Recently, FirstRain had the opportunity to sponsor a dynamic event on leaving the competition behind, hosted by the Silicon Valley chapter of Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP).
SCIP has the mission to “be the premier advocate for the skilled use of intelligence to enhance business decision-making and organizational performance to create competitive advantage.”
Photo by Jop Baylon
This recent event included information on SCIP by the Silicon Valley chapter head, Alok Vasudeva, and a presentation on escaping velocity by Michael Eckhardt. Eckhardt, Managing Director & Senior Workshop Leader for Chasm Institute was also a contributing author to Geoffrey Moore’s book, Escape Velocity: Free Your Company’s Future from the Pull of the Past. You likely remember Geoffrey Moore’s name from his bestseller, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Projects to Mainstream Customers.
Photo by Jop Baylon
Eckhardt presented and highlighted the assessment of competitive dynamics using those frameworks and tools depicted in Moore’s book. According to Alok Vasudeva, this chapter event was one of SCIP’s best attended in number, with a global audience ranging from Canadians to Brazilians.
Appreciative of the opportunity to hear Eckhardt speak, we dove into note taking, live-tweeting the whole way. The Hierarchy of Powers outlines 5 ‘powers’ a company must align in order to escape velocity. We challenge you all to evaluate your own powers.
A convenient example, and no stranger to Moore, Apple once analyzed seems to have a solid 4 out of 5 powers in action.
Giving us a glimpse into the future, Eckhardt outlined the top 9 tech trends that will be driving the next $1,000,000,000,000 of revenue for 2017-2018.
Because of our own industry focus, it was exciting for us to see the words “Analytics”, “Big Data”, and “Real-Time” in big letters as top revenue drivers. However, we’re still plenty excited about the trends outside our direct space that many of the attendees at the event are top leaders in. With the security and privacy market trending almost daily on every news forum from the national to the tech-specific, we’re looking forward to watching the major changes innovative companies will bring to the table.
After this event, we’re looking forward to finishing Escape Velocity and using it in customer conversations. We don’t want to give too much away but here’s a final teaser on the strategic wisdom strung throughout Moore’s pages,
“Leadership is about being in service to a higher cause; management is about ensuring that service is appropriately rewarded. Both are necessary. You just can’t put the focus on rewards first.” – Moore (p.13)
A big thank you to Alok Vasudeva for organizing, and for inviting FirstRain to participate in and sponsor, this engaging and enlightening Silicon Valley chapter event. We had a lovely evening and look forward to participating in future SCIP events.
Photo by Jop Baylon
If you are interested in learning more about how FirstRain can help you in your go-to-market strategies please contact Daniela Barbosa, our VP Marketing and Partnerships, to schedule a demo or to get more information.
I did consider the possibility that Dreamforce would turn out to be underwhelming – but this apprehension was quickly erased before I even walked in the doors by a casual passing of Marc Benioff. After watching his Keynote live and hearing about him from my team, I expected him to be larger than life, and he was. Seems Dreamforce would be exactly what I was hoping for.
After fulfilling my celebrity sighting for the day, I was ready to start the event. We began our hike in the training area where Salesforce products were explained and showcased for available learning.
If you have done much California hiking, you would feel right at home on the redwood-decorated “trail.” After completing our first walk-through and hearing product lessons, we just couldn’t resist revisiting the “campground” to collect pins and badges. The marketing team here sure knows their audience.
After the Trailhead, we entered the Cloud Expo to interact among my peers. From Silicon Valley neighbors to European visitors, I met many of the corporations helping to shape the cloud industry of today.
But the thing that impressed me the most? The sheer size of the event. What an incredible and diverse gathering of individuals interested in a better tomorrow.
Wish you were there too? Watch Dreamforce on Salesforce Live this year. But next year, be sure to hit the trail and I already found the dates.
For decades, IT has been dominated by males, with women technocrats having limited access to boardrooms. However, this trend is changing drastically as women enter strategic positions across the industry. The increasing participation of women in the tech industry and their growing influence is commendable. Still, there is a lot work to do before we see ‘real’ gender equality in the technology sector.
ABI is doing the work! They are empowering women on technology, entrepreneurship, career development, leadership, and advancing gender diversity in the workforce.
GHC/1 was recently held in Delhi and the experience was quite motivating. The conference had approximately 485 women in attendance, crossing technological roles to non-technological roles and ranging from professionals to students to aspiring entrepreneurs. The center of discussions was technology, entrepreneurship, and achieving a gender-diverse technology workforce.
One of the most intriguing discussions was “Digital Revolution – How the customer is embracing the technology.” The panelists were Deep Kalra (Chairman, Makemytrip), Harmeen Mehta (Global CIO, Bharti Airtel), Sanjay Rishi (President, American Express S.Asia) and Shikha Rai (VP, Canon India), all experts in their domain. Discussion included how panelists are transforming themselves alongside the revolution in technology.
