By Ryan Warren, Vice President of Marketing
As sales reps, we always look for new ways to close the sale because, let's face it, we've all been there – we did some research, maximized our pitch strategy, understood the ins and outs of why our product is the best out there, but we didn't get the sale. Why? Because many of us forget, perhaps, the one key thing – to get to know our customer. Whoops! And it's just not gleaning some information from the web before heading out on a sales call, it's diving 100 percent into market intelligence. And getting to know your customer relies on having the right tools – like that CRM investment you also keep forgetting to do – so you can be completely prepared to make the perfect pitch for that client before you even shake hands.
Get a Little Dirty
Your customer relationship management (CRM) relies on one thing – understanding what makes your customer's mind tick and what they really want out of the product you're selling. Don't believe it? Take a recent article by Inc magazine writer Jeff Haden where he talked about the time his wife wanted a new car.
A young salesman came up, gave them his rehearsed pitch, but Haden's wife wasn't buying it. Haden said the salesman started going through the whole sales-process checklist, but Haden's wife cut him off and started asking questions. Eventually the salesman figured out what Haden's wife needed in a vehicle and closed the sale.
Understanding your client can make you more confident in your own abilities. According to Entrepreneur, investing in customer insights can empower salespeople to play up their strengths.
But if you're like most sales professionals, you don't have all the time in the world. You're constantly running out on sales calls and talking with customers about the product. Because of the perpetual time constraints, researching what's going on in your customers' fields tends to get pushed to the back of the to-do pile. But what makes the top sales performers surge ahead of the pack every month is because they invest in customer insights. Yet cutting some time out to delve into client research is hard to come by.
You can cheat a little – you can boost your CRM strategies by investing in market intelligence software. When you have all the latest information at your fingertips – and you don't have to scour the Internet to find it – you have the tools you need to ensure your continued business with the client and close the sale.
By Ryan Warren, Vice President of Marketing
For sales teams, everything relies on staying ahead of competitors: If you're not first, you're last! Yet sales reps often waste a lot of valuable time figuring out what their client needs. The thing is, they needn't do so. Thanks to customer analytics and sales intelligence, which work hand-in-hand to drive salespeople and teams to reach goals and achieve an ROI on investments, the sales community is seeing big boosts in sales – and it's all thanks to big data analytics.
Big data allows sales teams to stay small while ensuring customer insights don't take a back seat. Forgetting big data analytics can significantly drag down productivity and cause severe consequences – like lost clients. That sentiment was recently reinforced when Tom Davenport from the International Institute for Analytics and Jill Dyché of SAS released the report "Big Data in Big Companies." The report focused on the increasing need for firms to bet on big data.
What's the Use of Big Data?
The data use of 20 corporations in pilot projects was profiled in the research. According to the report, employing customer analytics requires sales teams to develop new skills and for sales management to boost their investment in technology. And with budget cuts, it's not easy.
Jill Dyché, vice president of best practices at SAS, said implementing big data into the company was a struggle for many corporations, yet the obvious benefits of such deployments have become too much for business leaders to ignore.
"Big data was a wake-up call for these executives," Dyché said. "But the promise of fresh innovation is the real allure of big data for executives. They're turning their attention – and their budgets – to emerging technologies and skills."
While investing in sales intelligence may seem daunting, it's really not. According InformationWeek, real-time analytics not only offer insights for salespeople to identify what is happening in the industry at that precise moment but helps them to adjust their sales goals for the future. But big data doesn't just enhance your customer relationship management strategy (CRM), InformationWeek suggests it may produce stronger client loyalty. If the customer knows their sales team understands them and are able to deliver exactly what they need when they need it, sales representatives are able to ensure their customer's long-term business.
Knowing what's going through client minds right now may not be enough – sales reps need to peer into their crystal ball and see into the future. But sales reps have no need for Tarot cards of palm-reading, when all they really need is big data analytics is a salesperson's crystal ball. Gleaning insights about the customer before sitting down with them lets salespeople make the most of the interaction. One of the best ways corporations can improve client relationships is to mix sales intelligence into their bag of tricks.
