Market Mine

FirstRain and The World of Digital Business Intelligence

Tag Archives: sales

TOUCH ME: FirstRain is bringing touch-powered Customer Intelligence to the enterprise!

Posted on by
Reply

As we saw last year, there’s been a massive wave of Fortune 500 companies adopting touch-based tablets and devices. One result of that has been the proliferation of a whole range of B2B iPad and smartphone apps from companies like us and salesforce.com to enable those mobile, touch-powered professionals with the intelligence and data they need to understand and engage their customers, as well as open up new opportunities.

However, there’s a second big enterprise trend that’s picking up momentum as well: that of large companies who are developing internal enterprise apps for touch-based tablets and devices, for use by their own enterprise sales and marketing teams.

And because it’s a need that more and more of our customers are requesting every day, we’re very excited to announce this morning the launch of FirstRain for Touch, a new, powerful and yet easy way to drop highly relevant customer intelligence for your sales and marketing teams into your enterprise iPad app—and the first enterprise customer intelligence solution built for the Salesforce Touch Platform.

Last fall, at their annual Dreamforce ‘12 conference, along with their high profile launch of Salesforce Touch, salesforce.com also announced the launch of the similarly named (but very different) “Salesforce Touch Platform.” And unlike Salesforce Touch—which is a downloadable app for iPad, iPhone and Android created for their users to easily access salesforce.com data and capabilities on their devices—the Salesforce Touch Platform is a Software Developer’s Kit that developers within a large enterprise can use to create their own, internal touch-device apps for their sales and marketing teams.

Our new FirstRain for Touch solution is an elegant and personalized set of components that have been optimized for use on touch-based devices, and can be easily dropped into enterprise apps created by companies, just like those developed using the Salesforce Touch Platform SDK. And the demand has been notable. For example, we have at least 3 large, current customers (all in the Fortune 500) who are each planning or have already created and deployed their own iPad apps for use by their own enterprise sales and marketing teams.

But perhaps one of the nicest aspects of this launch has been the opportunity to work with the great folks at salesforce.com. We have lots of clients in common and solutions that have always been highly symbiotic, and so this area is just one more place where we find common opportunity to help each other succeed. Our thanks to Clarence So, their Executive Vice President of Mobile Strategy, for his kind comments about our release: “It is exciting to see the rapid innovation that partners such as FirstRain are delivering on our trusted mobile platform, FirstRain for Touch will provide customers with the right intelligence to help them connect with their customers in entirely new ways and accelerate business success.”

If you’re interested in more information about FirstRain for Touch, let us know!

Announcing a Breakthrough in B2B Twitter: FirstTweets™!

Posted on by
Reply

We’ve had an amazing year here at FirstRain. Over the course of just the last year, we’ve launched an intuitive new Web app interface, elegant iPad and mobile apps, and then our powerful new Enterprise Customer Intelligence System for end-to-end, company-wide intelligence integration.

And now today is another big day at FirstRain—but it’s also a big day for the social enterprise platforms like Chatter, Yammer and Jive because now, for the very first time, Twitter is useful for B2B professionals.

For some time now, media and brand monitoring solutions like Radian6 have been tapping into Twitter so that companies can see what their customers are saying. If United Airlines loses your luggage and you gripe about it on Twitter, United can see that. But solutions that provide consumer tweet monitoring are hopeless if you are a B2B professional trying to find useful and breaking industry news in Twitter about specific companies, products or business lines.

We’ve now solved that problem, and are announcing FirstTweets today. This is the world’s first solution for extracting business-relevant Twitter Intelligence. FirstTweets™ is a part of our FirstRain Enterprise Customer Intelligence System. It is a technology breakthrough that solves the Twitter problem for business executives: how to get business value and intelligence out of the 250 million tweets that Twitter produces daily.

Our analysis shows that more than 99.9% of all Twitter is non-relevant to business professionals, making it effectively impossible to get to the still more than 200,000 tweets per day of daily business intelligence buried inside.

Now, by using FirstRain’s patented semantic analytics, our system provides the ability to easily and effectively access the business intelligence hidden within the Twitter stream. FirstTweets™ collects and organizes real time industry and customer-specific information to uncover revenue opportunities, including customer developments, industry trends, news, market analysis, emerging themes and so much more.

This intelligence is then be easily integrated into different workflows, including iPads and other mobile devices, CRM systems,social enterprise platforms like Chatter, Jive, Yammer and SharePoint, or any workflow that works best for sales and marketing teams.

FirstTweets™ will be available to all users this Wednesday and will be included for FirstRain subscribers. It’s another exciting innovation by FirstRain, and I look forward to hearing what you think.