The discussion revealed how customers are the primary force behind the shift to digital transformation. In light of the fact that most people use social networks and digital interactive tools in their daily life, it’s reasonable for businesses to undertake digital transformation. Every business now runs on our smartphones. Companies are becoming more and more user and app-friendly to capture customers’ attentions. The role of social media also cannot be ignored. Tweets go viral in no time so target companies must acknowledge and, sometimes, take corrective measures for their reputation.
The session gave way to a Fireside Chat with Rentala Shekhar, Chairman of NASSCOM, who emphasized supporting a flexible culture for women starting families.
There was also a discussion by Bharathram Thothadri (Chief Credit Officer, American Express and Managing Director, RIM India) on “Big Data and the rise of Fintech.” Fintech, or Financial Technology, encompasses a wide of companies using software to provide financial services. The major examples in this field are companies like Paytm and PolicyBazar.com. It’s interesting to see how such complex things as deciding on fund investment or taking a policy have become user friendly with big data and technology.
On the innovation side, we had Meetul Patel (General Manager of Marketing and Operations, Microsoft, India). He made us realize how unaware we are of women inventors. Watch the discussion’s video here. The names that first come to our minds are mostly male. We hardly know of any female inventions. Does that mean women have not invented yet? No! You will be surprised when you Google to see the list of incredible inventions we (women) have done.
Another session of interest was “Role of Innovation in Entrepreneurship.” Aparna Gupta (Managing Director, FirstRain India) was the discussion moderator. To hear more of her thoughts, read her recent interview on business intelligence in a world of mergers and acquisitions, posted on CIO. On the panel were four women, all innovators, who spoke about how an innovation can change one’s life and the live
s of those around them. One such innovation, and a crowd favorite, was from Anusheela Saha. Saha designed solar powered school bags for children in poverty, so they can study at night. The bag has solar panels attached to the front flap and LED lights on the reverse. The bags are charged as children walk to school and throughout the school day.
My take away from this experience is that women should go for it with their business ideas. It’s ok to fail at first. But if you do not try, you will never learn!
The event was concluded by a workshop by the founder of Storywallahs.com, Mr. Ameen Haque. The “Art of corporate story telling” session explained that one should weave an honest story about yourself and your work if you want to be remembered for long. What do you remember most –math classes or stories from your grandparents?
Overall it was a splendid networking event where women got to meet and be motivated by the life stories of domain experts. I met with Dr. Vibha Tripathi (Founder of Swajal) and Mr. Ameen Haque in between the tea breaks and was fascinated by how modest, yet intelligent, they were in their respective domains. Looking forward to next year’s session!
Mehgna Puri, Senior Analyst, Customer Success
Chitra Singh, HR Manager
Sometimes it seems that executives change positions faster than your morning coffee can brew. However, even when executive changes affect your business directly, you might be the last to know.
It can be overwhelming, keeping track of the perpetually changing status for management in your companies of interest – customers, partners, or competitors. Often we are forced to just rely on the traditional online professional networking platforms like LinkedIn, for professional updates.
Unfortunately, LinkedIn is dependent on user inputs for updates, and much of its value as a business intelligence tool is stunted by a trend involving executive level professionals neglecting their LinkedIn presence.
How Professionals are Using LinkedIn
LinkedIn is meant to encourage connections, learning, and sharing. Users of LinkedIn build a professional identity online, a concept inspired by traditional paper resumes, to build networks with colleagues and classmates while maintaining a presence in the job market.
For Market Research
In addition to its most famous uses as a job-search tool and professional social network, LinkedIn claims you can find “the latest news, inspiration, and insights you need to be great at what you do.”
Motivated by the claim, LinkedIn users have been applying the network to marketing and sales research. A solid 41% of B2B marketers consider LinkedIn their default social platform, as indicated in a 2015 Social Media Marketing industry report.
For Building Brand Awareness
It’s true that LinkedIn is brimming with information. Companies eagerly post content, hoping to hop on the social marketing wagon and build brand awareness. You can cultivate this awareness with LinkedIn when you have a well-maintained company page, augmented with equally well-maintained executive profiles. However, LinkedIn tends to be biased since a company’s own social media experts curate and manage company-specific information.
When Executives Don’t Give LinkedIn What it Needs to Succeed
Although executive profiles are a positive tool for brand cultivation on LinkedIn, many C-level employees do not maintain their profiles, if they have one at all. A creator of multiple start-ups, Shaun McConnon, publicly boasts about not being on LinkedIn. Those top executives who do have LinkedIn often neglect this presence to the extent of violating the main rule for LinkedIn success: always keep your profile updated.