New Opportunities for Success
The newest advancement from FirstRain allows salespeople to employ analytics in an easy-to-use way each day. The latest innovation includes an additional set of capabilities so sales teams can take advantage of useful customer analytics right away.
Salespeople can now detect their customer's future needs. This allows staff members who are in the middle of the pack to become top performers.
FirstRain's new enterprise platform lets sales representatives enter a client meeting knowing exactly what the customer needs.
Greg Mihran, senior director of Global Sales Enablement, said integrating customer insights into the company's sales strategy helped to increase the productivity of sales teams. By utilizing an on-demand client intelligence solution, Global Sales Enablement was able to boost sales success and rise industry knowledge for sales professionals.
We’re extremely excited this morning to announce this morning a new white paper, produced by our partners at social data provider Gnip.
It’s a really nice piece detailing the ways in which FirstRain provides highly relevant customer intelligence for enterprise sales and marketing professionals, including a nice case study by FirstRain customer Flextronics. As Greg Mihran, senior director of Global Sales Enablement at Flextronics puts it in the white paper: ”It was imperative that Flextronics have access to, and the ability to monitor, social data from a business intelligence perspective–that’s where FirstRain and FirstTweets came in. FirstRain has helped our company evolve and gain awareness of tools and data sources we’d never leveraged before, emphasizing the importance of incorporating and monitoring social media data.”
Gnip, is a key partner for FirstRain, as they provide the stream of Twitter data behind our FirstTweets capability, which is a key differentiating capability for our users. In turn, Gnip values FirstRain because we provide an utterly unique approach to B2B enterprise intelligence—and one that’s particularly different from most of their clients, who are overwhelmingly in the Social Media Monitoring or Brand Management space.
As Gnip’s Elaine Ellis tweeted out this morning:
And while these services like Saleforce.com’s excellent Radian6, are extremely useful and powerful for enterprises, they don’t solve the fundamental problem of enterprise sales and strategic marketers in harnessing Twitter data to deeply understand their customer businesses.
With this white paper, companies can see not only how FirstRain makes that possible, but how companies like Flextronics are translating that into real results. Click the image of the white paper below to check it out!
As we saw last year, there’s been a massive wave of Fortune 500 companies adopting touch-based tablets and devices. One result of that has been the proliferation of a whole range of B2B iPad and smartphone apps from companies like us and salesforce.com to enable those mobile, touch-powered professionals with the intelligence and data they need to understand and engage their customers, as well as open up new opportunities.
However, there’s a second big enterprise trend that’s picking up momentum as well: that of large companies who are developing internal enterprise apps for touch-based tablets and devices, for use by their own enterprise sales and marketing teams.
And because it’s a need that more and more of our customers are requesting every day, we’re very excited to announce this morning the launch of FirstRain for Touch, a new, powerful and yet easy way to drop highly relevant customer intelligence for your sales and marketing teams into your enterprise iPad app—and the first enterprise customer intelligence solution built for the Salesforce Touch Platform.
Last fall, at their annual Dreamforce ‘12 conference, along with their high profile launch of Salesforce Touch, salesforce.com also announced the launch of the similarly named (but very different) “Salesforce Touch Platform.” And unlike Salesforce Touch—which is a downloadable app for iPad, iPhone and Android created for their users to easily access salesforce.com data and capabilities on their devices—the Salesforce Touch Platform is a Software Developer’s Kit that developers within a large enterprise can use to create their own, internal touch-device apps for their sales and marketing teams.
Our new FirstRain for Touch solution is an elegant and personalized set of components that have been optimized for use on touch-based devices, and can be easily dropped into enterprise apps created by companies, just like those developed using the Salesforce Touch Platform SDK. And the demand has been notable. For example, we have at least 3 large, current customers (all in the Fortune 500) who are each planning or have already created and deployed their own iPad apps for use by their own enterprise sales and marketing teams.
