This post was written by Fjorela Dardha our Marketing intern from Bolzano Italy through the M31USA, internship placement program:
I am Fjorela, a student of Masters of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Free University of Bolzano in Italy. As part of a project funded by the European Social Fund, I was given the unique opportunity to visit Silicon Valley for six weeks in order to get an insight into ways of doing business in the world leading hub for high-tech innovation.
In particular, I had the chance to do a month-long internship in the Marketing department at FirstRain. From the very beginning, I was warmly accommodated and walked through the team’s overall responsibilities and upcoming projects. What really impressed me was how much people cared to make sure my experience in this start-up would be as beneficial as possible. They involved me in different meetings and group activities and were always asking about what I was doing in Italy, curious to hear about my impressions on the differences between European and American culture.
FirstRain is characterized by a very flat organizational structure and the team appears to be enthusiastically committed to a common goal while making the working environment a great and fun place to be in. I felt that particular attention was given to diversity, which is seen as a valuable component and is reflected in the team composition. I was unexpectedly invited to celebrate the end of their financial quarter, which offered me the unique opportunity to witness how much passion and love people can feel for what they are doing while still finding time to have fun among colleagues. During the party, I had the chance to eat and drink with the whole company, getting to meet people from all over the United States. I even got involved in a Sumo Wrestling match! “It’s an intern tradition” – they said…
Overall I consider this experience to have been extremely valuable and positive both from an educational and personal perspective. I had the opportunity to learn new tools such as Salesforce, which may turn out to be useful for my future career, and got an extensive picture of how start-ups work in the Bay Area. Moreover I was able to get some insights and real life examples of management in highly innovative environments as start-ups tend to be, where the decision making process is very quick and people have to constantly adapt to new circumstances. I consider myself very lucky for having been part of such a great and motivated team and for having had the occasion to create contacts and discover potential future career opportunities.
“Just like having a website in the 1990s, buyers are now judging the legitimacy of an organization based on their presence (or lack thereof) on social media.”
Rachel Clapp Miller over on the Force Management blog recently wrote a great piece on how to incorporate social media into your sales process. According to the research she quotes, social is proven to helps sales organizations drive pipeline by
(1) engaging with buyers earlier in the sales cycle,
(2) maintaining relationships with current customers and
(3) demonstrating valuable market insight.
Whenever you start using a new social media site, it prompts you to change your avatar, the image associated with the content you create/post. Your avatar basically represents who you are and an increasing amount of sales people are starting to use their professional ‘headshots’ across all their social business networks. This allows them to create a recognizable brand for themselves as social sellers for when they finally meet face to face with the customer. [Have you ever experienced the delight of meeting someone that you have followed and engaged with on a social network? I have many times, and it is a great feeling!]
Many companies are also starting to dictate that their employees join and engage with their customers on social networks – primarily Twitter and LinkedIn. Recently I saw a huge influx of people joining Twitter from a specific company. I found them because they were all retweeting the same corporate tweets I was tracking. However, I also noticed that many of them were eggheads. An egghead is a twitter user that doesn’t change their profile pic. As an ‘egghead’ you are surely going to be ignored–some might even think that you are a spam bot of some sort. So I asked someone that worked there about what was going on. It turns out that their CEO had announced at their annual meeting that everyone had to be on social. So the eggheads got on social, and many of them still haven’t hatched.
Remember the old mantra, people buy from people? Your buyers are not going to engage with your eggheads. However, hatching an egghead into a social seller who will provide value to their network doesn’t happen overnight. You have to put together a social media plan that will help your sellers be successful on social. This should include tools that will help them quickly share content that is not only promotional for your own company and products, but will also provide insights into subject matters that your customers care about.
