We are proud to announce that our partner Mergent has recently launched Mergent Intellect 3.0, which now provides users with an enhanced social and Web content experience powered by FirstRain analytics. Mergent joins other FirstRain partners that are providers of structured business and financial information in leveraging FirstRain’s technology platform to deliver a modern and valuable information experience.
In today’s world of information overload, data platforms must go beyond traditional news feeds that quickly get noisy, repetitive and turn-off users, in order to provide a comprehensive 360 view of companies and markets. With access to FirstRain’s technology platform, which delivers advanced analytics on unstructured information, including social media conversations on Twitter and blogs, and highly relevant, real-time insights, companies can now deliver the perfect mix of contextual data to their users.
Read the full Mergent customer story here: Mergent. Global Financial Services Solutions.
FirstRain is proud to have been recommended as an Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) Vendor to Watch. EMA “Vendors to Watch” are companies that deliver unique customer value by solving problems that had previously gone unaddressed or that provide value in innovative ways. The designation rewards vendors that “dare to go off the beaten path” [one of our favorite things to do!] and have defined their own market niches.
FirstRain was recognized based on our advanced data science, smart content acquisition, and information space modeling that drives personalization for every business professional at hundreds of global Fortune 1000 companies. As part of this endorsement, FirstRain was evaluated on our ability to provide accurate and meaningful insights to customer facing teams in real-time, reducing risks through instant understanding of customer and market events. FirstRain was proven to advance both the quality and frequency of customer engagement as well as guide activity that drives growth and opportunity.
Download the copy of this EMA report here
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!
Overloaded 2014 has come and gone, and our presentation about role-based information overload was a great success!
Nima Niakan, Executive Fellow and Faith Chiang, Director of UX at FirstRain spoke about how context affects information architecture. People process information differently—we process it given the situation we are in and the task we are trying to accomplish. It’s not the amount of information that’s the problem, then, but the form in which it’s presented to the user. It’s critical to personalize what sort of information to deliver, and how to deliver it, to each business role—because role, device, origin and situation are the difference between information overload and information paradise.
For most sales and marketing professionals, there is too much content on the Web to be able to efficiently find useful, relevant business intelligence. Being able to find what you need to know, and knowing why you need it, are essential to do your job better. But in today’s world, it’s a problem of noise. And we at FirstRain are solving information overload every day with our personal business analytics solutions.
Watch the video below to see the whole talk!
Source: BusinessWire
FirstRain Introduces Personal Business Analytics™ for Salesforce1
FirstRain’s Personal Business Analytics for Salesforce1 to be available this summer; It’s personal, it’s about your business and it drives revenue growth.
June 18, 2014 09:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time
SAN MATEO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–FirstRain, the leader in Personal Business Analytics™ that give every professional their own personal and persistent x-ray into their customers, markets, strategy and competition, today introduced Personal Business Analytics for Salesforce1. FirstRain’s Personal Business Analytics already provide executives with uniquely useful insights based on the company and business unit they work for, the role they have, the territory they are responsible for and the critical business drivers that accelerate growth. Now all this will be delivered in an intimate information experience within Salesforce1. Executives now have analytics that tell them what just happened in their customer’s business that they have to act on and what action to take next – right in the palm of their hand.
“The future of information is personal. We are now making Personal Business Analytics available to Salesforce1 users in this increasingly mobile-first world”
Millions of business professionals already use FirstRain to get their own personal, role-based analytics that provide unmatched and highly relevant details into the changing characteristics of their customers and markets, down to the line of business, product, vertical market and dynamic trends. FirstRain’s business analytics engine dynamically responds to developments detected in the global web and social media, combined with user’s changing business interests, to deliver the most relevant personal business information experience available.
FirstRain Personal Business Analytics will be available to customers via the FirstRain beta program. Within Salesforce1, professionals will now have the precise insights relevant to them and their business, so they can engage their key customers and immediately share key information with their team on Chatter – easily bringing the brightest minds together to work on their opportunity. And executives will quickly see in real time the opportunities and risks occurring in their territory alongside other critical CRM data.
“The future of information is personal. We are now making Personal Business Analytics available to Salesforce1 users in this increasingly mobile-first world,” said Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain. “Offering our products on Salesforce1 helps our customers be more deeply informed on the changes that directly impact their job, and their business, so they can make better decisions, develop smarter strategic plans, get closer to their customers, achieve greater sales and outwit their competition.”
FirstRain will be demoing the beta Personal Business Analytics App at the Salesforce1 World Tour in Dallas, Texas today, June 18th, 2014 as a Gold Partner, at booth #116.