But perhaps one of the nicest aspects of this launch has been the opportunity to work with the great folks at salesforce.com. We have lots of clients in common and solutions that have always been highly symbiotic, and so this area is just one more place where we find common opportunity to help each other succeed. Our thanks to Clarence So, their Executive Vice President of Mobile Strategy, for his kind comments about our release: “It is exciting to see the rapid innovation that partners such as FirstRain are delivering on our trusted mobile platform, FirstRain for Touch will provide customers with the right intelligence to help them connect with their customers in entirely new ways and accelerate business success.”
If you’re interested in more information about FirstRain for Touch, let us know!
I began a customer introduction the other day stating that I was a “recovering salesperson.” I have been in sales in one way or another for a long time and will always use the sales skills I have learned selling into the enterprise, regardless of what job role I am in. When working in a start-up like FirstRain everyone has to be a salesperson, so even as I lead Business Development, I am selling!
If you look (or if you have ever been subscribed to one of the hundreds of daily ‘sales’ newsletter), every day you can find a list of things to do to improve your sales game. Today I found this one on the Salesforce.com corporate blog: ‘10 Tips to Up Your Sales Game‘ written by Salesforce.com’s VP of Sales, Scott Keane. It got my attention because it is a list (remember the #1 top thing to do to drive blog traffic? People love lists, and just about any kind of list is bound to attract traffic. Top 10 lists, 5 things not to do, 3 reasons I love something, etc. Start with a number then take it from there).
These 10 tips are probably not new if you have been in sales for a while, but are still well worth a read for the refresher. If you follow through with these tips, they can certainly help you get more appointments, create more pipeline and close more deals.
Here at FirstRain we’ve observed that top performing sales and marketing teams deeply understand their customers’ business and their markets. For example, as we start a new client engagement that is focused on Sales we spend time up front learning about how that company sells, who they sell to and what customer intelligence will help them connect with their customer end-markets and achieve their revenue goals.
Our aim is to deliver intelligence tuned to their specific strategy, and our major account sales customers (as well as our own reps!) find that FirstRain helps them much more effectively achieve many Scott Keane’s best practices, such as …
4: Have a conversation - Who wants to sit and listen to someone talk about how great they are? The answer is “no one”, in case you’re wondering. With that in mind, don’t sell or “pitch” your product. Make conversations about the person you’re speaking with, and learn about them first, then about their company or issues.
6: Be prepared - Know who you are calling & why. You need to own the conversation and if you don’t have a reason for calling and can’t articulate the connection, any objection they give will throw you off your game
7: Be the expert - Know the industry terminology, trends, and key pain points. You want them to look to you for recommendations so make sure you can give those.
8: Do your research - Leverage internal and external resources to understand the company vision and priorities. This sets you apart from the other sales reps and allows you to build a relationship faster. They’ll look at you as a consultant and friend rather than a sales person.
9: Float like a butterfly – Be flexible like a boxer and adjust messaging based on the audience. Speak to what they care about most. For example, CEOs care about achieving growth objectives, outpacing competitors. CMOs on the other hand are concerned with pipeline generation, how to leverage social media, keeping costs as low as possible.
If you are interested in learning more about how FirstRain can deliver customer intelligence specifically tuned to your sales strategy drop me a line dbarbosa@ignite.firstrain.com
Image|Flickr|by johncpiercy
John Stepper a blogger whose job is to “change how people work” using collaboration platforms, communities of practice, and public social media channels at Deutsche Bank, recently blogged how your best use of social media may not require a single post. The focus of his post (and most of his blogging on the subject) is on regulated firms, including both financial service firms like Deutsche Bank and other industries that deal with similar requirements such as pharmaceuticals, energy etc.
