There is a world of difference between news aggregators like Google News, Moreover and Meltwaterand a true customer intelligence system like FirstRain. All have the ability to deliver some news from the Web but the similarity ends there. Keyword-based news is OK if you want a simple cut of everything, but they are absolutely insufficient if you want your enterprise sales team to drive revenue by deeply understanding their customer’s business.
An enterprise customer intelligence system like FirstRain:
1. Uses semantic analysis to categorize all content (Web, social media, etc.) to a high degree of specificity—well beyond the specificity possible with keywords. For example: Using analytics, FirstRain can track and filter on topics as specific as “Diabetic Nephropathy”, “Enterprise Telecom Services Market” and “Solar Energy Farms Capacity Expansion”, which means the sales team will receive customer intelligence with a much higher degree of relevance than any other solution.
2. Searches the global Web, identifying and extracting only business-focused content (including news, press releases, company Web sites, government filings, industry sources, blogs and much more), while filtering out the consumer, entertainment and other noisy content routinely delivered by Google Alerts and news aggregators. This filtering has many layers to it—at the source, content and model levels—to ensure that only high quality business content makes it through to the end user.
3. Prioritizes all content using multi-factoral algorithms that push the most significant intelligence to the top (based on the user’s own workflow at the time), then de-duplicating it so you only see each important development once, all greatly improving the relevancy of the intelligence each user sees. This saves time and money for enterprise sales and customer marketing teams, eliminating the hours spent combing through search results (and often still missing key developments), and reducing it to seconds reviewing only the most important developments impacting their customers and their customers’ business
4. Delivers this highly personalized content wherever and however the team needs it: on their iPad, iPhone, Android device, directly into the social enterprise portal or CRM, or simply via a daily email intelligence brief. FirstRain’s apps allow the sales and marketing team to collaborate using this powerful customer intelligence database quickly and easily from any device, at any time, all integrated into their own daily workflow.
The patented technology that goes into the creation of this enterprise customer intelligence system is the result of years of algorithm development, customer collaboration and fine tuning—and it’s why most vendors of basic Web content can’t match it. But it’s these differentiators that are helping FirstRain deliver our users the kind of customer intelligence that actually grows and renews revenue in their businesses.
The most exciting development in the Enterprise today is not, as Salesforce and Jive would have you believe, “social networking for business” but the not-so-stealthy explosion of the iPad as a productivity tool.
We see dramatic deployments every day, especially into the enterprise sales and customer marketing teams which are the teams we work with most often. Eric Lal of ZDNet keeps a site updated with iPad pilots — often documenting large company decisions we have already seen on the ground — thousands at a time!
Even big blue IBM may now have one of the largest Apple and iPad deployments in the world. As an Apple fan it’s terrific to see the corporate world finally seeing the light. Even my own R&D team (for a long time PC-based nerds) are adopting a mix of Apple in with their PCs, iPads (of course for development) and iPhones in with Android phones (which after all you can hack and play with so much more easily than an iPhone).
I also agree with Peter O’Neill at Forrester that many market researchers are falling behind in their methodology and not including broad enough sources of corporate deployment. They have a PC bias and may be missing the rapid growth of BYOD (bring-your-own-device) policies at companies large and small. BYOD is not only popular but in the end it’s cheaper. Cisco pioneered this policy 5 years ago, showing that it was, in the end, cheaper for IT to support. And while IT departments still worry about data security, I was convinced this was solved the day my Symantec customer told me in 2011 that he could now work officially work on the iPad (Symantec is the most paranoid company on security – appropriately so given that it’s their business).
There are two major waves happening for enterprise sales teams right now: social collaboration (yes I don’t think Salesforce and Jive are wrong) and the iPad. And the FirstRain customer intelligence system is right at the intersection of the two – with our sizzling hot iPad app and integration into the top collaboration portals. We have customers deploying in all of them: Jive, Salesforce, Microsoft and Quad (Cisco) and in every case enterprise sales reps also have iPads (either their own or company issue) so they can stay on top of their major customers wherever they are.
