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.
At FirstRain our customers are business people – people looking for high quality real-time intelligence – and so they include both marketing and sales, and investors. Within the investing community we are considered a type of independent research. Independent because we just supply research, we don’t trade or sell you positions, unlike the big banks.
Investorside is an industry association that was formed to help investors find and consume independent research – especially important after the scandals of the early 2000s when sell-side analysts had been pushing stocks they did not believe in.
This month FirstRain is featured on the Investorside site – you can read their newsletter here.
and here is an excerpt:
Smarter than Google or Traditional Intelligence Databases
According to Herscher, business professionals struggle between incomplete and inflexible news or intelligence systems — or Google — as choices for decision content. So they are faced with either incomplete information, or such a quantity of irrelevant information that they cannot find the useful intelligence.
“If you are trying to do an in-depth analysis on Domino’s Pizza as an investment candidate – looking for company strengths and weaknesses, competitive positioning and market demand drivers – in a Google search you will have to wade through store locations, coupons and menus,” Herscher explains. “Conversely, if you use a news service, or even an intelligence database like Factiva or Lexis Nexis, you will be missing critical web content.”
FirstRain monitors and then extracts, filters and organizes only relevant intelligence from the web. The information is delivered to users as efficient reports about a company’s business environment including recent events, industry trends, competitive dynamics and management turnover.
“FirstRain is particularly valuable in helping clients keep track of fast-moving industries such as technology and clean energy,” Herscher continues. “Users can monitor critical industry topics and lists of companies and receive monitors to keep them up to date with the important changes impacting their holdings.”
I had the pleasure of meeting one of our customers a few weeks ago at a Selling Power conference – a sales rep called Samantha Barrett – and after she told me how much she loved FirstRain I asked her to describe for me how she uses it every day. It’s always helpful for me to listen to a user’s daily experience and make sure I understand what they like and how we can improve.
XL Group is in Philadephia and they provide sales and marketing solutions to the life sciences and automotive industries. Their products are software packages like SFA, data management, BI etc.
Sam uses FirstRain to both save her time, and help her develop her top prospects. As she says “I use FirstRain to solve four problems: how I stay current on my top 10 prospect’s businesses, how I understand key industry changes, how I find expansion opportunities in my existing customers and how I know what’s new for my competitors”.
Sam goes into FirstRain every morning to analyze what is new with her top prospects, and she also uses email monitors to track her major existing customers, her market and her competition. The unique intelligence she needs, when she needs it, in her daily workflow.
You can read a short case study of how she uses FirstRain here (download the XL Group case study).
As she says “With FirstRain I now save at least an hour a day monitoring the developments which are impacting my prospects, existing customers and competition.”
Fabulous.
We released out first free version of FirstRain on the brand new Seeking Alpha app store last week – and today we are the #1 app with over 2500 downloads!
The reviews are terrific — like “This is brilliant. You can see in an instant all the important news on any ticker and know what happened to the stock and the volume when the news was released. Probably the fastest way to get familiar with any new stock.”
It’s easy to try it out for yourself. Go to the Seeking Alpha App Store and install it.
You can see two views of a company – a short overview of what’s hot and happening:
and then if you click through to Read More – you see a whole page of the company brief – an in depth and very relevant view of what’s impacting the company, it’s competitors, it’s management, and then from there review the top industry topics that are trending on the web.
In one page you can quickly and easily review, or come up to speed on, a company and it’s market (this is the chart at the top of the page showing the critical events).
Today more people than ever can use FirstRain to monitor and understand their stocks – or the companies and markets they care about.
The news is we announced our FirstRain Snapshot application on the newly released Seeking Alpha App Store (which is in itself a terrific new capability for all Seeking Alpha users). The press release is on our website – check it out. But more importantly – down load the app and try it for yourself. It’s free.
It’s exciting for us to make our unique brand of dynamic, in-depth market intelligence available to the millions of business-savvy bloggers and readers at Seeking Alpha. The Snapshot provides embedded Quote and Portfolio analysis — as well as up-to-the-minute briefings generated on companies and trending topics, seamlessly within Seeking Alpha.
To download it for yourself — go to: http://seekingalpha.com/store/app/87-firstrain-snapshot
We are holding our mid year sales meeting this week and I have brought our sales team in together for training and territory planning. And since it’s beautiful weather, and it’s summer, we went as a company to AT&T Park to watch the Giants play the Cincinnati Reds.
The team all really enjoyed the game – especially since our home team crushed the opposition! And because we had purchased a block of tickets our name was listed on the big board.
As part of our announcement today of our new snapshot on Salesforce CRM we have also announced a webinar to show our sales users the power of being able to do account analysis in line when preparing for meetings or planning out campaigns. Join us!
Conduct Major Account Analysis to Increase Revenue Today
Date: July 27, 2010
Time: 1:00 PM PDT or 4:00 PM EDT
Registration Link: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/148402243
Webcast link: http://ignite.firstrain.com/Events.php