Over the years, I have spent a lot of time talking to people about the use of social media in a B2B environment, regulated or not. There is, of course, the very well established and vendor-serviced market of social media monitoring and measurement from a PR/Communications/Brand perspective. But increasingly, companies are seeing the value of social media within other functions in their enterprise, and as Stepper points out in his post, value from Social Media can come without the need to actually create and post content by every employee.
I think it goes beyond embracing the 90-9-1 rule that “1% of people create content, 9% edit or modify that content, and 90% view the content without contributing.” This is now a given and as Stepper says, it should be embraced not fought against. Many organizations just can’t afford to have everyone—especially revenue producing functions—creating social media content and listening and learning using either consumer-oriented or professional PR tools. I, however, do encourage every single enterprise employee to use social media to build themselves a brand and engage with their customers and markets—just leave the ‘heavy ‘lifting’ to others.
The conversation about Social Media is very often focused on what I would call the outbound: building the brand, supporting and connecting with consumers, monitoring and measuring marketing campaigns, etc. But there is certainly a shift afloat about using Social Media to get a deeper understanding of customers and markets—especially in the B2B space. Here at FirstRain, we are seeing how our customers who have been early supporters and leaders in ‘outbound’ and ‘customer listening’-focused social media are now looking for targeted and useful ways to provide highly relevant ‘read’ views for specific job functions. International Data Corporation (IDC) analyst Sue Feldman has pointed out that the sheer volume of what users receive sometimes obscures what’s important and relevant, especially as their ‘day-job’ is not to monitor and engage in social media. Our launch of FirstTweets™, where we are extracting business intelligence from the full Twitter feed was driven by these specific needs.
Take, for example, common use cases we are seeing among enterprise sales account managers who are finding daily value in FirstTweets. The typical territory and market intelligence needs for a major accounts sales rep in this kind of role can include:
Now imagine, as an end user, trying to cast a net wide enough using keywords to capture relevant information that would cover the requirements above across all the standard social media channels. Without tools like FirstRain—which filters out the non-business content and categorizes it into targeted business topics—it’s effectively impossible, yields a huge amount of additional noise, and just wouldn’t be practical for the sales reps who would benefit from such intelligence.
I think we still are in the very early stages of B2B sales organizations using social media content like Twitter to improve their sales processes by truly understanding their customers and markets. And companies will quickly figure out that, sometimes, the best use case for social media may not require any posting for the majority of their employees—just the right tools to help uncover the highly relevant, contextual information their employees need to accomplish their most important goals, which in case of sales is closing deals!
Note: If you are interested in learning more about Collaboration and Social Media in enterprise especially in regulated companies, I highly suggest you spend some time on John Steppers blog.
Image|Flickr|michal_hadassah
Last Thursday I had the opportunity to participate in a panel discussion on digital privacy in Palo Alto hosted by the Business Association Italy America (BAIA), a network of entrepreneurs, managers and professionals focused on innovation. Personally, an event like this is always a bit of a stretch for an introvert like me, but I’m very glad I was coaxed out of my shell to engage on this important topic.
On the panel with me were two fascinating people, Professor Alessandro Acquisti and Andrea Vaccari. Andrea was a hot commodity that night, as he is co-founder and CEO of Glancee. Glancee had just been acquired by Facebook, and Facebook was going public the next day. Alessandro is a true expert in the field of Information Technology and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon.
As panel moderator Mary Trigiani put it, we were two Digital Immigrants and One Digital Native coming together, representing diverse perspectives. And the difference in perspective on on digital privacy issues between the Digital Natives in the room, who were more comfortable with their persona, behaviors, and lifestyle being out there and accessible on the Web was noticeable that night. The Digital Natives were not necessarily pushing the boundaries, but more were either unaware of the boundaries being pushed or not at all bothered by them, seemingly confident that things would be okay. The Digital Immigrants, on the other hand, expressed much more concern about how acquired data can be used by Companies for great good and great evil.
Alessandro shared his thought-provoking experiment, where he and a team of research analysts constructed a mobile App to generate a person’s social security number from a snapped photo of a stranger’s face. All based on freely available software, online databases, and statistical processing.
