AI startup InsideSales asks if a machine can be taught to sell

The world of the salesperson is filled with maxims of success: "You don't sell a guy one car, you sell him five cars over fifteen years." In the rough and tumble world of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, the play from which that line comes, such sales tactics are part instinct, part hard-won savvy. A startup company named InsideSales argues such expertise can be figured out over time by mining sales data, and applying some rudimentary forms of machine learning. David Elkington, founder and chief executive of InsideSales of Provo, Utah, was in New York last week for his own customer conference. He sat down with ZDNet to explain his thinking.