and reliability of data for marketing and sales leaders. We noticed that the market wanted to get deeper insights into the companies and people who would want to do business with them. It’s not easy to hold that information together or keep it accurate. At that time, it was not easy for marketers and operational executives to fully optimize use of the information they were exposed to, especially with  the martech systems they had then. 

This is why we built InsideView, to tackle that core problem for the B2B marketplace. 

A key area we’ve always focused on: how do we find as much as possible about decision makers and businesses to make it actionable enough for end users to benefit.

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Things changed (for the better of course!) this year, with Demandbase acquiring InsideView, we’d love to hear about the experience during this time…and now as part of the Demandbase family: what are you most looking forward to in terms of your platform and how it will evolve? 

Gabe (CEO at Demandbase) and I, when we talked first, we realized we had a similar vision on where the market needed to go. Our customers had too many martech pieces and data coming in from different places and they were looking for a more comprehensive, all-inclusive solution. 

Demandbase’s solutions are stronger in certain areas and helps drive top of the funnel engagement or audience targeting, while InsideView has been more focused on bottom of the funnel data…we realized the two companies are quite complimentary and we could combine our customers to offer a much more complete solution to all of them. 

Today we have an integrated top of the funnel to bottom of the funnel marketing and sales data provision to allow customers to look at the full funnel and identify a more appropriate addressable market, including what kind of technologies those companies use.

What’s exciting about this is the ability to provide all of this to customers as one solution. We now have our account based marketing cloud, advertising cloud, a sales intelligence cloud and a data cloud. We have done a lot of work since the merger was completed to combine all of our technologies and go to our customers with information on how much more we can do for them. 

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There’s going to be no dearth of acquisitions in this industry, how do you feel the marketplace will evolve as companies/platforms come together to build unified capabilities for end users?

The market is leaning towards more comprehensive solutions, we see other players in the space consolidate capabilities through acquisitions; if you see brands like ZoomInfo or Dun and Bradstreet, that’s what providers are doing and that’s what customers are looking for -> fewer vendors and fewer disparate pieces of technologies to draw business insights from. 

This uniformity, the same data, it enhances Demand Gen, SDR, even sales capabilities. 

Companies want to align their marketing and sales and its hard to do that with different data sets and different infrastructures. 

These consolidations will continue over time. 

One of the better things about us is the broader scale we offer. We are probably the largest independent private martech company today. We are focusing on the ability to drive this forward, to listen to what customers would like to have today and bring that into the equation. 

We want to be best in class in each of the areas we cater to, that’s why we are committed to invest in each of our clouds to bring the most modern solution to customers.

A few tips you’d share with tech founders who are at the brink of an acquisition?

It’s important that founders ask themselves a few questions before an acquisition:

Questions like:

-Does this make sense for the customer? 

-Does it make it better for the customers of the company I’m thinking of joining. 

If the answer is yes, then that’s a big positive!

The other thing is to consider the people aspect: will employees feel like they belong in the new company. 

Also, the founder/CEO of the company that is acquired needs to find a productive way to become part of the new organisation. Often times their journey ends when the company is sold but as a founder you should find a way to be a contributor in the new company…

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