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FirstRain and The World of Digital Business Intelligence

Tag Archives: salesforce.com

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

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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!

360 Degrees of Excellence: How GE Capital Drives ROI Through Customer Intelligence

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If you didn’t get to hear the Dreamforce session where GE Capital’s Sales Excellence leader, Steve Kozek, discussed their challenges in increasing the customer expertise of their sales reps and driving CRM adoption and engagement, we have now posted a highlights video on our YouTube channel. We think you will find the value in hearing GE Capital’s experience in solving these problems!

If you are interested in seeing the full video of the session please email us at sales@firstrain.com

Have You Done Your Homework Ms. Salesman?

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I must be a horrible target for a sales person. I don’t listen to cold call voicemails, I delete 99% of the spam emails I receive and, if a sales person is lucky enough to get me live, they have about 10 seconds to catch my attention before I tune out.

But I am not unusual. My short attention span and company-selfish interests are typical of the busy exec. And this is something too many sales people don’t take into account. They talk about their products and their needs, not my company’s needs.

In one study:

  • 82% of senior executives said they ”almost always” or ”frequently” experience
    sellers who are uninformed about the executive’s needs and the
    executive’s company — and

and there is simply no excuse for this any more!

In the recent report on Sales Intelligence the Aberdeen Group not surprisingly found that the types of intelligence that are most useful are the higher level ones — company and competitor, not the basic contact data most sales teams get equipped with.

We see this need again and again. If you want to get through to an executive (like me) you need to understand my business. What drives my business, what I am trying to achieve, and what’s impacting my customers decisions.

Having my social profile, while cute, can actually make a salesperson annoying. Just because you contact me on Twitter or send me an Inmail is not going to make me respond— in fact if it is a cheesy message without substance I am not going to pay any more attention just because your message is on social media. On the very rare occasions an email gets through my filter it’s because it speaks to my business needs.

The solutions exist today to equip your sales team with smart customer and competitor intelligence right in their workflow. Within the CRM, tailored to the market the rep is in, configured to make it easy for the rep to review the customer intelligence and so be knowledgeable about how he/she can impact the customer’s business—and so talk about the customers need first!

So if you want to sell directly to executives, do your homework about their business first or you are wasting your time as well as theirs.

Free snapshot of FirstRain account intelligence is now on Salesforce AppExchange

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We’re making a snapshot of FirstRain intelligence available for free on Salesforce.com AppExchange today – so everyone can get access to intelligent business search results within their accounts, contacts, opportunities etc.

Today’s announcement is the new free applet – a snapshot – that shows What’s Hot for each account. What are the most important business topics impacting the customer? (for example breast cancer in the Pfizer example below) What are the most recent management changes? Who are the top competitors and what are the latest developments with them?

The snapshot is designed to help the sales person figure out what to say on a call or in a meeting – how to help the sales person make their conversation relevant to the customer and their business. Arming the sales person to talk about the changes impacting the customer’s business (and how he/she can help) rather than speed-and-feed a product.

Why should you care? Because unlike typical databases, FirstRain uses the web as the most dynamic, real time source of updates and intelligence for your sales campaigns. But unlike typical web search it extracts out the events that are impacting your customer… and de-junks, filters and ranks what’s hot for you, so you only see what matters. This means you can

- Prepare for a call instantly
- Understand your account in context
- See competitor events and top news and blogs
- Know the top hot industry topics impacting your accounts
- See key unannounced management changes
- Link into deeper intelligence and reports

=> Know what you should know — but never have the time to research

We have a number of customers who have already downloaded the applet and they are telling us that not only is the information immediately useful – but also downloading the applet was easy and it runs fast! Great to hear.

Here’s a link to the press release….. and here are some samples of how the applet works inside salesforce CRM. As you would expect – it also has many links into FirstRain so licensed users can easily jump into company briefs and deeper views of their customer’s business to use during meeting and campaign planning.

You can see a demo and screenshots – or download the app for yourself – on our page on AppExchange.

“What’s hot” smart summary – FirstRain chooses what goes onto the front page of the snapshot based on where the hot activity is for the account
Who are the top competitors – and what’s happening with them?
What are the hottest issues in the industry and what’s been happening?
What is the trend in management turnover – who recently joined and left – plus a link through to extracted management team lists

Why Salesforce buying Jigsaw is just the first shot in a new battleground

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We find and analyze management for our customers. It’s one of the most popular things we do. So we know that helping users get a better, richer picture of who matters in the companies and markets they care about is valuable intelligence.

Enter from stage left: Salesforce.com buys Jigsaw.com today.

Jigsaw has a mixed reputation – from Michael Arrington of Techcrunch originally calling them evil in 2006, and then in 2009 just calling them amoral – to the New York Times describing them as driven by users self interest. They’ve been growing, but not like LinkedIn; revenue has been doubling, but was it enough to go it alone? But whatever you may think about their business model, and your “friends” revealing your contact information into a central database, the net result is more than 1.2 million members and more than 22 million contacts.

Salesforce has positioned this as entering the $3B data services market – and creating “new opportunities” to partner more closely with other data providers like D&B, Hoovers and Lexis Nexis. But I think this is a classic misdirect. I agree with Michael Maoz – what’s really going on here is the convergence in the needs of CRM and the social process.

Users want dynamic, current data. They know that today the most up-to-date information is on the web. It’s in networks, it’s in blogs, it’s living in the thousands of phoenixes (or should that be the correct Latin phoenices?) rising from the ashes of the breakdown of traditional journalism. They don’t want to get data from databases built from manual processes and filings – they are simply always out of date.

And so for Salesforce, the ability to pick up a dynamic contact list and the continuously updating process behind it (since we have to assume LinkedIn was not for sale) is a way for them to bring that dynamism into their CRM platform and into their moves into social media. It’s a smart move. But I do wonder what the long term impact is for the traditional, static databases. I know at FirstRain we are replacing Factiva today because our intelligence is richer, fresher (and easier, but that’s another story) – will Salesforce end up competing with Hoovers et al?

Current example of a sales team using FirstRain to stay ahead

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Got email from a client last week really pleased with the information they had found on FirstRain to help them with a campaign.

Here’s the story: A small software company selling to a large energy utility. They sell software to help automate and improve customer communications.

In this case the sales team was doing a detailed business process analysis to show the utility how much money they could save by upgrading their customer communications, and how they would also improve their quality.

Friday afternoon – meeting with the CIO to present their findings. The CIO walks in, out of sorts, the company had just been in the news as losing customers because of their inability to invoice customers correctly (right in the sweet spot for this sale). On a break during the meeting the sales team looked for the news story – wanting to make sure they understood the severity of the issue and how to use it in their sales cycle. They looked on Google – not there – then on FirstRain – straight to the link and then able to use the research engine to understand the background.

The sales team is now using their additional knowledge to help the customer get on top of their billing issues quickly – and sent us an email saying “Thank you FirstRain”.

(the story is anonymous until they win the contract – then we can name them)