InsideSales

InsideSales (InsideSales.com, later renamed XANT) is a Provo, Utah software company founded in 2004 that builds sales engagement and sales acceleration software for enterprise sales organizations. Its flagship product, Playbooks, is positioned beyond a conventional auto-dialer or sequencer: it supplies representatives with additional contacts and recommendations on who to contact, when and through which channel, automates data entry and CRM synchronization, and gives sales leadership visibility into individual and team activity and performance. Capabilities described by the company include lead prioritization, sales cadence creation, click-to-call, automated voicemail and email, local presence dialing, and immediate routing of newly arrived inbound leads to the top of rep call lists [0][2][3].

The platform is built on a predictive and prescriptive self-learning engine the company markets as Neuralytics, which combines customer CRM data, InsideSales' own data set (NeuralData) and third-party signals such as company mergers and acquisitions, stock movements, and traffic or weather data. Models score which accounts and deals are most likely to close and recommend next best actions; the company states it draws on 27 billion revenue interactions and 183 million buyer profiles and describes the largest database of sales transactions counting trillions of data points, with data anonymized to meet privacy requirements including GDPR [0][2][3].

The company originally sold a simple dialer product for roughly seven years, using it to accumulate sales interaction data before shifting to predictive optimization. In 2018, founder Dave Elkington was replaced as CEO by Chris Harrington, previously COO and formerly president of Omniture and Domo. The company rebranded to XANT, cut 30% of staff in mid-2021, and sold its remaining assets to Aurea Software, part of Joe Liemandt's ESW Capital, in August 2021; the acquired business unit reverted to the InsideSales name [5][6][7].

Founding story

David Elkington, who studied philosophy as an undergraduate and completed a graduate degree in computer science at BYU with a period working in banking, based the concept for the company's data engine on his philosophy senior thesis and the idea of propinquity — that similar people behave in similar ways. The company was bootstrapped without outside financing in its early years, during which Elkington and his wife took nighttime janitorial work to cover expenses [5].

Business model

InsideSales licenses its sales engagement platform, Playbooks, to organizations that employ sales teams, integrating with customer CRM systems such as Salesforce and enriching that CRM with buyer intelligence data. Its product has been distributed as one of the more widely used applications on the Salesforce AppExchange [0][2][3][4].

Software platform sold to business customers, with the company having repositioned from a lower-priced dialer product toward enterprise-focused deployments [4][5].

Traction

Reported more than 100 billion recorded interactions between salespeople and customers, 27 billion revenue interactions and 183 million buyer profiles; hundreds of AI-enabled customers; and G2 ratings in which 95% of users rated the product 4 or 5 stars and 91% said they would recommend Playbooks. Recognition included AA-ISP Service Provider of the Year, Best AI for Marketing and Sales, and SellingPower Top AI Solutions for Sales 2020. Employee headcount peaked at over 900, and the company was listed at 457 employees in one profile [0][1][2][3][5][7].

Latest developments

In June 2021 XANT laid off 30% of its workforce, including 75% of its sales team. On August 2, 2021 Aurea Software announced it had acquired XANT; terms were undisclosed, though sources cited a purchase price in the low double-digit millions. All employees were terminated in the transaction, with severance conditioned on signing a separation agreement, and the business unit reverted to the InsideSales name, with Aurea planning to integrate Playbooks into its commerce software suite. Former CEO Chris Harrington was announced as Entrata's Chief Revenue Officer on August 24, 2021 [7].