This was a big week for FirstRain. We released a major software release which the team has been working hard on both in the US and in our Gurgaon office for several months. I am truly delighted with the impact of their work – it’s transformative for our customers – and so I decided we should get out of the office into the fresh air and celebrate together.
We rented the Bay Wolf for the afternoon and fueled with champagne, sandwiches, cookies and fruit we spent a wonderful afternoon on the Bay. I think our summer intern from Berkeley thinks working in high tech is a blast now.
FirstRain crew – in uniform (sort of)
Relaxing and bonding together
Ashutosh at the helm!
The underlying way in which FirstRain adds such value to our customers is our unique ability to extract only high-quality Business Web content from the consumer internet, and then deliver it up to folks who need it to make decisions about their company, their industry, their products, their competitors, etc.
But one thing we’ve focused on a bit less is delivering information about the actual practice of certain roles. In other words, rather than the content a sales executive needs to succeed in their job (which we currently do very well), it’s the content that’s ABOUT being a sales professional: the tools they use, the best practices in the space today, the emerging trends, the industry changes, the major purchases, etc. If you’re a sales enablement, operations or support professional, or a manager looking to successfully lead your team to exceed their goals, this information is of great interest.
And it turns out, FirstRain is is pretty good at finding this stuff too! Of course, our friends at Selling Power have been providing leading edge information about sales sucess for many years via Selling Power magazine, SellingPower.com, their conferences, custom publications, and more. So when we sat down to chat about this challenge a couple of months ago it seemed natural to team up!
Monday (June 20) at the Selling Power Sales 2.0 Conference in Boston, MA, Selling Power CEO Gerhard Gschwandtner and I had a chance to discuss the challenge now facing Sales people as they struggle to find useful information on Sales 2.0 issues using Google and other consumer search tools:
And as I mentioned in the video, we’re very happy to announce a new collaboration between FirstRain and Selling Power, delivering new Sales 2.0 “Hot Topics”, powered by FirstRain, right to the home page of SellingPower.com. Included are topics such as CRM & Sales Enablement, and Sales Management & Compensation, and each features high-quality Business Web content found by FirstRain and delivered in real time to SellingPower.com readers.
It’s yet another example of the power FirstRain can deliver Sales, Marketing, Finance and other business professionals, and it’s great to be able to do offer it in collaboration with our friends at Selling Power. For us it’s a bit of an experiment, so check it out and let me know what you think!
Day 1 iPad2 Winner: Rachel Eichen, Library Intern, Consumer Electronics Association (with FirstRain VP of Marketing, Ryan Warren)
FirstRain was an SLA newbie this year, attending the Special Libraries Association conference for the first time at this year’s annual gathering in Philadelphia, June 12-14. And although it was our first time, SLA’s attendees were gentle with us. 
We received an incredibly warm welcome and a hugely positive response to the FirstRain solution suite, meeting many wonderful people from the SLA community who visited our Info-Expo booth, who joined us for our Philadelphia-themed Cheesesteak and Beer cocktail parties, and who attended the SLA Midwest Chapter Event that we sponsored.
Overall, it was a wonderful SLA, and made even brighter by the excited winners of the three iPad2s given away by FirstRain to SLA attendees. Thanks for the warm reception everyone, we’re looking forward to seeing you all again soon!
Day 2 iPad2 Winner: Michelle Bing, Library Director, Miller-Motte Technical College (with FirstRain Sales Executive, Thomas Lai)
Day 3 iPad2 Winner: Janet Holly, Reference Librarian, Virginia Military Institute
One challenge of being an information solution that’s been designed from the ground-up to be easily used by business professionals who are not professional researchers, is the mistaken assumption that corporate libraries wouldn’t be interested in FirstRain.
So it’s always gratifying, then, when yet another customer comes along that helps us dispel this myth. We’re very happy to announce today that leading international commercial law firm, Bird & Bird, has selected FirstRain. And once again, it’s Bird & Bird’s Library and Information Services team that selected FirstRain as the solution to provide business monitoring to their organization, and assist with the dissemination of that intelligence across the firm.
Bird & Bird has integrated FirstRain into both their ad hoc research process, and is used to provide ongoing updates to their firm’s fee earners. FirstRain was selected, as Cecilia Cheung, Head of Library at Bird & Bird noted “In order to to give Bird & Bird Fee Earners competitive advantage …”.
We know that many info pros love FirstRain because of our unique and patented Business Web Graph(TM). Better than a conventional, linear taxonomy, FirstRain’s Business Web Graph takes traditionally hierarchical concepts such as sectors, industries and companies, and then creates live interconnections between them using our unique Business Lines and Dynamic Topics. The result is a dynamic graph of linked Business Web concepts we apply to all of our content–and continuously update based on the living Web. It’s the industry’s best collection of business topics, and is one of the many reasons FirstRain is the market leader in filtering out the noise of the consumer Web and delivering your users only highly relevant Business Web content.
We’re very excited to be working with the Library at Bird & Bird, and can’t wait for the next myth-busting customer to come along!
By the way, for those of you who will be at next week’s Special Libraries Association 2011 Conference in Philadelphia, stop by and see us at Booth 540! We’ll be giving away an iPad every day, hosting Beer & Cheesesteak cocktail parties, and our own Nima Niakan will be leading a session on developing effective Sales & Marketing triggers. Hope to see you there!