FirstTweets in Chatter FirstTweets from FirstRain

CRM Magazine talks about FirstRain and sales intelligence

Posted on by
Reply

Check out the article in the March issue of CRM magazine talking about sales reps, and whether or not companies were willing to expand their sales teams. The article refers to a study by CSO insights in which they showed that companies who gave their reps access to sales intelligence (SI) had significantly shorter ramp-up periods. Given that 78% of the companies they surveyed said they are planning to add sales people this year – sales intelligence and productivity is a big issue.

“… the level of insights coming from a new generation of SI companies, such as FirstRain, InsideView, OneSource, and ZoomInfo, has expanded dramatically. Today, employing Web-crawling and other data-gathering methods, SI solutions constantly gather information about the marketplaces into which reps are selling, the competitive landscape, and details on prospect accounts and key stakeholders.

Think of it this way: Each sales rep has his own digital research assistant constantly to track key news and events in his territory. Let’s say a new executive gets hired in a prospect firm you are targeting, or a company reports an earnings surprise (good or bad), or a merger is announced in one of the industries on which you focus. The SI system immediately would notify you about any of those developments. Then that information could be appended to contact and opportunity records in the CRM system you are using to manage your pipeline.”

CRM magazine maintains that it’s worth it to invest in such intelligence; the knowledge that it provides is invaluable—and in many cases, unexpected. So if you’re looking to shorten the ramp-up period in expanding your sales team, check out our products!

A little wine at sales kickoff

Posted on by
Reply

We started our new fiscal year on Tuesday of this week – our year runs Feb 1 through Jan 31 – and I brought the sales team in from the field for training and forecasting. Q4 of 2010 was very good for us and so we had a little fun alongside of the serious business of training and preparing for the next year.

After a long day in the conference room in our San Mateo office the whole team – R&D, sales et al went bowling together. Some ringers (Reiko that’s you…), some pretty weak bowlers (our resident Frenchman…) all mixed up together and having fun.

One of the teams

As is typical at this type of affair we bought pitchers of beer and pizza for sustenance in the intense  competitive environment. And for the few of us who really don’t like beer we went to the bowling alley bar to buy a bottle of wine. Ha! This is how they sell wine – little airline bottles – and when I asked why the bar tender told me – this is a BOWLING ALLEY lady!

The bright side of the news

Posted on by
Reply

There is a helpful article for sales people in Selling Power this morning.

Titled “Are you selling problems or solutions” the article cites four things you can do with the news to improve the conversation with you customer.

Consider the sale as just the beginning – as a friend of mine used to say – there is no post sales – there is sales and more sales!
Look on the bright (aka solution) side of the news. – the Selling Power editors say  FirstRain is an ideal option.

Turn features into benefits – yep – don’t speed and feed.

Smile more – an easy one on a sunny day.

Why Thomas joined FirstRain

Posted on by
Reply

We hired a new, senior sales rep at FirstRain this week. Very seasoned guy, has worked for our VP sales before, and I asked him to tell me why he joined.

I am always curious what motivates people to join us — how good a job do we do of sharing what’s in our crazy minds about what we’re trying to build when we interview people — and I like to capture it before they get mired into the daily challenges of growing a new company (which are considerable, especially if you are in sales).

Thomas sent me his list:

* FirstRain provides sales people competitive advantage (better info faster)
* Excellent leadership team and longstanding relationships
* Game changing vision
* Fantastic people and culture
* Significant market opportunity

Clearly he is not a loquacious guy. A year from now I’ll buy him a beer and ask “So… was it what you expected?”

Where’s the edge?

Posted on by
Reply

We’re in sales training all day today and Keith McCullough of Research Edge came to talk to the sales team about the “tectonic shift” that is happening in investment research today and why he loves our service.

He gave us two terrific concepts that apply to our role in the shift.

1. “the edge is in the question – what question you ask and when you ask it”. It’s no longer speed, it’s no longer whisper, it’s about having the rigorous research process that you ask the question at the right time. FirstRain in the process stimulates continuous, valuable questions.

2. “the internet is the disintermediator”. He thinks there is a generational change happening. Technology is dramatically changing the way people get information. Why did Obama beat the Clintons? (whatever your politics Obama took a new, tactical, technology driven approach). It’s Google vs. the ad agencies – the old style is “coming down” and whole industries are being rebuilt – and Wall St is one of them.

Very inspiring stuff for our sales people. Keith is one of the very high performers on the street – well known for his performance – so he has great credibility with my team. He told them they are selling a hot product, on the leading edge, creating a market as the industry goes through radical change – heady stuff.