2016 IPO Prospects: InsideSales.com Appears Ready to List

According to a 2014 study by InsideSales.com on sales acceleration technology, the US market is estimated to grow from $12.8 billion in 2014 to more than $30 billion by 2017. The report estimates the market to have grown 40% in 2015. According to another study on the European market, European businesses are spending nearly $6,590 per sales rep per year on sales acceleration technology compared with $2,280 per rep per year spent in the US.

InsideSales.com’s Financials

David Elkington, Ken Krogue, and Rob Christensen set up InsideSales.com in 2004 as an outsourced web application development firm to build HR, inventory, and accounting systems based on consumer demand. Driven by its initial success, the founders veered themselves toward building an artificial intelligence learning platform to predict how users behave. They used their customer inputs to build a web-based sales management solution platform that provides companies with web marketing-generated leads for their sales teams. The app includes tools such as the ability to dial, click-to-call, and emailing. Its comprehensive sales acceleration platform helps build high performance sales teams through predictive analysis, data visualization, effective communication tools, and gamification capabilities.

InsideSales offers its platform for monthly subscriptions that range from $125-$295 per user per month. They offer features like a call dialing service, single-click dialing, automatic clogging of Inbound calls to CRM, call recording solution, an email tracking service, drag-and-drop interface for routing inbound calls, gamification capabilities, tracking of e-mail and web interactions, predictive opportunity scoring, and prescriptive prioritization. It does not reveal its financials, but in my discussions with Dave in 2015, he revealed that revenues for 2004 reached to $1 million. However, they fell from over a million to $400,000 before regaining growth to over 100% annually. By 2012, revenues had grown to $12.5 million and it had turned profitable. In 2013, revenues grew to $25 million.

After being bootstrapped, InsideSales first raised venture funding in 2012. It has raised $201.2 million so far with investments from Salesforce Ventures, HWVP, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Microsoft, Polaris Partners, US Venture Partners, Zetta Venture Partners, Acadia Woods Partners, and EPIC Ventures. InsideSales raised $60.6 million in March 2015 at a valuation of $1.5 billion. Valuation has increased from $1 billion in a round held in April 2014.

InsideSales.com’s Growth

Over the past year, InsideSales has been investing in product development. Last year, it announced the integration with Microsoft CRM. T9day, InsideSales’s cloud-based sales acceleration platform is available for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. The integration will allow Microsoft CRM’s customers to use Accelerate’s key sales communications and lead prioritization features.

In September last year, InsideSales also announced the Predictive Cloud, a first-of-its-kind open platform that enables businesses of all sizes to build rich, powerful predictive apps that drive business results. The platform is built on Neuralytics, the self-learning predictive engine, and uses the intelligence gathered from over 100 billion sales interactions to allow companies to improve applications, business processes, and sales practices. Additionally, its open API will allow independent software vendors to add predictive functionality into their own apps.

Last summer, InsideSales also announced the acquisition of C9. San Mateo-based C9 helps sales teams improve pipeline visibility and forecasting accuracy with predictive analytics. The acquisition has helped InsideSales expand its reach within the sales process, giving it access to actionable data within the entire sales funnel of an organization. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

InsideSales may now be ready to go public. It will be difficult to comment on its valuation given the secrecy about the financials. But InsideSales has been bootstrapped, so it should be well aware of financial discipline. Also, InsideSales has made strategically right choices about investments. Through funding from Microsoft and Salesforce, it has been able to develop better relationships with these companies. InsideSales is a premier partner for Salesforce and a Microsoft Global Independent Solutions Vendor Partner for Microsoft Dynamics. Clearly, the company is making all the right moves.

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