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.
As we approach the much anticipated final four weekend of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, everyone’s talking about whether Kentucky will win it all. The past predicts that the championship isn’t in their favor, but so far they’re proving history wrong and fans can’t stop watching to see what happens.
March Madness may be killing sales productivity in your organization and with the odds of predicting the perfect bracket being 1 in 1,610,543,269 according to Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight you definitely want your sales strategy to have better odds. The more we watch, the more we realize that transforming your sales strategy is a lot like playing the tourney.
Check out these top ten tips* we have put together for transforming your sales teams with analytics that reveal the changing relationships between businesses, markets and products—so you can win, on and off the court.
*Hover over each dot to view the tip.
A new post from Rachel Clapp Miller at Force Management posted on HubSpot titled ‘How to Get Your Sales Team to Show Value in Social Media‘ is a good quick read as you think about enabling your own sales teams with social selling skills.
According to the post, a survey from IDC shows 75% percent of B2B buyers use social media to make purchasing decisions. And that number jumps to 84% when you factor in C-level and/or VP Executives. It’s a no brainer, making your sales and customer facing teams social is important and Rachel’s 5 tips are spot on:
I love this combination of technology, enablement and setting formal goals for your teams and have seen it work well for sales teams of all different sizes. Here is how we enable our own FirstRain team to become social sellers:
Using our own platform, FirstRain provides each one of our customer facing rep with prompts, covering their customers, target markets and industry trends. With one click access from all our apps, they can quick share externally to Twitter and LinkedIn and to internal social networks (we use Chatter, but enable our customers on Chatter, Yammer and IBM Connections).
In addition, our marketing team on a weekly basis picks out 10 pieces of content for our field team to quickly share on Twitter and LinkedIn. Our team creates these weekly emails, using targeted FirstRain views we have created and selecting content that we may see our own network sharing. Topics range from Sales Enablement trends, Platform engagement, Internet of Things and things like security concerns that our customers care about. Some are directly addressed by the products we provide, but some are top of mind topics that everyone should care about. The format is as easy as our product app sharing, one click to twitter or Linkedin- leading to many thanks and sharing from our teams!
DM Radio provides a casual talk radio format for detailed discussions about the people, products, services and trends that comprise the IT industry. On this week’s episode “Rise (and Assimilation?) of the Analytics Databases” host Eric Kavanagh will lead a discussion around a whole new crop of analytics databases that have emerged. This week’s guests include FirstRain’s COO YY Lee, Zahid Akhtar of Deloitte, Mark Madsen of Third Nature, and Brian Gentile of TIBCO.
Join the broadcast to learn how can you use these tools to benefit your organization today!
Tune in Thursday February 12th 2015 at 03:00PM ET/12:00PST. Register here
FirstRain, is proud to announce that it is has launched FirstRain sharing for IBM Connections. FirstRain will empower businesses on the IBM Connections social network platform to meaningfully engage with customers, partners and employees through deep, real-time insights that are scored and ranked based on sophisticated, business-aware algorithms that drive personalization down to the user’s role.
Why Connections? IBM Connections is an enterprise social networking platform that allows organizations to engage the right people, accelerate innovation and is currently used across major FirstRain customers. With our new FirstRain share to IBM Connections feature, users can now quickly and efficiently share insights about their customer and markets straight from their FirstRain Apps to help improve decision-making and increase productivity.
FirstRain’s information modeling technology captures the global universe of unstructured data and applies layered algorithms to extract meaning across key structure and semantic characteristics to build a sophisticated business graph that delivers understanding of the business universe and relationships within customers and markets. By allowing users to post directly to their IBM Connections streams, FirstRain’s powerful analytics are extended right into the users streams and workflows.
Our FirstRain team is currently at the IBM ConnectED conference in Orlando and will be conducting a Chalk Talk session tonight at 6:15pm @ Walt Disney World Swan Room 5-6 titled:
They don’t just want streams, they want deep insights
Session Description: Collaboration inside and outside your enterprise is built on the notion that knowledge should be shared and streams and social sharing of information are an ideal way of collaborating. But the reality is that for some organizations streams of information quickly get noisy and users disengage. Come learn how personalizing insights at the user and group level can enhance collaboration across products like Connections, Websphere and other community platforms. In this session we will provide examples of how Fortune 1000 companies are utilizing targeted views of customer and market insights to enhance collaboration and community aspects booth internally within their enterprises as well as in customer applications. We will also ‘chalk out’ your own user scenarios in an interactive exercise.
Need to enable IBM Connections share on your FirstRain account, please contact us!
