Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) grows the most valuable relationships in business by uncovering truth and meaning from data. D&B Sales & Marketing Solutions harness the volume of changing data to improve sales and marketing ROI. Customers depend on D&B for real-time information when they are going out to talk to a prospect or customer. An increasing challenge for the D&B team was to take social and web data which is unstructured, structure it in a way that it’s meaningful to their customers, and merge it with the data that D&B already has so that it could provide very actionable insights.

One of the things that D&B was looking for was the ability to provide a deep social business experience for their customers that was not just noisy social buzz or lists and lists of irrelevant news headlines. D&B understood that in order to be successsful, today’s sales reps can not spend a lot of time searching for information, doing administrative tasks or doing things they consider non-value add when trying to find a new prospect or close a deal.

D&B selected FirstRain as their long-term partner to enable customers to receive up-to-the-minute insights on prospects, customers, competitors and key markets by leveraging the FirstRain technology platform.  FirstRain now provides D&B with customer and market intelligence, which D&B delivers through its sales and marketing products.  The solution provides a 360-degree view of a company that unifies relevant social content with D&B’s structure content in a simple and seamless manner that is easy to use.  The partnership allows D&B to offer relevant new analytics, from a wide range of sources including social media, to millions of users across different industries.

FirstRain enables D&B to offer a completely new value proposition that combines structured and unstructured data through the D&B product set. For sales and marketing, time equates to revenue. Customers are already providing feedback that the D&B products using FirstRain are more relevant to them, making it much easier to get information when they need it and where they need it. With FirstRain analytics directly embeded into D&B products, users no longer have to spend hours of their time looking through different sources of information to figure out what’s meaningful. By incorporating FirstRain’s unique platform for big-data analytics, it’s the first time that D&B has combined structured and unstructured data in a customer centric way. This partnership with FirstRain provided D&B with several key benefits:

• real-time, flexible platform that delivers critical insights generated based on real-time big data analytics of unstructured sources including social media
• versatile and seamless integration options based on the partner’s goals
• committed partner who values ongoing communication and continuous innovation