If you are going to Dreamforce this year, you may already know, the Dreamforce Agenda builder will be going live tomorrow, so it’s time to start getting ready to make your session selections!
Learn More about FirstRain Dreamforce 2014 Activities here Still not registered? Use our promo code EC14FRSTRN for a $100 discount!
Tips: Getting Into the Sessions I Want
Plan. Plan. Plan.
This year registering for sessions at Dreamforce will be a bit different, as only 50% of the available seats will be open for pre-registration. The others will be on a first come first serve basis. So if there are sessions that you must get into:
1. Make a list of the sessions you are interested in so you can quickly find them when the agenda builder opens up.
2. Create a calendar with all your personal travel, scheduled meetings and networking events. Have an overview of this and all other main events and conference timelines available for when you start selecting your sessions. Use this handy guide that we have put together to get started!
3. Do not stress out if a session fills up! Check back every day or so- attendees switch sessions all the time. Push comes to shove, you can go wait in line right before the session starts!
Schedule Time for Expo Hall
The Cloud Expos are the best way to get the most out of Salesforce products and solutions. Make sure you schedule some time to make your way to the Salesforce Campground to get your hands on all the Salesforce products and solutions.
FirstRain is a Silver Partner again this year and we look forward to meeting you. We will be in Moscone North Booth 2128 and have a lot of fun activities planned, so come on by to get a demo, visit our Drink Serving Robot and meet the FirstRain Team!
Attend our FirstRain Sessions!
There are over 1,100 sessions currently available to pick from! Join our sessions and learn why FirstRain salesforce.com solutions are used by some of the world’s largest Salesforce customers.
GE Capital: Driving More Sales Opportunities with Personal Business Analytics
Date & Location: Monday October 13th 12:00pm-12:40pm, Club Room, Marriott Marquis
JDSU: Drive Salesforce Adoption and Custom Engagement with Just In Time Analytics
Date & Location: Wednesday October 15th – 3-3:40pm, Yerba Buena, Salon 10-11-12
Flextronics: Increasing Customer Value and Sales Productivity
Date & Location: Wednesday October 15th 4:30pm-5:10pm, Century Theater 7
Want to learn more about FirstRain? Meet with us at Dreamforce!
This post was written by Fjorela Dardha our Marketing intern from Bolzano Italy through the M31USA, internship placement program:
I am Fjorela, a student of Masters of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Free University of Bolzano in Italy. As part of a project funded by the European Social Fund, I was given the unique opportunity to visit Silicon Valley for six weeks in order to get an insight into ways of doing business in the world leading hub for high-tech innovation.
In particular, I had the chance to do a month-long internship in the Marketing department at FirstRain. From the very beginning, I was warmly accommodated and walked through the team’s overall responsibilities and upcoming projects. What really impressed me was how much people cared to make sure my experience in this start-up would be as beneficial as possible. They involved me in different meetings and group activities and were always asking about what I was doing in Italy, curious to hear about my impressions on the differences between European and American culture.
FirstRain is characterized by a very flat organizational structure and the team appears to be enthusiastically committed to a common goal while making the working environment a great and fun place to be in. I felt that particular attention was given to diversity, which is seen as a valuable component and is reflected in the team composition. I was unexpectedly invited to celebrate the end of their financial quarter, which offered me the unique opportunity to witness how much passion and love people can feel for what they are doing while still finding time to have fun among colleagues. During the party, I had the chance to eat and drink with the whole company, getting to meet people from all over the United States. I even got involved in a Sumo Wrestling match! “It’s an intern tradition” – they said…
Overall I consider this experience to have been extremely valuable and positive both from an educational and personal perspective. I had the opportunity to learn new tools such as Salesforce, which may turn out to be useful for my future career, and got an extensive picture of how start-ups work in the Bay Area. Moreover I was able to get some insights and real life examples of management in highly innovative environments as start-ups tend to be, where the decision making process is very quick and people have to constantly adapt to new circumstances. I consider myself very lucky for having been part of such a great and motivated team and for having had the occasion to create contacts and discover potential future career opportunities.
FirstRain has decided to take on the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge! CEO Penny Herscher and CFO Glenn Goelz took the plunge yesterday and will donate to help find a cure for this debilitating disease. Watch the videos below!
Penny now challenges Bob Carrigan, President and CEO of D&B; Jonathan Becher, CMO of SAP; Ron Black, CEO of Rambus; and Thomas Waechter, CEO of JDSU.
Penny:
Glenn:
We’re all moved into our new office! Even though some of us are still getting lost in the hallways, you can feel the positive energy in the building.
More space for us also means space to add more people. We have a bunch of open positions; if you think you’re a good fit, send us your resume! Check them out here
Lots of space!
Spacious, classy new foyer
Our awesome kitchen loaded with snacks!
We are happy to announce the beta launch of mobile calendar integration for FirstRain! To help our users be as prepared as possible for every meeting, our algorithms will prioritize the most important customer insights, delivering a different personal insight experience tailored to each user and their role prior to any calendar event.
We’re excited to empower our customers with the mobile calendar integration by helping them increase the quality and frequency of customer engagement, guide activities to drive more opportunities and reduce risk through real-time understanding of customer and market events.