Andrea pointed out that we all leave “digital footprints”—data that is left behind, collected, and available for use. As an example, he related a story from Business Insider that told of how Target got into some hot water when they used observed shopping patterns to indicate women that are likely pregnant, and then used this statistically derived information to send coupons to those theoretically pregnant women. The technology proved to be so good that it exposed a teen girl’s pregnancy to her father when he found the coupons that had been sent to her.
In my view, this technology is still way ahead of the law. Living and working in Silicon Valley, every day we see analytics technology being applied relentlessly to redefine business and the way businesses work, online retailers challenging the way states levy sales tax, and online shopping experiences getting more and more targeted. Digital Privacy law requires legislation, and legislation is the purview of governments, regulatory bodies and advocacy groups—in other words, it’s not a speedy process. Structurally, legislative timelines will always lag the incredible pace of technology adoption, with the result being that most of what is technically feasible has not only not been regulated, but probably isn’t even being thought about yet in our legislative bodies.
In this digital privacy environment, many companies simply state they are “in compliance with all federal and state laws…”, but what does this really mean? Given this known lag, companies should be responsible for operating at a higher standard when deciding how to best to manage and protect information from inappropriate use. Setting internal privacy boundaries and codes of behavior proactively mitigates the negative effects of overstepping the mark and the subsequent consumer backlash. At FirstRain two of our core values are “Act with integrity at all times” and “Take ownership for the company’s success”. For us, keeping these values at the forefront helps maintain the balance between ethics and profit.
FirstRain provides our customers (B2B sales and marketing professionals) with relevant customer and industry information to increase revenue and strengthen relationships. Our users are business professionals who want to quickly and efficiently access only the information they require to drive revenue in their businesses. Now, the more we at FirstRain know about each customer, the better an intelligence solution we can then offer. But often they do not have the time or patience to enter a boat-load of personal preference information—and therefore the tension between relevance, business objectives and customer analytics. In this case, I believe the use of a thoughtful combination of “self-declared” information, combined with “observed” behavior (e.g., likes/dislikes, click-throughs, etc.) and “inferred” statistics can make a massive difference. The key is using the information with integrity and only for the intended purpose of delivering an improved customer experience.
I am concerned about digital privacy, and the lack of tools for consumers to access, verify and fix incorrect or inaccurate information out there. I am also sure that in the years ahead we will see businesses continue to push the digital privacy boundaries. There will be some notable scares, subsequent backlashes and regulatory adjustments. However, I am personally also looking forward to a massively improved user experience.
A big thank you goes to our hosts Giorgio Ghersi and Mary Trigiani at BAIA, for being wonderful hosts, and our own Daniela Barbosa, here at FirstRain, for her tireless focus on making sure this introvert turned up and participated.
Today’s Facebook’s IPO although a more consumer focused interest story then what most of our customers are interested in, brought a huge amount of tweets on the subject as expected. (I would even venture to say that it was more then a ‘consumer interest story’ but rather a ‘human interest story’). None the less, being that FirstRain is a Silicon Valley based company, the buzz is also being felt strongly outside the digital world for those of us that live here and have friends and acquaintances that are being directly impacted by facebook’s IPO. Exciting times.
Yesterday, prior to Facebook’s IPO we ran some stats using our FirstTweets™ technology and then redid the same exercise at the close of the market today. FirstTweets™ uses our patented FirstRain technology to uncover and deliver only high-quality, business-relevant tweets to sales and marketing professionals across the enterprise. Our analysis shows that less than 0.1% of daily tweets contain quality, business-related content, yet this still represents more than 200,000 tweets per day of business-focused intelligence.
The picture painted by the stats that we captured, aren’t surprising but are interesting and illustrative on why our customers are seeing value in our FirstTweets- as YY Lee our COO tweeted this morning allowing them to “cut through the frenzied roar to net out the actual business discussion…”.