About FirstRain
FirstRain is a pioneer and leader in Personal Business Analytics solutions for the enterprise. FirstRain’s mobile, cross-platform solutions provide sales, marketing and finance professionals analytics tuned to their specific company strategy and allow them to deeply understand their customer’s business and their markets. FirstRain’s patented, advanced analytics technology finds business-focused Web and social media and then integrates it seamlessly into the world’s premier CRM and social enterprise platforms, including Salesforce.com, Chatter, Microsoft SharePoint and Dynamics, Jive and Yammer. This intelligence is similarly incorporated into leading research platforms such as Fidelity.com, Dun & Bradstreet, Interactive Data and Mergent. Based in San Mateo, California, FirstRain also has offices in New York and Gurgaon, India.
Additional Information
Watch the promo video: http://firstrain.it/BETAS1
Follow FirstRain on Twitter: @FirstRain
Contact:
MSLGROUP
Merrill Freund, 415-512-0770
merrill.freund@mslgroup.com
Developing a strong brand is an essential part of building value. Your brand is the most outward-facing, recognizable element of your company, and in the end, that is what people respond to. Of course, a good product is the building block of a good brand, but the brand itself is what conveys trustworthiness and quality.
However, according to an article in The Economist, research shows that decision-makers feel that brand is a central element of the seller’s value proposition. B2B products, do not elicit the same kind of emotional connection that consumer product do—but a strong brand can nonetheless facilitate access to prospects and speed up the sales cycle by clarifying benefits and reducing perceived risks.
Needless to say, brand strategy is something to take seriously. Chief Outsiders offers a look into how to make your brand as strong as possible:
The goal for a brand strategy is to have your brand reflect quality, which in turn will help convince more customers to buy from you. But that’s no easy task—your message needs to deeply resonate with your target buyers. By truly understanding the markets you wish to enter or lead, you will be able to clearly articulate the value your product provides in a context to which your targets can personally relate—winning you more loyalty and more deals.
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.
In this day and age, where widespread distribution and globalization is a given for enterprises, just knowing who is selling in a particular geography isn’t enough. We see with our own customers in industries like manufacturing that a major shift is needd in how data are used to make decisions. In fact, as DISC Corp.’s Herm Isenstein points out in The Art and Science of Sales Forecasting in the Electrical Market, “in what sense is supply equals demand meaningful when we know distributors are located in nearly 1,400 counties and that… end customers are located in about 3,100 counties?”
Isenstein is talking about the electrical supply industry in particular, but the same principle applies to any company that sells into many different geographies. With distribution so broad, it’s foolish to assume that buyers in drastically different markets have the same buying triggers, problems and priorities—their demand is almost undoubtedly different. Isenstein says in his piece, “Identifying demand is the most crucial element for measuring performance where the action takes place, at the trading area level.” And that’s why, in order to increase sales and sales productivity, it’s important for sales reps to know what the demand side is thinking in their specific market.
It would be extremely difficult to find the detailed information a sales rep need to be able to understand a specific trading area without one pointed, go-to source, and in many organizations today, reps are sifting through hundreds of noisy sources, making them less productive than they would like. More than ever, it’s important for sales productivity and forecasting accuracy to be able to understand what buyers in a particular market are saying about a certain need or problem they have, because it will help them be more effective during customer meetings and more accurately forecast their sales.
Personal business analytics allow users to see trends the particular market/s they care about, as well as understand what their end-customers care about. For a company who has sales across the country (or the world), being able to personalize what a rep sees means they’re better able to discover opportunities on the ground in their particular market by understanding what that market cares about. Because we’re acutely aware of these dynamics, FirstRain customers experience tailored, relevant information through personal business analytics—delivering the information that Isenstein believes sellers need, but can’t currently get.
In today’s hyper-growth, rapidly changing markets, companies diversify for many reasons. Maybe you are trying to expand into a new market, or have launched a new product. No matter what, you need to strike a balance between gaining net-new customers and expanding your footprint within current customers—and one of the most important things you need to have access to is in-depth, reliable customer intelligence.
Although you may have a lot of data points on your current customer, chances are you are probably not an expert on the different business lines of the company, go-to-market strategies, or specifically what their executive focus is. If it’s a new client in a new market or industry, then they will likely have vastly different challenges and care-abouts than what you’re used to.
To improve your sales and marketing efforts—and successfully enter a new market—you need customer intelligence “but transaction data doesn’t improve the customer experience unless you combine it with some other data to learn something new and useful,” according to CIO.com author Allen Bernard (@CIOUpdate). What large enterprise B2B companies have found is that by using a particular practice of Big Data, personal business analytics, you can have even more strategic conversations with customers by gaining true insight into their business—not based on click data, but reflective of the customers own voice and needs. You learn valuable things, including:
Going into a new market blind rarely, if ever, ends well… so take advantage of the customer intelligence technology that’s now available to you and your teams. Make sure you’re always learning something new and useful that will lead you on a successful path.