In conjunction to the calendar integration, we’re also introducing the FirstRain Labs program to accelerate innovation between FirstRain and our users. We always want to make sure that the personal insights and the functionality of our solutions help and empower our users as much as possible—and what better way to understand that than from the users themselves?
FirstRain Labs will grant participants beta access to capabilities that are currently being researched and developed, as well as to focus groups where they can share ideas with the FirstRain R&D team and the larger user community. We’re actively recruiting lab participants—sign up here!
We are excited to announce that we’re continuing the momentum from the beginning of the year and are finishing Q2 on a high note by winning 2 awards this month!
FirstRain Customer Insights has just won the DataWeek + API World 2014 award for Most Innovative Customer Intelligence Solution.
Customer Insights was selected by crowd vote, where thousands of people voted on the top Data + API technologies of 2014.
As DataWeek + API World awards recipients, our team will be attending and participating in this year’s conference & expo. We’re offering 50 free OPEN passes (for the Expo, Keynotes, and Open Talks) to our community. Register here to get your pass!
https://dataweek14.eventbrite.com/?discount=dw14-award-guest
We were also named a finalist in the 2014 Stratus Awards. The Business Intelligence Group today announced the 2014 winners of the Stratus Awards. The inaugural industry awards competition recognizes those companies innovating in the Cloud and providing innovative offerings that are truly differentiated in the market.
We work hard to provide the most relevant, personal customer insights to our users to help them meet and exceed their own revenue and customer goals. These awards denote the importance of personal business analytics in today’s world and validate the hard work we put in every day for our customers!
When respected industry peers highlight our company and our products, it’s incredibly special for us. So, we are extremely happy that we have been selected by Matt Heinz, founder of Heinz Marketing, as “Matt’s App of the Week.”
Matt selected FirstRain because, as he said, “Even with the proliferation of information available online, getting it all together and keeping it updated has often been a hassle… That’s where FirstRain really shines. You tell them what companies you’re targeting, including the type of engagement or business relationship you’re interested in. They then filter the entire Web for information about the company and specifically related to your focus areas, and share it for you in one easy-to-use Web interface.”
Matt has been using FirstRain and says it is a “huge time saver—and I’ve found it a source of intelligence I’m sure I wouldn’t have found anywhere else.”
Thanks again to Matt for making FirstRain this week’s App of the Week!
Read Matt’s entire post here and follow Matt Heinz on twitter @heinzmarketing.
Overloaded 2014 has come and gone, and our presentation about role-based information overload was a great success!
Nima Niakan, Executive Fellow and Faith Chiang, Director of UX at FirstRain spoke about how context affects information architecture. People process information differently—we process it given the situation we are in and the task we are trying to accomplish. It’s not the amount of information that’s the problem, then, but the form in which it’s presented to the user. It’s critical to personalize what sort of information to deliver, and how to deliver it, to each business role—because role, device, origin and situation are the difference between information overload and information paradise.
For most sales and marketing professionals, there is too much content on the Web to be able to efficiently find useful, relevant business intelligence. Being able to find what you need to know, and knowing why you need it, are essential to do your job better. But in today’s world, it’s a problem of noise. And we at FirstRain are solving information overload every day with our personal business analytics solutions.
Watch the video below to see the whole talk!
Much of a company’s success—whether that’s a driving force behind a complete turn-around or simply a shot in the arm—hinges on new product releases and updates. A product manager’s role, then, is vital to driving revenue. But they have to get it right, and that’s not always an easy task.
An article by Eric Nguyen on ProjectTimes.com lays out the 3 main challenges for product managers. The first is planning an accurate product roadmap. Many of the challenges that come with creating one stem from a lack of information, leading to discord within the team and/or products that don’t drive real value for customers. Having a solution that would allow the PM to track and receive updates on what the customer is saying in the marketplace about a solution like theirs, as well as understanding market trends and competitive activity, will help them understand how the market is trending and what the customer really wants and needs—creating a better product and a more accurate timeline. If their team has the same information as they do, they will have to spend less time dealing with conflict from the different business groups and get down to business.
The second problem is embracing change to speed product development and delivery. Product managers—and other business stakeholders, for that matter—are used to seeing a detailed plan and timeline. But by having insight into the changing market and competition, they can be more agile and take advantage, knowing what to develop and when to release it. They can get ahead of the market and claim innovator status—putting them in front of the competition and driving revenue.
Lastly, the project manager needs to be able to align all of his teams and facilitate communication between them. Giving everyone access to the same information is one thing, but they also need to be able to collaborate and communicate key information they find. Once they can, the process will run much more smoothly, driving innovation in products and a more agile approach to the market.
A product manager has to juggle a lot of different viewpoints and input—from sales to marketing to the customer—in order to develop a product that will move the needle. By having relevant, real-time information, his team will be able to stay ahead of the market and create great value for both his company and his customers. See how Rambus is using FirstRain to identify strategic opportunities in new markets.
It’s a really exciting time at FirstRain. We’ve been growing very fast recently—and that means we need more space! We’re only moving a few steps away, but we can’t wait to settle into our new offices. It’s still a work in progress, but coming soon!
More space for us also means space to add more people. We have a bunch of open positions, so if you see one that interests you, don’t hesitate to send us your resume. Check them out here!