On the day before Facebook’s IPO:
At the close of Market on the day of Facebooks IPO:
Note: This post was originally published on the Huffington Post
The world is slowly climbing out of the great recession as companies around the world begin to increase investment and hiring. But for B2B sales teams looking to recapture growth during these early days, it’s critical to understand who’s really paying their bills and keeping the lights on–and guess what? It’s not your customer … it’s your customer’s customer. And if your sales team doesn’t deeply understand the business problems of these folks, then you’ll lose to competitors who do.
Before I get into the reasons why this is, consider some of the big, underlying changes happening in the market today. As companies start growing and investing again they are spending money, but they have fewer people than they had before. This means less time to accomplish key objectives and an even stronger focus on developing efficient strategies and processes to drive revenue growth ahead of the competition.
As a result, they are changing the way they do business, innovating in the vertical integration of their product lines and socializing their go-to-market, because if they can innovate and out-execute the competition in the way they serve their customers they can gain more market share as spending comes back.
To accomplish this, large companies are now talking about “business transformation” in their sales teams, “cultural transformation” in how they interface with their customers, and building a “social business” as a new way to look at their internal collaboration process.
With all these trends, the end objective is the same: How to better solve their customer’s business problem and so gain market share.
And so how do you solve your customer’s problem? Well like you, their challenge is revenue, profit and market share. So when your sales team understands their customer’s customer–and the business dynamics, competition and growth opportunities that their customer has–magic happens.
Here are the top 5 reasons:
1. You can focus on the customer’s business problem, not your products
It’s a cliché, but a true one: your customers don’t buy products, they buy solutions. But you can’t sell them a true solution unless you know what problem they are trying to solve, and understanding their customers will give you the insight you need to hold a useful conversation with your customer.
If you pitch product you become a tactical vendor; if you can discuss their customer and how they are serving their customer you become a member of your customer’s team. For example, is their customer driving price down on them – and so is your opportunity to help them take cost out of their operating expenses? Or are they focused on revenue and end user growth – and can your solution help your customer reduce their time to market?
Understanding the customer’s problem is sales 101 right? But it is surprising how many sales people still pitch product. It’s essential you provide your sales team with the intelligence and systems to stay on top of the customer’s ever changing end-business problem (see #5).
2. You can align your solutions with your customer’s evolving needs.
While the customer is always right, reality is they may not actually be asking for the right solution. Maybe this is because they lack specific knowledge of the options available, they have budget concerns or because internal politics are at work.
But consider a recent study by the Corporate Executive Board — buyers don’t contact vendors until they are, on average, more than half-way through the buying process. This means that by the time you are contacted as a vendor (if you are contacted!), it may be too late in the process to help your customer identify a better solution mix for their needs.
If, on the other hand, you truly understand your customer’s problems and challenges because you have studied their customer, and you are engaged with helping them meet these needs, then you can design specific solutions to meet the needs of their evolving business–before your competitors are asked to get involved.
3. You can design your marketing programs to address what you customer cares about
It is possible today to understand what an end buyer cares about in ways that have simply not been possible before. The Web and social media create an unprecedented level of transparency into a market, and can show you what’s top-of-mind at your end B2B customer. And it’s a noisy, Big Data world which means you need technology to do it.
There are millions of articles, blog posts and Tweets posted on the Web every day, but using newly emerging semantic analytics you can monitor intelligence in a very precise way. You can now analyze the intersection of three views of your customer’s business and so understand what the top issues are for them. When you can see the intersection of:
- the vertical market you are targeting
- the business line you are selling and
- the role which is going to buy your product (e.g. CIO, EVP Sales et al)
you can then target your marketing campaigns to speak to the specific issues the companies in a vertical market care about.
By monitoring what your target market is talking about you can ensure your messaging–and your value–speaks to their top-of-mind problems.
