Posts in April 2013

We’re fortunate enough here at FirstRain to speak with Fortune 500 sales and marketing leaders every single day about their challenges, their objectives and how they’re trying to move the revenue needle for their companies. And one thing we’ve heard consistently when talking to these folks is the urgent need they have to increase the productivity of their teams. As we exit the great recession, many companies are facing pitched competitive battles while having significantly reduced teams—which puts the onus on a company’s sales and marketing operations or enablement teams to help every rep be as productive as possible!

This drive to provide increasingly powerful solutions for helping enterprises raise their revenue productivity is what’s behind our latest release, just announced today (see it here on WSJ.com): an expanded set of analytics actions for Salesforce.com. With this new release, FirstRain users who are accessing FirstRain integrated into their Salesforce.com CRM instance can now:

• Advance their sales cycles more quickly by instantly assigning critical FirstRain intelligence into an actionable salesforce.com Task for themselves or their team.
• Easily inject useful context and intelligence into any account view by enriching emerging account developments using account Notes.
• Improve collaboration by instantly sharing impactful developments with their team and colleagues via Chatter or email.

By introducing these new capabilities we’re further extending the ways in which salespeople can use FirstRain to easily take useful action on great analytics and intelligence they’re finding every day in FirstRain. In other words, it allows them to instantly convert useful customer analytics into the activities that increase team collaboration, improve alignment with customer strategies and drive revenue

As our CEO, Penny Herscher notes in the press release, “To be competitive in today’s market, enterprise sales teams need to not only deeply understand the customer, their customer’s customer and their customer’s market, but they must also be able to instantly act on that intelligence.” With FirstRain’s help, sales and marketing reps can now act more quickly and effectively than ever before, and our early release customers are already loving it!

CMSWire’s great article on the release today puts it well, “FirstRain, whose name invokes nourishing precipitation after a dry spell, is looking to refresh productivity in Salesforce …”. We couldn’t have put it better, and keep watching as FirstRain gets more and more nourishing every day!