According to recruiter Andrew Johnson, not maintaining your LinkedIn profile could be for a number of reasons, including:
Here at FirstRain, we noticed a rising trend in executive-level employees neglecting or forgoing LinkedIn profiles. If you follow us on Twitter, you have seen some examples of Management Changes across various industries:
Event detected 8/23/16 and tweeted on 8/30/16
Since LinkedIn updates originate from the users themselves, this trend of slow to non-existent updating throws a major wrench into the network’s use as a timely and useful research tool to understand management turnover.
Event detected on 8/5/16 and tweeted on 8/10/16
To see more of our management turnover updates, head over to our Twitter page.
How Does this Affect You?
If you are relying on LinkedIn alone, you might be missing top-level changes in companies of interest. Such changes often indicate a shift in direction in terms of company control, power, culture, or even a combination.
In sales or account management, an executive change can act as a catalyst for relationship development. Management changes can cause previously out-of-reach companies to become more hospitable or better aligned with your product or service. On the other side, if a change stems from a negative cause, think layoffs or poor leadership, you may consider the change a reason to contact your account.
At the end of the day, meaningful and valuable business relationships are possible only when you know your accounts intimately and executive level changes are a key part of this.
Don’t Jump Ship, Just Grab Another Oar
LinkedIn isn’t sinking and there’s no reason to jump. Instead, simply supplement the network with a tailored research tool. FirstRain presents key insights on your customer, competitors, and industries of interest in a streamlined manner so you receive the updates you rely on without the noise. Unlike other business analytics engines, FirstRain incorporates the business web and social media content for a one-stop shop of business intelligence.
Management changes are highlighted in at-a-glance panels and cover management and executive hires, departures or internal moves within a company, and board changes. Management Change analytics include senior level hires and retirements, executive promotions and resignations, and even plans for departure. To easily consume these key insights, the changes are presented for a specific company, account, industry, or topic of interest and can be further filtered down by your choosing.
Events detected 8/10-18 on and tweeted on 8/18/16
Where LinkedIn is lacking, there’s FirstRain to help.
Want to see just how FirstRain fits into your day? Here’s a video for those of you in sales. For those of you in marketing, read this overview.
Have thoughts you want to share or questions you need to ask? We’d love to hear from you.
There are only 25 days until Dreamforce 2016! Recently on their blog, Salesforce pointed out how to make the most of your airplane hours on the way to Dreamforce. This inspired the FirstRain team to optimize other often-wasted moments of time that are part of the full Dreamforce experience – time spent digging for information and time spent commuting from hotel to event, event to hotel. Luckily, we found a optimization with hotel service, Perch.
We were first introduced to Perch through the Women in Tech Salesforce User Group as FirstRain has been participating in “Girly Geeks” events for over the past four years. Later, FirstRain and Perch realized that, when united, they could help you get the most out of your Dreamforce experience. The shared advantages of using FirstRain and Perch can easily been visualized in this infographic.
Networking is, at its core, socializing (perhaps with a drink in hand or via escalator rides up and down Moscone). There is no doubt, that at Dreamforce, you will have the opportunity to meet inspiring and knowledgeable individuals. Rather than waste time desperately researching to keep up, FirstRain can give you instant updates on market and industry topics around the world. Impress your peers with smart insights around the companies and industries they work in so you can spend more time connecting and less time looking down at pages of irrelevant search results.
Since we are both committed to your success at Dreamforce, every Dreamforce attendee booking their stay through Perch will receive complementary access to FirstRain through October.
Don’t forget to set up FirstRain on your mobile phone for on-the-go access throughout the conference.
Enjoy!
FirstRain Named IDC Innovator in Financial Compliance and Risk Analytics
FirstRain is proud to announce that it has been recognized as an IDC Innovator in a recent report that identifies key players pioneering the U.S. financial compliance and risk analytics markets.
In this report, IDC highlights how FirstRain customers use the FirstRain Business Web Graph, fact extraction, and event detection to know their customers better and gain new insights into their customers and operations, as well as financial services compliance (e.g., Know Your Customer and Customer Due Diligence).
The FirstRain Business Web Graph is central to providing meaningful (high-resolution) information across FirstRain solutions. In additional to SaaS based apps, customers can also leverage FirstRain at the data level, via a categorization pipeline that measures dynamic information based on the strength of relevance, noise and nature of the subject, and weighs linkages between related industries, companies and topics that can be customized for each customer. The result is that FirstRain delivers a level of disambiguation and meaning-based through analytics that far exceeds the relevance and quality that can be achieved through search or keyword-matching approaches.
Quoting from the IDC press release, “Financial firms remain under pressure from regulators to improve the effectiveness of their compliance and risk management analysis and reporting,” said Bill Fearnley, research director, Compliance, Fraud and Risk Analytics at IDC Financial Insights. “To stay ahead of bad actors and improve their compliance and fraud detection programs, financial firms are increasing investments in analytics tools and new sources and types of data.”