4. You find new customers.
Many businesses have triggers that drive new customer opportunity. It could be generic management changes, like a new executive being hired, but just as often businesses are driven by precise, industry-specific changes that create new opportunity for you. Is there a government RFP released that impacts your customer’s business? Has a competitor created a dislocation in your customer’s end market? Does your customer need to execute M&A flawlessly to execute their strategy?
When you understand your customer’s customer you can monitor the very specific events and changes in their business that signal an opportunity for you.
Automatically alerting your sales person on their iPad or mobile phone each time there is an industry-specific event which impacts their customer will win you new business.
5. The majority of your sales team can be as effective as the top 5%.
Most sales people don’t like to do research, but the top 5% –your rainmakers–do. They already do the work to understand their customer’s customer, they plan out a campaign, they do research every morning before they place any calls. They study the customer and understand the customer’s business and many will spend 1-2 hours a day doing it.
When you provide Enterprise Customer Intelligence to your sales team and teach them the Why and How needed to focus on their customer’s customer, you’ll raise every team member’s productivity. And when you integrate the intelligence into the CRM and social enterprise systems they are already using, there are No More Excuses.
Your Customer’s Customer is the real revenue engine behind your business, and the B2B companies who truly believe this, and are investing in the systems for their sales teams, are the ones who are already pulling ahead of the competition, even in this lukewarm recovery.
Note: This post was originally posted on my personal blog “Chitchating about Information Delivery” on April 18th, 2012.
This week’s FirstRain’s announcement of FirstTweets a solution for B2B users delivering “business-quality Twitter intelligence on thousands of global companies, industries and topics relevant to the specific business lines of your customers, industry and competitors”- was an exciting one for our team and our customers.
I have been on a couple of client calls where we previewed this new content stream and across the board the enthusiasm and spark of ideas around FirstTweets from them has been very inspiring. These are companies of all sizes across various industries- some that have been extremely active supporters of using Social Media as part of their strategies (e.g. Customer Care centers, tech support, brand monitoring etc) and others that are just starting out.
For example, some of these companies have tried to use their existing social media monitoring and measuring tools to ‘push’ relevant business content to their sales team, but none have been able to crack the code using their existing systems that are great for monitoring their own brands and customers using keywords- but can not deliver precise business focused content on thousands of companies and industries that their salesforce covers or their market intelligence teams needs to keep track of competitors and new business trends. Some have tried other ‘sales intelligence’ solutions that push social media buzz into their CRM systems- all based on keywords with low hit business relevancy results- turning off most users.
Now i have been an active user of Twitter for a bit over 5 years, just when the little twitter bird began chirping. i use Twitter outbound and to listen quite a bit. I would estimate that i have spent hundreds of hours, curating content, selecting people to follow (and unfollow!) , creating lists, monitoring client issues, company employees and general news. i am one of those 9% of digital news consumers that sees the news Break on Twitter.
I use Twitter effectively and teach others how to at any chance i get- but hundreds of hours of my time has been invested, and will continue to be since Twitter is not a set it and leave it information flow.
Is that the level of time investment that most companies want for their employees that are not responsible for monitoring and measuring social media??? Do companies want staff especially Sales who can benefit greatly from business intelligence found in Twitter- spending the same amount of time i have over the years??
I would venture to say no.
Now, i think that EVERY employee should consider using Twitter to engage with their peers in their industry, their customers and of course their friends and family- but i don’t think the processes that i have developed over the years is sustainable for most sales and marketing people- especially as your markets become more competitive and the budget dollars to spend on the solutions you sell decrease.
And that is where i see the biggest promise for FirstTweets- delivering intelligence to better understand your customers’ end-markets, strengthen relationships and improve overall sales strategy.
The customers i have talked to agree.
Note: Today April 18th is the official launch to existing FirstRain customers, i have been using FirstTweets in our Sandbox environment for about two weeks- and have found many gems that i would never have found using the various tools i use in my Twitter day to day use- so it wasn’t built for “me”- but i sure will benefit from it!
