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.
When FirstRain first launched our FirstTweets customer intelligence and analytics capability last spring, we knew we were taking an approach that was unlike anything else we’d seen in the marketplace, and our customers have told us as much. Unlike social media monitoring tools designed to help you understand and monitor conversations around your brand, FirstTweet’s unique analytics extract only business-focused intelligence from the extraordinary noise of Twitter, and then our patented algorithms actually understand and organize that information into the exact business lines, companies and industries that B2B sales and strategic marketing professionals sell into.
With FirstTweets, many business professionals got access—for the first time—to a world of Twitter-based intelligence relevant to their most important customers, competitors and end-markets, and all easily integrated into their existing CRMs, mobile devices and workflows. It’s Twitter made easy and highly relevant for the B2B sales and marketing pro.
And critical to the success of FirstTweets was, first, to have comprehensive, authorized and reliable access to the Twitter firehose—and for this FirstRain relies on Gnip. Gnip is the world’s largest and most trusted provider of social media data, and in addition to being a fantastic team of innovative social data ninjas, they’ve been terrific partners in our quest to transform the way corporate enterprises drive revenue through Web and Social customer intelligence and analytics beyond social monitoring.
That’s why we here at FirstRain are thrilled to announce this morning that we have been selected as one of Gnip’s inaugural Plugged In To Gnip partners. Joined by only a handful of select companies such as IBM, EMC, Brandwatch and others, being selected as a “Plugged In” partner by Gnip reinforces the unique, leading-edge approach to B2B social media analytics for sales and strategic marketing that FirstRain is taking.
We believe that having access to Gnip data really does give us a competitive edge which allows us to deliver real value to our customers every day, and being selected as a ‘Plugged In’ partner is yet one more proof point that FirstRain is providing customer intelligence that delivers unique and powerful customer intelligence our customers can’t get anywhere else.
Thanks to our friends and partners at Gnip for selecting us, and we’re looking forward to doing even greater things together in the future!
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!
Help nominate FirstRain and Penny for the 6th annual Crunchies Awards! The award ceremony recognizes the most captivating startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. It’s co-hosted by GigaOm, VentureBeat and TechCrunch.
The ceremony will take place January 31, 2013 at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. You can vote for FirstRain in the “Sexiest Enterprise Startup” and “Best Content Discovery Application” categories. You can also vote for Penny in the “CEO of the Year” category.
You may vote once a day until the cut off date, December 6th. Spread the word to your colleagues, families and friends!
Vote here to nominate FirstRain for the Sexiest Enterprise Startup!
Vote here to nominate FirstRain for the Best Content Discovery Application!
Vote here to nominate Penny for CEO of the Year!
Yesterday FirstRain celebrated Halloween and this year we invited all of the Rainmakers’ kids to partake in the festivities! In preparation for the party, each section of the office was given a pumpkin to carve and each team really went all out. I was surprised by the creativity each team brought to their pumpkin, from Nick’s “pumpkin eating another” pumpkin to Daniela’s “green wig” pumpkin, to my team’s very own “carrot” pumpkin— they were all awesome! During the party we let the kids pick a winner and Carolyn/ Laura’s “cat” pumpkin came out victorious.
Julie organized a Halloween scavenger hunt and each kid received a Halloween themed good bag—filled with candy. The kids were very excited (although the parents probably not so much).
The party was a fun excuse to bring all of the FirstRain kids together and they sure were cute!
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.
The day of the Airtel Delhi Half Marathon, September 30th 2012, finally arrived; the pinnacle of lots of hard work (or not so hard) for thirteen Rainmakers. The alarm bells rang at 3:45 AM on Sunday morning. It may have crossed our minds to hit the snooze, but the excitement of the marathon was enough to drag us out of bed.
The night before the big day was tough. Most of the participants were nervous, with the fear of not completing the race on time (or at all) weighing on us. We loaded up on both sleep and hydration, downing 4-5 liters of Gatorade in the 24 hours leading up to race day. Well in advance of the starting time, participants lingered near the course with running bibs pinned to their t-shirts and timing chips fastened to their shoes. Some listened to music to relax their minds. The morning was cool and breezy. Varun and Priyankar were the first of the Rainmakers to reach the packed venue. The DJ’s music filled the morning air as people stretched their sleepy muscles and fit in last minute exercises. At last, amid many speculations, our MYSTERY RUNNER was revealed. Nobody could have guessed our mystery runner was Gaurav Chauhan, who had been following a very secret regimen of workouts and an office diet of carrots, almonds, sprouts and apricots.
We gathered at the starting point, where people of all ages had turned up for the mega event. Moving forward wasn’t easy, as thousands of people with the same idea shoved and pushed their way through. The weather gods were not generous at the race’s 6:40 AM start time. As we reached India Gate, the scorching sun made every step more difficult. But each Rainmaker’s mind was consumed by only one thought: to complete the race. From the first stride, a sense of team spirit and competitiveness drove the Rainmakers. In a moment of pure concentration captured by event cameras, Varun and Mohammad Athar ran side by side for a full minute, but didn’t notice each other until reviewing the marathon photos after the race. Along the way, Rainmakers were encouraged by each other, motivated by the sheer number of other runners, and supported by well-organized event facilities. Cooling tunnels, oranges, water points, energy drinks, mobile toilets, and cold sponges at various places aided Rainmakers toward their destination.
Sanjay Shankar, a dedicated competitor from the beginning, finished the race with an impressive 13.10 miles in 2:27:29. His impromptu victory dance at the finish line was caught on camera and acquired Facebook fame. His enthusiasm spoke for all of the competing Rainmakers, who finished the race with complete participation.
Close to 32,000 people, including athletes and celebrities, turned up for the race. The spirit of the marathon is alive and well among Rainmakers. This year thirteen of us competed in the race, and we hope to see our numbers grow next year.
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!