With that being said, I think it is time for me to retire my very own avatar. A couple of years ago I wrote an ebook that was beautifully illustrated. It included a hand drawn cartoon of me. Since then, I have used that picture as my Twitter avatar. My network knows me as such and I am concerned that by switching I might be masking myself with … well … a real picture of myself! But that’s ok- the aim is to provide value and engagement to my old friends and my new ones as well, and a fresh look could help do the trick..So follow me to see the “new” @danielabarbosa
FirstRain has decided to take on the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge! CEO Penny Herscher and CFO Glenn Goelz took the plunge yesterday and will donate to help find a cure for this debilitating disease. Watch the videos below!
Penny now challenges Bob Carrigan, President and CEO of D&B; Jonathan Becher, CMO of SAP; Ron Black, CEO of Rambus; and Thomas Waechter, CEO of JDSU.
Penny:
Glenn:
If you are reading this post, you may be one of the lucky people out there that recently received a custom piece of art from FirstRain as part of our “Don’t Get Run Over by the Competition” campaign. According to a recent survey, over 74% of our sales and marketing users reported that access to FirstRain helps them identify competitive threats during campaigns and make sure they stay ahead of the game.
With that information in hand, our marketing team brainstormed ways to communicate this benefit with our customers, and decided that they would appreciate a one-of-a-kind gesture. So we put one of our summer interns, Doug Huynh, to work. Doug is a graphic design student studying at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and has extensive artistic experience.
Inspired by our own users who use FirstRain on a daily basis to identify competitive threats, Doug designed and hand crafted unique pieces of art using bike tires and paint. Using tires of different treads and widths, he hoped to create a visually appealing mix of textures and effects. The results are cool, one-of-a-kind pieces of art that not only look good on your desk, but also provide a good reminder to always be aware of what the competition is up to!
Feedback from recipients has been positive so far. If you are one of the lucky ones, turn the artwork over and go ahead and tweet out with hashtag #FirstRainArt the custom number of your piece! We’d love to hear from you.
Interested in one of these custom pieces, but haven’t received one? Drop me an email at dbarbosa@ignite.firstrain.com and, if there are any left, I will mail one to you!
We are proud to announce that FirstRain has won this year’s Bronze Stevie Award for Most Innovative Company of the Year in the US and Canada! Stevie Award winners were selected by more than 250 executives worldwide who participated in the judging process from May through early August.
The International Business Awards are the world’s premier business awards program. All individuals and organizations worldwide—public and private, for-profit and non-profit, large and small—are eligible to submit nominations. The 2014 IBAs received entries from more than 60 nations and territories.
We’re so happy that the world is recognizing the value FirstRain brings to our customers, as we help them drive more revenue by truly understanding what’s affecting the customers and markets they care about most. We’re constantly striving to bring the best and most advanced experience to our users, so this recognition from the Stevie Awards is a wonderful validation of the value we bring to our customers.
We’re all moved into our new office! Even though some of us are still getting lost in the hallways, you can feel the positive energy in the building.
More space for us also means space to add more people. We have a bunch of open positions; if you think you’re a good fit, send us your resume! Check them out here
Lots of space!
Spacious, classy new foyer
Our awesome kitchen loaded with snacks!
We are happy to announce the beta launch of mobile calendar integration for FirstRain! To help our users be as prepared as possible for every meeting, our algorithms will prioritize the most important customer insights, delivering a different personal insight experience tailored to each user and their role prior to any calendar event.
We’re excited to empower our customers with the mobile calendar integration by helping them increase the quality and frequency of customer engagement, guide activities to drive more opportunities and reduce risk through real-time understanding of customer and market events.
In conjunction to the calendar integration, we’re also introducing the FirstRain Labs program to accelerate innovation between FirstRain and our users. We always want to make sure that the personal insights and the functionality of our solutions help and empower our users as much as possible—and what better way to understand that than from the users themselves?
FirstRain Labs will grant participants beta access to capabilities that are currently being researched and developed, as well as to focus groups where they can share ideas with the FirstRain R&D team and the larger user community. We’re actively recruiting lab participants—sign up here!