And I hope I never have to use a PC again… although this is a false hope since my husband is the lone hold out in our family because he is an electronics designer and needs the high end tools which will probably never be on Apple (sigh).
Image from AllThingsDigital
One of the most rewarding aspects of being a CEO is when you can see the hard work put in by you and your team really paying off.
For the last several weeks, everyone here at FirstRain has been putting in long hours in order to launch the next phase of FirstRain intelligence solutions to market, and so now I am extremely delighted to announce the release of the third generation of the FirstRain Web Application and our new FirstRain mobile apps for iPhone and Android (now available in the iTunes App Store and the Android Marketplace) today.
This important new release represents the third major step forward in FirstRain solution development, and provides our customers a truly unique and effective, role-based way of monitoring the critical developments impacting their business, industry, customers or competitors. In addition to these workflow enhancements and the new mobile apps, we’ve also now optimized FirstRain for use on tablet devices, all of which means that critical business intelligence can now be delivered to any place or time our customers most need to see it: whether it’s over their morning coffee, at their desk, on their company portal or out on the road.
The product also has also had a bit of a make-over, with a fresh-new look and a streamlined design which our non-professional-searcher customers will find even easier to navigate—making it simple to get in, find what you need, and get on with your work.
All in all, we think it’s a big step forward in an already great product, and seeing this really sharp new iteration of FirstRain come to life has been extremely gratifying for me and everyone involved. And for all of you who are FirstRain customers, try out the new role-based monitor setup, download the new mobile apps, and please, let us know what you think!
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!
Last week was a busy week – we held our Q2 sales kickoff at our San Mateo offices – but the day before we were invited to participate on a panel at the Symantec Vision 2011 Conference held at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.
The panel was titled “Competitive Testing Reports Got You Confused?” and it was set up to discuss the technologies and approaches that are best practices to gather competitive intelligence about products. Our panelist was Thomas Lai from our San Mateo office who has been working closely with Symantec on the deployment of FirstRain within SymBrain to provide competitive intelligence to the sales and distribution teams.
The panel tackled a range of best practices to evaluate and report on competing products. Consultants or analysts go through deep exercises to understand competing products – but any technique can be biased so the panel tackled how to be comprehensive enough to get a complete, unbiased picture.
One area that was a surprise to us is how vendors interact with the analysis on their products. For example, an analyst might review a product from McAfee using both engineering and qualitative techniques. They then send the report to McAfee to review, for a sanity check, to potentially correct – and yet many times the vendor (in this case McAfee) does not respond. What does this imply – that the results are reasonable? or not? You can imagine a healthy debate on a panel about the techniques to get to the report and then what the lack of response really means. (No disrespect to McAfee but in this context they are a primary competitor to Symantec).
The thread of the panel, in the end, was what types of techniques can be utilized so that test results and market results — when looked at together — make sense.
Our application is used to build competitive intelligence for the broad sales team (you can see a Symantec exec talk about this here), but also in this type of competitive analysis at the product level and Thomas was speaking about the best practices we see in our customers in this context.
The conference was a lot of fun for Thomas (and I gather not all of the fun was in the panel session – it was Vegas after all!)
I’ve mentioned before what an exciting time it is to be a part of FirstRain. We’re building momentum every day as our fantastic sales team helps more and more customers in Marketing and Sales roles use FirstRain to monitor and act on the critical events that impact their business, industry and competitors.
But for an increasing number of professionals, the real need is efficiently getting high-quality, Business Web content out to the rest of their organization. This was the challenge we helped solve with Mark Heindselman, Manager Knowledge Network & Info Services at Emerson Process Management. As Mark described,
“We were looking for a better solution to find business relevant content from the web and found FirstRain to be superior to others in this space at delivering highly relevant content. FirstRain allows us to automate the collection of business content and distribute it across the company. We can now put in our users email box or RSS reader the web based news they are looking for and no more. The FirstRain Support team has been very responsive to our requests in setting up and rolling out our service.”
It’s always gratifying when you hear how you’re helping real-world users solve real-world business challenges, and we look forward to solving those challenges for many more!
