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
Guest post by: Jan Willis, Calibra.
Customer success stories are an important and necessary sales tool. Just like having references for any job interview, they aren’t going to make the sale but without good ones, it may cause a delay in the sales process. Yet, customer success stories are often cookie cutter in style and not engaging. Even worse, you may struggle to get your customers to approve them.
I’ve been working with companies on success stories across industries – from semiconductors to software development tools to software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions. I have experienced the frustration of writing a customer story only to have the customer not approve it, or worse, approve it and then pull it after its been published. There will be many customers who won’t share their brand value with you for fear of diluting it. There will be others that you simply don’t have the relationship with to “override” the policy of not doing them. But there will be customers where you do have the product and people relationships that gain you the necessary approvals. Make the most of these customers and seize the moment as your champion might move on. Most of all, tell a great story for your company and their customer.
Here are three tips from my recent experiences that I hope will help you tell a great customer story. Let the story begin!
Tell the story in your customer’s own words
Don’t fall into the trap of marketing speak! It’s easier to just write the problem, solution and benefits using all the company’s great messaging, but it’s dry and boring. Tell the story as if it were unfolding as you read it. And to do that you need to interview the key people and collect as many usable quotes as possible. Don’t forget to ask for their picture to make it even more engaging and realistic. I like what I see for pulling all three of these elements together in the customer case studies by RelateIQ, a Palo Alto, California-based start-up that is quickly becoming the go-to relationship intelligence solution for professionals seeking to build better relationships and make smarter decisions.
Use surveys to help gather facts and interesting user commentary
Not another survey! I know we’re asked to respond to surveys almost daily now. But companies who are SaaS providers are one of the best examples of where knowing if customers are successful is not just nice to have – it’s crucial to achieving very high renewal rates, a key metric for a SaaS company. These surveys are usually quite effective as they are often run internally by the customer to validate the ROI. Provided there are open ended questions, this can be a rich source of additional commentary from the users by incorporating direct quotes that can help bring authenticity to the success story and have it sound less like marketing speak. I have seen this work for myself while working on case studies such as Nuance Communications for FirstRain, a pioneer and leader in personal business analytics solutions for the enterprise.
If you hit the wall on permission, try new approaches
Beware of the marketing police! I always find it a bit awkward to coach people on how to get through the marketing controls on the use of their brand since I used to enforce them myself. The truth is every decision is a business decision and with the right case made by the right person, there are exceptions. There are many companies who have business reasons to want to work with their suppliers on telling their story. The keys are having senior relationships between the companies and finding the win-win scenario. Should you still hit the wall on permission, there’s a new approach that I really like if you have 50-100 customers to work with. Founded in 2007 and based in Emeryville, California, TechValidate solves the problem of extracting quantifiable operational and financial metrics from your customer base, and then instantly turning that data into usable, third party verified marketing materials.
Author:
Jan Willis founded Calibra in 2007 after holding senior marketing positions at Cadence Design Systems, Simplex Solutions, Synopsys, and HP and completing an MBA at Stanford University. Calibra is a B2B business consulting firm specializing in helping high-tech companies enhance their brand and accelerate the market adoption of their products. Its consulting practice includes whole product strategy, company and technology branding, strategic options analysis, industry alliances, and interim leadership.
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.
Having to build consensus among your buyers is one of the most challenging parts of the sales process. It is likely that many of the stakeholders (and maybe even all of them) are driving their own personal agenda—and many times, they won’t match up, neither amongst themselves nor with you.
The Corporate Executive Board mentioned in a recent webinar that having to build consensus can be frustrating for the salesperson, because it creates price-driven conversations, lengthens sales cycles, increases the need for specialist resources—all of which can result in more stalled deals.
Though the great benefit to companies of having diverse teams has been proven time and again, the diversity of opinions and points-of-view can frustrate the salesperson by increasing tension and slowing the buying cycle even more. So what can the salesperson do to avoid falling into that trap? Make sure you truly understand your customer’s business before you even start talking.
Help all stakeholders understand the problems they face. Getting every decision-maker on the same page is the very task that seems insurmountable in the first place. But if you demonstrate a deep understanding of the customer’s business and present their business challenges to them, you can focus the conversation around those particular points—and eliminate side agendas that can distract from what you’re trying to do. Using personal business analytics, you can see critical events and trends within their market, helping you make sure that your message really resonates with them when you walk into the meeting.
Demonstrate that your solution truly meets their need. Once you’ve centered your discussion around a specific handful of business problems, it’s time to work your magic. If you avoid selling your product itself and, rather, position it as a solution to their particular problems, your executive buyers are more likely to see the value that you create. Since you’ve already gotten them on the same page as to what their business issues are, you are more likely to be seen as a trusted partner—and explaining how you can help them tackle those challenges will help you get ahead.
