FirstRain is revving up for Dreamforce 2013, and to make sure we’ve got all the latest information, we’ve been watching The Road to Dreamforce on Salesforce Live. It’s been really informative and has helped get our creative juices flowing—except they stillwon’t tell us who the band is! Come on, guys!
The best part is that anyone can participate. If you have a question, you can easily ask in real-time: just go on Twitter and use #salesforceLIVE during the session. You might even get an on-air shout out and be famous like Justine!
If you missed yesterday’s episode, don’t worry. You can watch it here.
It’s on: We’re going to Dreamforce again! And this time, we’ve moved on up to Silver Sponsor status. Our booth last year was packed and buzzing with great conservations, with both attendees and salesforce.com employees wanting to learn more about FirstRain. So, this year we’ll have some more elbow room—and, in typical FirstRain fashion, we absolutely guarantee to have something extra special that will make you want to come on by!
These past few weeks have been really exciting at FirstRain with our launch of our new product, Market Insights, but now it’s time to start looking ahead. The Dreamforce momentum is really picking up, and we can’t wait to participate and show the Cloud community how FirstRain’s big data insight solutions can help companies increase revenue and put their go-to-market strategy into action.
For news and updates as we get closer to November 18, you can follow us on Twitter at @firstrain, and check us out on Facebook. Also, while you’re tuning into Dreamforce buzz (and hopefully getting as excited as we are), don’t forget to listen in to salesforce’s own “The Road to Dreamforce” weekly show to get the latest news and tips to make Dreamforce 2013 the best Dreamforce ever!
FirstRain is excited to announce that we are sponsoring this weekend’s Overloaded2013 conference, February 9th in San Francisco. This annual conference, which is produced by the Information Overload Research Group, is a diverse gathering of thought leaders in information management, workplace collaboration and technology productivity who come from academia, corporate management, information technology and private research—and all of whom are addressing real-time issues with information overload. The agenda and speaker lineup looks wonderful and includes our very own Nima Niakan, FirstRain’s Director of Customer Solutions.
Every day our customer solutions team works directly with our customers help them use FirstRain to solve a piece of their own information overload problems—delivering only the highly relevant, real-time information their sales and marketing teams need—and nothing more!
We’re really looking forward to meeting the other participants who are also working on innovative solutions to information overload!
Co-Authored by Senior Software Engineers Pallavi Agarwal and Yogita Singh Malik
“There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we erect ourselves.”
-Ronald Reagan
This year the Grace Hopper Conference focused on how to overcome many fears. GHC offered everyone a great opportunity to meet and learn from experiences of some of the world’s most successful leaders.
It was inspirational and motivational to hear from leaders who have reached heights in their life and career, and the entire conference was filled with rich content ranging from technical, to management to early career advice.
Some major highlights from the conference this year were:
1. Former Intuit CMO Nora Denzel (and current member of the FirstRain board) presented a keynote session. She had a very memorable quote that I haven’t forgotten since she said it: “It’s not about who you know or what you know. It’s all about who knows what you know”.
2. A session on cloud computing with an excellent overview of benefits, the risk, the lack of standards and where it is headed.
3. A great session on SDETs (Software Development Engineers for Test)—which I was pleased to see bore a strong correlation with what FirstRain Testers do daily. Some prominent speakers from premiere companies discussed how the testing industry has emerged over the last twenty years and how SDETs are gaining the necessary cross skills and complimenting the development life-cycle.
4. Dr. Noor Fathima, Behavioral Scientist and OD (Organization Development) Consultant, carried out a workshop called “Unleashing the Power Within”. The workshop was dedicated to today’s women who are multi-talented, juggling the work-life balance and dealing with the multitude of challenges that come their way. This session was completely sold out!
5. Aparna Gupta, Managing Director of FirstRain India and the rest of the panelists in a session called ‘Road to Executive Leadership’. They discussed the ongoing problem about the lack of women in executive roles. Aparna and the panelists discussed how this is an important issue we need to continue to address. She revealed the hurdles she had to overcome to reach the level of success that she has today.
6. Lastly, the highlight that stood out most during the entire conference was the sheer energy and camaraderie throughout all of Grace Hopper. The excitement of technical women from all over the world, networking and learning from each others’ past experiences was very inspiring and made for a great event.
Last week I had the pleasure to head down to Boca Raton, Florida for my first cross-country business trip. Since I earned my demo stripes at this year’s FirstRain Dreamforce booth, I am now part of our team that is deployed to customer events—yay for frequent-flyer miles!
One of our customers, Ciena, had their annual sales meeting and invited FirstRain to participate. The meeting took place at what my seasoned FirstRain sales colleagues call a typical sales conference: a “fancy-smancy” hotel with a perfect ocean view, beautiful weather, non-stop great food and one happy sales team!
