Nuance Communications is a leading provider of voice and language solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Nuance has sales representatives in more than 70 countries, with a large presence in the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. The company also has a complex sales model with multiple global sales forces aligned by business units, solutions, and geographies.

A global company like Nuance needs to grasp what’s impacting customers and prospects in order to stay ahead of the competition and grow revenue. Their sales leadership understands that they can’t compete in the market today if they’re not constantly engaging with their customers and providing value. Nuance was searching for a solution that would help them match their sales strategy with actionable data, easily integrate with salesforce.com and provide worldwide coverage for their growing sales organization.

“FirstRain provides me with relevant, up-to-date information on my key accounts,” explained a Nuance sales executive. Nuance introduced FirstRain analytics to their sales organization in order to provide their sales reps with personal business insights about customers and prospects in real time. FirstRain is integrated within salesforce.com’s CRM platform at Nuance through a  personalized home dashboard view, which provides an interactive view of the critical news and events affecting the reps’ key customer accounts, as well as on their opportunity and account pages.

Nuance’s sales organization quickly adopted FirstRain and the impact of personal business analytics on the sales team was immediate and positive. “Thanks to FirstRain, I recently was alerted about a new product being launched by a customer and immediately discussed the opportunity with them, which looked like a good fit with Nuance,” stated a member of the global sales team, who uses FirstRain to grow revenue by solving his customers’ business challenges.

“FirstRain daily alerts allow me to be current and meaningful when speaking with customers,” said Dennis Kieffer, Area Vice President for Healthcare at Nuance. Dennis uses FirstRain Personal Business Analytics™ on a daily basis, having monitors set up for his top 15 customer accounts. Dennis’s daily use of FirstRain gave him the insight and chance to close a multi-million dollar contract with one of his customers. While checking his daily alerts, Dennis noticed that FirstRain pulled a local news article about how his customer was in merger negotiations with another company. Dennis was able to use this insight to refocus his strategy with his customer and give him the opportunity to continue closing the deal.