Not familiar with FirstRain? FirstRain is an enterprise scale, SaaS analytics platform that provides individuals with personalized, high-precision analysis on critical developments for their customers and end markets, as they are happening. FirstRain’s information-modeling technology enables millions of users to have an unmatched view of the global business world through their own very personal lens in order to make better decisions, get closer to customers, drive revenue growth and outwit the competition. FirstRain’s patented, advanced analytics identify relevant, business-focused Web and social media insights and then seamlessly delivers them into the world’s premier CRM and social enterprise platforms, including Salesforce.com, Chatter, Microsoft SharePoint, Dynamics, Yammer, Jive, Oracle and now IBM. FirstRain analytics are used by Fortune 1000 enterprises around the world and also integrated into leading platforms like Fidelity.com and Dun & Bradstreet.
IDC’s Private Vendor Watchlist Profiles provide detailed data and analysis on emerging technology vendors, markets, and deals. If you are not familiar with IDC’s Private Vendor Watch Service it is “designed by financial and strategic investors to address a gap in the marketplace for accurate information and expert guidance on smaller, private tech vendors before they hit the public radar”.
FirstRain is proud to have been selected to be profiled and highlighted as being at the forefront of a rapidly emerging and evolving market that IDC calls “value-added content”. The report, highlights FirstRain in the business analytics and value-added content markets, and reviews key success factors: market potential, products and services, competitive edge, corporate strategy, and customers.
You can download a complimentary copy and if you are interested in learning more please get in touch with us.
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
This week’s Smart Selling Tools newsletter, recommends FirstRain as its “Tool of the Week” calling FirstRain “a personal sales assistant for each rep prompting customer engagement that’s personalized to how and what you sell”. Smart Selling Tools is a resource site and newsletter for B2B buyers to discover Sales and Marketing software that helps companies grow revenue.
You can read the newsletter to see why Nancy Nardin, a nationally recognized thought leader on sales and marketing productivity tools, chose FirstRain to be one of the year’s top 40 sales tools of 2014 as well as this week’s recommended tool and then head over to the Smart Selling Yahoo video channel to listen to Nancy explain why in her Tool Skool video.
This week FirstRain’s COO YY Lee gave an advanced-level class to Big Data TechCon conference attendees on how to develop and drive personalization of information experience in a Big Data world. Personalization is quickly becoming an assumed part of technology UX. These rapid advances, also affected by increased expectations set by flagship consumer apps create a need and an opportunity for enterprise software to deliver personalized experiences inside traditional applications and workflows. YY’s class covered data and analytics techniques for building user profiles, leveraging explicit and implicit factors into the process, and addressing the challenges of user behavior and expectations in order to create a highly adaptive, individualized information experience.
As part of her class, YY spoke to the fact that the application of information science techniques is core to creating a very personal mobile era user experience. She shared some of the lessons learned by the FirstRain R&D team, who are pioneers in developing and introducing our customers to an adaptive and pragmatic semantic information space model – a model that allows for the marriage of deep data science and personal business analytics. FirstRain technology understands human perspective, awareness and preferences to deliver analytics with each user in mind. YY advised what factors can be leveraged to build profiles and nuanced understanding of users including: building rationally-derived/real life characteristics; isolating real–time, structural, transient, in the moment user preferences; leveraging common personal tendencies; etc. “We are successful when a person looks at the application and thinks: Wow, this is me! This is exactly what I need to do my job today’, said YY.
She also talked about the importance of developing and applying skepticism filters to discover, for example, whether any given case ‘in-doubt’ is an opportunity for a non-linear development or if the system really got it wrong and needs to be re-educated. She also mentioned the importance of human analyst inputs in the process of building precise personalization models to further refine information and adopt it to deliver better results each time. Other methodologies in developing personalization were discussed such as correlations, pattern recognitions, network relationships, leveraging external data, etc.
During this class, YY highlighted that the best opportunity to create the user experience that says “this is about me, my job, and what I need to know at this moment” is to develop a fine balance of information space modeling and user data modeling in your apps. She wrapped up an engaging discussion by sharing her team’s advice for some simple ways to get started personalizing your data delivery:
1. Find easy ways to customize – learn and refine your work. Users often have little appetite to providing input, therefore the developer needs to carefully select their points of engagement.
2. Start with easy tricks to customize by making the UX feel personal, such as simply adding a profile picture.
3. Start with the personalization characteristics that are easy and obvious to your user and how they use your apps: what role the person is in, what place they live, etc.
4. You don’t have to start by solving really big problems
5. Moderation and balance are important in providing suggestions. Change is sometimes difficult for a user. Too many choices may be annoying. Learn the art of notification by selecting things with the right information density.
5. Minimize the mysteries to minimize risks. Explain where the content is coming from: ‘I am showing you this because of X”
6. Inject small reminders for personalizations through the whole user so that the user can be in charge.
If you are interested in having YY come to your next event to talk about driving truly personal information experiences, please contact us!
“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
