Salesforce is taking its Salesforce1 platform on tour—and FirstRain will be sponsoring their Dallas event! Attendees will be able to experience the power of the Customer Platform and see how to connect anything to everything: apps, devices and customer data. See how to deliver apps designed for the new hyper-connected world of customers that increase productivity and competitiveness, as well as learn firsthand from industry-leading customers how to sell, service and market like never before.
Will you be attending? Connect with @FirstRain on Twitter using the official event hashtag: #Salesforce1Tour
We would also love to meet you and show you how FirstRain is helping Salesforce customers like GE, Cisco and Flextronics grow revenue and drive better customer engagement. Stop by our booth to learn how market leaders leverage FirstRain’s mobile platform solutions to create sales organizations that consistently meet their revenue goals. Schedule a meeting with us!
Congratulations to Stephane from Coherent, the winner of an AppleTV! Stephane learned how his sales team can increase sales productivity and drive revenue with access to relevant, personal insights just when they need them—using FirstRain.
Didn’t get a chance to attend the webinar? Check our events page to register for a future session.
CRM has become an integral part of any salesperson’s workflow, but buying and implementing a CRM system is a big investment for any company. Companies need to make sure they get the best ROI they can—and the value CRM systems bring is not only from engaging users but also by providing them with critical information that helps them do their jobs smarter and better.
CRM ROI depends almost exclusively on user adoption. According to the Corporate Executive Board, “Only with high levels of adoption could any potential benefits or enhancements of the CRM be realized and applied to produce growth.” But how do you drive adoption amongst your team to ultimately see the growth that led you to implement the CRM in the first place? The answer is to make the system invaluable to them by using it to provide them with incredibly relevant customer insights.
It’s well known that people will not change the workflow to which they are accustomed unless they see a clear personal benefit of doing so—the typical “What’s in it for Me” syndrome. With enterprise B2B sales teams, it has been proven that incorporating personally relevant information on customers and prospects into CRM workflows can make the team realize that the CRM system does provide significant value. For example, FirstRain’s annual end-user survey shows that by delivering relevant insights when and where they need it, sales can see up to a 17% productivity increase, which is significant.
One of our customers, JDSU,recognized a new set of needs to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their global sales organization. Their sales and marketing teams now required more customer intelligence in order to advise them on their end-to-end networking needs, while also improving sales productivity.
Their previous CRM ROI was not ideal due to poor usability. They selected FirstRain Customer Insights for salesforce.com to be integrated into their CRM solution. Their salespeople are now fully on board using Salesforce, and through their FirstRain views personalized to their role and what they sell, they are able to find more sales opportunities and build better relationships with their customers.
Thanks to salesforce.com and FirstRain, the entire team JDSU is now on the same page, and the critical insights provided by personal business analytics was one of the major incentives to drive adoption and help them maximize CRM ROI.
CMOs definitely need to understand how to interpret data, because “data science is all about predicting the future,” as Computerworld Executive Editor Julia King says. The responsibility of choosing and driving strategy based on where the market is headed lies with the CMO, but,if the CMO arms herself and her team with the right tools, she doesn’t need to be a data scientist—and she might not necessarily need one on her team, either.
FirstRain CEO Penny Herscher gives her take on the relationship between marketing and big data on The Economist’s Lean Back blog.
Everyone wants to be as effective as possible at his job, and to be effective one needs to have deep knowledge of his or her business. Whether you’re a salesperson or a marketer, your job effectiveness most likely depends on how well you know your products, customers and markets. But people struggle with unearthing the critical information that will take them to the next step, and according to an IBM study “From Stretched to Strengthened Insights,” 66% of companies lack an in-depth understanding of their customers. This leaves them with a huge gap that they try to bridge by spending an inordinate amount of time searching for key insights, hidden in a sea of information overload.
But you can work smarter, not harder, and drive more revenue by making sure of a few critical things:
Having the right information at your fingertips is key, but what you do with it is just as important. Our own customers report a 17% increase in productivity increase for Sales Reps using Personal Business Analytics. By making sure that you use the information to your advantage, you to can drive more revenue while spending less time on tasks that are killing your team’s productivity.
FirstRain today released its third generation of mobile apps for iPhone, iPad and Android, and a brand new app for Windows 8 phones. The apps now include social sharing, analytics and configuration integrated within the Personal Business Analytics mobile experience. These new upgrades mean that users can continue to see developments deep in their customer’s businesses and take the right actions to grow their revenue.
Mobile is now more important than ever to the executive agenda, but it’s important to do it right. Our app has already proven to be a hit with our customers; Todd Keiner, the managing director for strategic marketing at Pfizer, said, “FirstRain is my go-to mobile app, unlike many other general consumer apps, it provides a very personalized view of my markets and customers enabling my team to understand where opportunities exists that can provide mutual business value, even when I am out of the office.”
In order to continue to deliver an exceptional user experience and help our users see better productivity and more revenue, we have rolled out the following enhancements:
For more information, you can read the full press release here.
Congratulations to Chris from Siemens, the winner of an AppleTV! Chris attended our webinar for strategic account managers, Develop More Strategic Relationships with Personal Business Analytics.
Didn’t get a chance to attend the webinar? Check our events page to register for a future session.
The world is more social than ever—and selling is no exception. But as Salesforce.com points out, the conversation around social media has been focused on marketing instead of making the sale. However, salespeople can and should take advantage of social selling to drive more wins and increase revenue.
But where to begin? The insights are out there, but where do you look for the most actionable and strategic, and then draw them out? Personal business analytics enable salespeople to use social selling techniques to reach prospects and win sales by not only showing them exactly the information they need to understand their customer’s business and their own market, but by allowing them to share critical insights as well.
To excel at social selling, there are a few key steps.
Salespeople are usually very social people by nature, and by equipping them with the right tools, you can harness and direct their sociability to improving sales.
Time is money, and salespeople often find themselves with too little of both. They are constantly trying to figure out how to become more efficient and shorten their sales cycle, in order to win more deals and meet (or exceed) their quota faster. It is a huge task, but there are a few ways you can, at least, make the most of your time.
1. Target the right people
Though salespeople wish that everyone would buy from them, that’s unfortunately not the case. So don’t waste time targeting the wrong people. Understand who and what teams in the organization would most benefit from your solution, given their particular business needs and challenges. And keep a pulse on critical changes affecting them: did they miss their revenue goals? Are they getting eaten alive by their competition? Find the person or people who oversee these goals, and increase your own sales productivity by not wasting time with someone who really won’t be interested in what you provide.
2. Aim high
According to Mark Suster for Inc., instead of pitching your product to a lower-level employee, you can increase your sales productivity by cutting out the time you’d have to spend giving demos and repeating yourself to many different levels of the organization by going as high up as possible. People higher up in the organization have buying authority, or direct access to the person who does. If you’re pitching to a senior executive, they may even send you down to the person who actually does the purchasing—and you’ll have executive endorsement.
Having a champion is invaluable, but if you’re pitching to an executive, you must make sure that you’ve done your research so you don’t waste their time. Executives are busy people, and if you don’t wow them on your first shot, the odds are that you won’t get another. Prepare by using a personal business analytics solution that will help you align your value proposition to exactly how it will solve their specific business challenges.
3. Create value
A salesperson’s job is to sometimes lead the customer to the correct conclusion. In order to do that, you need to truly understand their business. If you point out challenges and opportunities that they may not have even realized and then suggest a solution to address them, they will see you as a trusted advisor. Because there is so much information out there about your customer and their markets, only with access to personal business analytics can you truly understand how your solutions can benefit them, based on their particular customers, competitors and market.