What to learn more about how we are helping Financial firms? Please contact us!
Big congratulations to our FirstRain product and data science team, for winning the Ventana Research “Marketing Excellence Award” for 2015! Driven by our recent Orion release, FirstRain was distinguished as a groundbreaker in Marketing Strategy and as an Essential Tool for Marketing Success by Ventana Research.
The annual Ventana Research 2015 Technology Innovation Awards recognizes companies and technologies that are continuing to innovate and utilize expertise to interact with customers and we are proud to be one of the recognized leaders amongst these!
The FirstRain platform is an analytics platform that empowers enterprise customers to deliver business-critical and actionable insights to departments, teams and individuals. Mark Smith, CEO and chief research officer at Ventana Research affirms, “Marketing needs up to date information as it assesses the market and takes action, and FirstRain’s platform exemplifies our idea of an essential tool for marketing success, through FirstRain, enterprises and especially marketing organizations are not only able to learn more about the marketplace, but they are also able to gain insights leveraging big data analytics for highly personalized, relevant and timely information for sales and marketing teams.”
FirstRain dramatically increases strategic insight by adding new families of business analytics and the ability to integrate and analyze internal company data with Web and social data.
“Ventana’s Operational Innovation Award for Marketing Excellence is a testament to the powerful business insights that we provide our customers through the FirstRain platform,” said Penny Herscher, president and CEO of FirstRain. “With FirstRain, marketers can unlock the value of internal company data with Web and social for disruptive analytics that drive smart business decisions.”
For more information on the award please read the full press release and visit the Ventana Research Innovation Awards site.
What to learn more? Please contact us for a demo!
FirstRain is proud to have been named one of Oracle’s key ISV partners as part of Oracle’s Partner ecosystem expansion announcement at this week’s Oracle Open World (#OOW2015) annual conference. In support of helping customers maximize ROI from its Oracle Cloud Applications, our newest offering, FirstRain for Oracle Sales Cloud provides subscribers on-the-go access to real-time, relevant insights into the customers, competitors and markets they care about most. With FirstRain, Oracle Sales Cloud users are coached on who to call and what to say using advanced analytics and are able to quickly stay current on the critical changes impacting their customer’s business and end markets in a simple, elegant format directly in their Oracle Sales Cloud workflows.
You can read the full press release on the Oracle website or you can visit the FirstRain for Oracle Sales Cloud listing here. What to learn more? Please contact us for a demo!
You saw Lightning. You heard Thunder. Did you discover FirstRain?
For our fifth year running, the FirstRain team was a force to be reckoned with at Dreamforce, with the mission of sharing FirstRain’s brand new product release, a powerful analytics platform called Orion.
Marching through the crowd, our astronaut met and took pictures with many conference attendees and was even featured on KPIX Channel 5 news.
As a part of our Discover FirstRain initiatives, we held Exploration Sessions where executives toured our platform and learned how to use FirstRain to tap into their customer’s world through real-time analytics of their markets, competitors, critical events and developments in key sectors and product lines.
The attendees had a chance to preview our newest families of analytics that create even richer business insights, a newly designed user interface that allows to both get a bird-eye view of the industries and markets that the sales rep sells into, and do a deep-dives into topics and markets that help them make smarter decisions.
In good Dreamforce spirit, of course we had to raffle off something. Sorry, it wasn’t a Tesla Model X—maybe next year. But Jessie, who attended one of our Exploration Sessions, won a GoPro, courtesy of the FirstRain marketing team. Congratulations Jessie! We are looking forward to collaborating with you in the future. Send us some videos of your adventures with it!
FirstRain is proud to be on the forefront of today’s business analytics technology platform and enrich the Salesforce experience right inside CRM workflows. While Salesforce helps you manage leads, pipeline and forecasts, FirstRain provides personalized high precision insights on your accounts, end markets and competitors. The custom analytics are flexible, manageable, extensible and easy to understand and act upon. Our technology brings together dynamic categorization of the global enterprise data sources including web and social that are highly relevant to each user and augmented with real-time scoring and ranking across all sales rep’s accounts.
Interested?
Visit us on the Salesforce AppExchange or Contact Us for a demo.
FirstRain’s case submitted on ‘Personal business analytics platform for reasons to call’ was selected for NASSCOM Top 50 ‘Excellence in Analytics’ 2015. The case study was selected from over 200 submissions received. As a result, NASSCOM has released a report reflecting the application, innovation, and maturity of analytics. The evolution of new technology that drives analytics adoption is trademarking globally. Shifting to a analytics centered culture is an exponential, high-powered change.
Read the report here.