Though it may seem like an intimidating task, there are things that you as a salesperson can do to shepherd your buyers in the right direction. By truly understanding their business, you can clearly define what their needs are and how you can help them.
Congratulations to Stephane from Coherent, the winner of an AppleTV! Stephane learned how his sales team can increase sales productivity and drive revenue with access to relevant, personal insights just when they need them—using FirstRain.
Didn’t get a chance to attend the webinar? Check our events page to register for a future session.
CRM has become an integral part of any salesperson’s workflow, but buying and implementing a CRM system is a big investment for any company. Companies need to make sure they get the best ROI they can—and the value CRM systems bring is not only from engaging users but also by providing them with critical information that helps them do their jobs smarter and better.
CRM ROI depends almost exclusively on user adoption. According to the Corporate Executive Board, “Only with high levels of adoption could any potential benefits or enhancements of the CRM be realized and applied to produce growth.” But how do you drive adoption amongst your team to ultimately see the growth that led you to implement the CRM in the first place? The answer is to make the system invaluable to them by using it to provide them with incredibly relevant customer insights.
It’s well known that people will not change the workflow to which they are accustomed unless they see a clear personal benefit of doing so—the typical “What’s in it for Me” syndrome. With enterprise B2B sales teams, it has been proven that incorporating personally relevant information on customers and prospects into CRM workflows can make the team realize that the CRM system does provide significant value. For example, FirstRain’s annual end-user survey shows that by delivering relevant insights when and where they need it, sales can see up to a 17% productivity increase, which is significant.
One of our customers, JDSU,recognized a new set of needs to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their global sales organization. Their sales and marketing teams now required more customer intelligence in order to advise them on their end-to-end networking needs, while also improving sales productivity.
Their previous CRM ROI was not ideal due to poor usability. They selected FirstRain Customer Insights for salesforce.com to be integrated into their CRM solution. Their salespeople are now fully on board using Salesforce, and through their FirstRain views personalized to their role and what they sell, they are able to find more sales opportunities and build better relationships with their customers.
Thanks to salesforce.com and FirstRain, the entire team JDSU is now on the same page, and the critical insights provided by personal business analytics was one of the major incentives to drive adoption and help them maximize CRM ROI.
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.
The world is more social than ever—and selling is no exception. But as Salesforce.com points out, the conversation around social media has been focused on marketing instead of making the sale. However, salespeople can and should take advantage of social selling to drive more wins and increase revenue.
But where to begin? The insights are out there, but where do you look for the most actionable and strategic, and then draw them out? Personal business analytics enable salespeople to use social selling techniques to reach prospects and win sales by not only showing them exactly the information they need to understand their customer’s business and their own market, but by allowing them to share critical insights as well.
To excel at social selling, there are a few key steps.
Salespeople are usually very social people by nature, and by equipping them with the right tools, you can harness and direct their sociability to improving sales.
Time is money, and salespeople often find themselves with too little of both. They are constantly trying to figure out how to become more efficient and shorten their sales cycle, in order to win more deals and meet (or exceed) their quota faster. It is a huge task, but there are a few ways you can, at least, make the most of your time.
1. Target the right people
Though salespeople wish that everyone would buy from them, that’s unfortunately not the case. So don’t waste time targeting the wrong people. Understand who and what teams in the organization would most benefit from your solution, given their particular business needs and challenges. And keep a pulse on critical changes affecting them: did they miss their revenue goals? Are they getting eaten alive by their competition? Find the person or people who oversee these goals, and increase your own sales productivity by not wasting time with someone who really won’t be interested in what you provide.
2. Aim high
According to Mark Suster for Inc., instead of pitching your product to a lower-level employee, you can increase your sales productivity by cutting out the time you’d have to spend giving demos and repeating yourself to many different levels of the organization by going as high up as possible. People higher up in the organization have buying authority, or direct access to the person who does. If you’re pitching to a senior executive, they may even send you down to the person who actually does the purchasing—and you’ll have executive endorsement.
Having a champion is invaluable, but if you’re pitching to an executive, you must make sure that you’ve done your research so you don’t waste their time. Executives are busy people, and if you don’t wow them on your first shot, the odds are that you won’t get another. Prepare by using a personal business analytics solution that will help you align your value proposition to exactly how it will solve their specific business challenges.
3. Create value
A salesperson’s job is to sometimes lead the customer to the correct conclusion. In order to do that, you need to truly understand their business. If you point out challenges and opportunities that they may not have even realized and then suggest a solution to address them, they will see you as a trusted advisor. Because there is so much information out there about your customer and their markets, only with access to personal business analytics can you truly understand how your solutions can benefit them, based on their particular customers, competitors and market.