Attending and participating in sales orientation/training events and annual kick-offs is something that FirstRain offers as part of our customer success program. As one of our customers, Ciena invited us to attend in order to showcase FirstRain as an important new tool for the team within their CRM system. All of their sales users are encouraged to take advantage of FirstRain intelligence within their CRM and it was evident that FirstRain is already acting as their carrot! In fact, for this event our booth was right next to their CRM team’s station, and we were pretty busy giving lots of demos and answering questions for interested reps. We were really delighted by the amount of positive feedback we received during our 4 days on the ground with this great team.
From individual sales reps, to team managers, to the head of sales himself, we had an overwhelming number of people expressing the value FirstRain is bringing to their business. Our own team is certainly aware of the benefits and usefulness of FirstRain for companies like Ciena, but hearing from actual sales users telling us how we are making an impact is extremely cool and rewarding. You can’t ask for anything better than that, can you?
I had a great time talking with people from all over the world, and it was very exciting to hear how different teams are using FirstRain daily. Sure, the “fancy-smancy” hotel and delicious food, we’re a great perk for all, but the best part was coming back to California knowing that FirstRain is delivering the customer intelligence they need, where they need it, and that their sales teams are WINNING with FirstRain!
On October 17th, 2012, our amazing COO, YY Lee will speak at the Semantic Technology and Business Conference. Her session, “Expanding Your Horizons: Using Cross-Domain Semantics to Deliver Higher Impact Intelligence“ will present how FirstRain has tackled the challenge of delivering customer intelligence across many different business domains. The session takes place at 9:30am-10:00am at the Grand Ballroom.
The Semantic Technology and Business Conference takes place from October 15th-October 17th in New York City. The conference will host numerous sessions from diverse experts in many industries, as well as an expo hall exhibiting the newest semantic and big data tools and developments. For more information, email me at jlevi@ignite.firstrain.com.
And the winner of the FirstRain ‘be the carrot’ iPad contest is … Talitha Baker from Invisible Children! She came in first with over 600 Facebook Likes and 75 retweets (in fact, that was her winning count as of our Friday evening deadline—but as of this morning, Talitha’s Carrot pic has more than 800 FB Likes and over 80 retweets)! Great job Talitha on ‘Being the Carrot’ and rallying your networks to help you win. It was quite a battle between the close second-place finish of George Messiha at Citrix, who had over 520 Facebook Likes!
And thanks again to EVERYONE who participated in this fun contest. And of course, if you’d like to hear more about how FirstRain gives you the “carrot” to drive Salesforce adoption by delivering customer intelligence to your company’s major account sales and marketing teams–and makes your entire team as knowledgeable about your most important customers as your top performers already are, drop me a line!
If you didn’t get to hear the Dreamforce session where GE Capital’s Sales Excellence leader, Steve Kozek, discussed their challenges in increasing the customer expertise of their sales reps and driving CRM adoption and engagement, we have now posted a highlights video on our YouTube channel. We think you will find the value in hearing GE Capital’s experience in solving these problems!
If you are interested in seeing the full video of the session please email us at sales@ignite.firstrain.com
FirstRain decided to have some fun as we get ready for Dreamforce next week. A real team collaboration!
I can’t think of a better way to start a major conference then attending a conference sponsored networking event. From day one you are able to network and make connections with others, who can heavily influence the value you ultimately get from the conference.
On the eve of Dreamforce, Monday September 17th there will be a ‘Women in Tech’ event hosted by GirlyGeeks and the Salesforce.com’s Women’s Network (open to all Dreamforce attendees and Salesforce.com employees).
This networking event is sure to rally in many passionate, energetic and career driven women and certainly all the Girly Geeks at FirstRain are looking forward to meeting them all, as we kick off Dreamforce 2012.
Events like these are great opportunities to come together to network, share your own personal experiences, and hear some of the challenges and experiences women have faced in order to build their careers. In addition to networking and ‘cocktailing’ time, attendees will hear from:
Plus a special panel session moderated by Jill Rowley, Director of Key Accounts, Eloqua. The panelists will share their career stories and take questions from the audience. Panelists include:
We are very happy that Penny was invited to be part of the panel, because as a FirstRain Girly Geek, I know the benefit of her daily dose of inspiration, guidance and fortitude, that I am sure will come across in the panel. As many of you know, Penny is very passionate about the opportunities and challenges that women in technology encounter on a daily basis. She actively shares her thoughts on her personal blog as well as on the Huffington Post. Earlier this year Penny participated on a panel at Yahoo! on the myth of the work-life balance and spoke at TEDx Gunn High School on how coding is the new literacy.
Want to learn more or attend the Women In Tech Event? If you are a Dreamforce attendee or Salesforce.com employee, visit the Girly Geeks Dreamforce Chatter Group and then RSVP here (email me if you need a code: dbarbosa@ignite.firstrain.com).
And don’t forget, Dreamforce is only 10 days away and all of FirstRain is working hard to get #DF12ready! Most of the team will be present, whether they are at our booth (#1626!), wandering the expo and hosting meetups (interested in meeting up with us? Email us at DF@ignite.firstrain.com) or checking out the GE Capital Session–we are gearing up for a fun week!
Image|Flickr| Elizabeth Thomsen