Check out the article in the March issue of CRM magazine talking about sales reps, and whether or not companies were willing to expand their sales teams. The article refers to a study by CSO insights in which they showed that companies who gave their reps access to sales intelligence (SI) had significantly shorter ramp-up periods. Given that 78% of the companies they surveyed said they are planning to add sales people this year – sales intelligence and productivity is a big issue.
“… the level of insights coming from a new generation of SI companies, such as FirstRain, InsideView, OneSource, and ZoomInfo, has expanded dramatically. Today, employing Web-crawling and other data-gathering methods, SI solutions constantly gather information about the marketplaces into which reps are selling, the competitive landscape, and details on prospect accounts and key stakeholders.
Think of it this way: Each sales rep has his own digital research assistant constantly to track key news and events in his territory. Let’s say a new executive gets hired in a prospect firm you are targeting, or a company reports an earnings surprise (good or bad), or a merger is announced in one of the industries on which you focus. The SI system immediately would notify you about any of those developments. Then that information could be appended to contact and opportunity records in the CRM system you are using to manage your pipeline.”
CRM magazine maintains that it’s worth it to invest in such intelligence; the knowledge that it provides is invaluable—and in many cases, unexpected. So if you’re looking to shorten the ramp-up period in expanding your sales team, check out our products!
Monday and Tuesday of next week we will be at the first Forrester’s Technology Sales Enablement Forum. This is a terrific new technology showcase for the sales enablement and marketing professionals and is being held at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.
The focus of the show is to help buyers understand the new tools and methodologies now available to help their sales teams generate more revenue.
We’ll be showing how our market intelligence platform is enabling sales teams to:
- easily monitor the changes impacting their major accounts and so be knowledgeable and have smarter conversations with them
- detect new, hard to find sales opportunities using advanced market-based triggers and filtering mechanisms
Come and meet us at Booth #304, we will be happy to give you a test drive!
There is a helpful article for sales people in Selling Power this morning.
Titled “Are you selling problems or solutions” the article cites four things you can do with the news to improve the conversation with you customer.
Consider the sale as just the beginning – as a friend of mine used to say – there is no post sales – there is sales and more sales!
Look on the bright (aka solution) side of the news. – the Selling Power editors say FirstRain is an ideal option.
Turn features into benefits – yep – don’t speed and feed.
Smile more – an easy one on a sunny day.
It’s exciting to see the economy come back and companies start to add new jobs – even the usually glum media like CNN is starting to report a coming hiring boom here.
Here at FirstRain we have a number of open positions in very interesting areas. Our openings are both in San Mateo, California and in Gurgaon, India. We are looking for smart, hungry talent. People who want to be a part of a dynamic, fun company doing edgy, ground-breaking work. If you are a potential Rainmaker send your resume in to careers@ignite.firstrain.com
Open positions January 2011:
You will probably have noticed that your FirstRain email monitors changed over the Holidays.
This new style of monitor is designed to help you
i) see the highest impact articles first,
ii) quickly read the ranked highlights for each company or market topic you are monitoring,
iii) highlight key analytics such as management turnover, analyst comments or corporate governance issues and
iv) read them more easily on your mobile devices.
A new year opens up new opportunities and ideas for us all. May I wish you and your family a happy and prosperous New Year. Thank you for being our user.
Best wishes
Penny
Our team is working hard at Dreamforce this week – if you are there and have not visited us yet stop by! Not only can we share the benefits of the new version of FirstRain with you, we are also giving away a tiny radio for your listening pleasure
As you can see here – the FirstRain team is having fun, collecting leads, talking to prospects and sharing their excitement about our new version which is, after all, simply the easiest, most efficient way to monitor the changes that impact markets and companies! A must for every marketing and strategic sales professional.
We’ll be at Dreamforce 2010 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco next week – the happening place for sales people and the sales ops and marketing people who support them.
We’ll be showing all the hot new capabilities in FirstRain – how to easily monitor your key customers – how to efficiently understand the changes in your market, and their market, that impact your opportunity.
Come and talk to us about how sales people use the FirstRain monitors every day and how our marketing users at major customers have integrated FirstRain into the internal portals – both customer and SFDC – so sales people always have real-time updates on the competition.
And – because we are all about staying up to date – we’re giving away radios that fit in your lapel pocket (they are small but sound great!) so come and pick one up. Booth #1105
Marty did a lightning talk at the recent Smart Content conference in New York. The video is not great quality (stick with it because his face does come onto the screen after a minute) but his talk is interesting if you are curious about how we treat “business” as a domain and use semantic technology to find our customers the critical intelligence about their markets and target companies.
Here’s the link if you want to go straight to the Vimeo site
FirstRain lightning talk, Smart Content MArty Betz from Seth Grimes on Vimeo.
There is nothing like hearing about how customers use a product from the customer himself. Here are two short videos about how Symantec has integrated FirstRain into their market intelligence process and platform.
First: Clips from Kevin Bailey’s overview talk (4 mins)
Second: Q&A between Kevin and me (7 mins) – describing how FirstRain is used in the intelligence flow and what it does for the user’s knowledge of their customers and market.
FirstRain is sponsoring the new Grace Hopper Conference India in Bangalore Dec 7-9 this year. GHC has been held in the US for many years but this is the first time we (the Anita Borg Institute of which I am a board member) is organizing an international conference and I am delighted it is going to be in India since FirstRain has a develpment operation in Gurgaon, India.
And we are hiring – so if you are a software engineer going to the conference seek out our Director of Analytics Aparna Gupta! We are looking for bright engineers with expertize in either applications and algorithms to help us continue to develop our ground breaking search and analytics platform.
