We’re fortunate enough here at FirstRain to speak with Fortune 500 sales and marketing leaders every single day about their challenges, their objectives and how they’re trying to move the revenue needle for their companies. And one thing we’ve heard consistently when talking to these folks is the urgent need they have to increase the productivity of their teams. As we exit the great recession, many companies are facing pitched competitive battles while having significantly reduced teams—which puts the onus on a company’s sales and marketing operations or enablement teams to help every rep be as productive as possible!

This drive to provide increasingly powerful solutions for helping enterprises raise their revenue productivity is what’s behind our latest release, just announced today (see it here on WSJ.com): an expanded set of analytics actions for Salesforce.com. With this new release, FirstRain users who are accessing FirstRain integrated into their Salesforce.com CRM instance can now:

• Advance their sales cycles more quickly by instantly assigning critical FirstRain intelligence into an actionable salesforce.com Task for themselves or their team.
• Easily inject useful context and intelligence into any account view by enriching emerging account developments using account Notes.
• Improve collaboration by instantly sharing impactful developments with their team and colleagues via Chatter or email.

By introducing these new capabilities we’re further extending the ways in which salespeople can use FirstRain to easily take useful action on great analytics and intelligence they’re finding every day in FirstRain. In other words, it allows them to instantly convert useful customer analytics into the activities that increase team collaboration, improve alignment with customer strategies and drive revenue

As our CEO, Penny Herscher notes in the press release, “To be competitive in today’s market, enterprise sales teams need to not only deeply understand the customer, their customer’s customer and their customer’s market, but they must also be able to instantly act on that intelligence.” With FirstRain’s help, sales and marketing reps can now act more quickly and effectively than ever before, and our early release customers are already loving it!

CMSWire’s great article on the release today puts it well, “FirstRain, whose name invokes nourishing precipitation after a dry spell, is looking to refresh productivity in Salesforce …”. We couldn’t have put it better, and keep watching as FirstRain gets more and more nourishing every day!

FirstRain is excited to announce that we are sponsoring this weekend’s Overloaded2013 conference, February 9th in San Francisco. This annual conference, which is produced by the Information Overload Research Group, is a diverse gathering of thought leaders in information management, workplace collaboration and technology productivity who come from academia, corporate management, information technology and private research—and all of whom are addressing real-time issues with information overload. The agenda and speaker lineup looks wonderful and includes our very own Nima Niakan, FirstRain’s Director of Customer Solutions.

Every day our customer solutions team works directly with our customers help them use FirstRain to solve a piece of their own information overload problems—delivering only the highly relevant, real-time information their sales and marketing teams need—and nothing more!

We’re really looking forward to meeting the other participants who are also working on innovative solutions to information overload!

When FirstRain first launched our FirstTweets customer intelligence and analytics capability last spring, we knew we were taking an approach that was unlike anything else we’d seen in the marketplace, and our customers have told us as much. Unlike social media monitoring tools designed to help you understand and monitor conversations around your brand, FirstTweet’s unique analytics extract only business-focused intelligence from the extraordinary noise of Twitter, and then our patented algorithms actually understand and organize that information into the exact business lines, companies and industries that B2B sales and strategic marketing professionals sell into.

With FirstTweets, many business professionals got access—for the first time—to a world of Twitter-based intelligence relevant to their most important customers, competitors and end-markets, and all easily integrated into their existing CRMs, mobile devices and workflows. It’s Twitter made easy and highly relevant for the B2B sales and marketing pro.

And critical to the success of FirstTweets was, first, to have comprehensive, authorized and reliable access to the Twitter firehose—and for this FirstRain relies on Gnip. Gnip is the world’s largest and most trusted provider of social media data, and in addition to being a fantastic team of innovative social data ninjas, they’ve been terrific partners in our quest to transform the way corporate enterprises drive revenue through Web and Social customer intelligence and analytics beyond social monitoring.

That’s why we here at FirstRain are thrilled to announce this morning that we have been selected as one of Gnip’s inaugural Plugged In To Gnip partners. Joined by only a handful of select companies such as IBM, EMC, Brandwatch and others, being selected as a “Plugged In” partner by Gnip reinforces the unique, leading-edge approach to B2B social media analytics for sales and strategic marketing that FirstRain is taking.

We believe that having access to Gnip data really does give us a competitive edge which allows us to deliver real value to our customers every day, and being selected as a ‘Plugged In’ partner is yet one more proof point that FirstRain is providing customer intelligence that delivers unique and powerful customer intelligence our customers can’t get anywhere else.

Thanks to our friends and partners at Gnip for selecting us, and we’re looking forward to doing even greater things together in the future!