The Science of the Cold Call

When Dave Elkington started InsideSales.com in 2004, he broke one of the cardinal rules of then-nascent cloud sales software. To persuade businesses to put their precious customer records in remote servers, pioneers like Salesforce.com had promised to never, ever look at the data. InsideSales took the opposite approach, saying it wanted not just a look at the data about how its customers close deals, but to own it in anonymized form.

A dozen years on, InsideSales.com has customers including ADP, Groupon and Microsoft. And after a recent $60 million fundraising, including from Salesforce.com and Microsoft, a $1.4 billion valuation.