By Daniela Barbosa, Director of Business Development
It’s no secret that companies of all sizes are adopting tablets in the office. According to this poll of 610 professionals by CDW, more than half of the American workforce have used a tablet at work for more than a year. From being able to take a presentation on the go to accessing vital information outside of the office, tablets are the perfect gadget for today’s professionals. But if we are talking about revenue enablement, there isn’t anyone that benefits more from tablet use than salespeople.
Salesforce.com recently pointed out that 40% of sales teams use a tablet, according to the Sales Management Association, and they outlined six ways how tablets are transforming sales. How? For example, portable devices allow you to conduct B2B market research when you’re about to head into a client meeting and even to optimize your product pitch based on the sales intelligence you gather. Yet these aren’t the only reasons tablets are ideal for sales reps.
Makes Multitasking Easy
Tablets are everything rolled into one—laptop, your product catalogue and even means of communication with the rest of your team. In the CDW survey, this ability to do many things at once provides us with more than 1.1 hours in gained productivity every day. According to the survey’s info graphic, 84% of the respondents said tablets make them better multitaskers.
This is essential to sales reps who are driving revenue. It frees up time when you’re able to add another slide to your presentation before entering a client meeting and take notes right on your tablet instead of having to transcribe them into the computer later on. With sales reps already pressed for time, salesforce.com suggested tablets provide teams with access to insights in real-time, which results in smarter selling strategies—and here at FirstRain we have many enterprise customers that are already seeing these benefits with FirstRain for Touch solutions.
Increase Customer Visibility
You always need to have your finger on the pulse of your customer’s market, but this can be difficult when you can’t access information when you’re away from your desk. Apps from FirstRain and companies like salesforce.com provide teams with a way to collect customer insights, which can do more than just help you maximize sales strategy.
Salesforce.com suggested reps use tablets to boost customer engagement by loading the device with videos, slideshows and other types of media. When your client is able to see your pitch in action, they’re often more willing to purchase it.
Stay Constantly Connected
One of the greatest advantages of tablets is the ability to always be connected with the rest of the team. According to the survey, respondents said they couldn’t live without email access when they are away from the office—we all know how that feels! In addition to being connected, being able to communicate with co-workers can help sales reps improve their sales pitch and receive additional insight about their customer’s markets.
In fact, salesforce.com says that being able to communicate with colleagues on the go is a great advantage to sales reps. With cloud-based CRM systems, professionals can access customer records and keep track of opportunities. There is no question that being able to connect with your team and your CRM system is essential to maximizing your time and ensuring no opportunity is lost.
So yes, tablets are transforming the sales environment—is your team ready?
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!
On this day in 1984, the space shuttle Discovery took off on its maiden voyage.
And just as the Discovery launch was another important step forward for NASA, FirstRain made another big advancement today with the launch of our newest product, Market Insights!
Our sales-focused solution, Customer Insights, is revolutionizing the big data analytics market and has become a valuable part of the daily workflow at many Fortune 500 companies. But some of these companies are already finding that sometimes customer intelligence alone isn’t enough—in order to truly put their go-to-market strategy into action, their marketing teams need market-focused intelligence as well.
And that’s why we created FirstRain Market Insights. Developed over the last year in collaboration with two of our leading enterprise customers (both major, Fortune 100 technology companies), Market Insights leverages our powerful semantic analytics technology in order to provide relevant, real-time market insights that CMOs, strategic leaders and entire marketing teams need about their specific lines of business.
The combination of our new Market Insights solution with our already popular Customer Insights product (not to mention our recently launched FirstRain for Touch) now makes a powerful suite of enterprise solutions providing unmatched business insights into your target markets and your top customers, helping you grow revenue and (finally!) putting your go-to-market strategy into action.
As with the rest of FirstRain’s products, it doesn’t matter if you’re on the road, at a customer site, on your iPads, iPhones or Android phones, via email, or integrated directly into company CRMs or social enterprise portals such as salesforce.com—we can deliver insight wherever and whenever you need it.
FirstRain Market Insights is available now. For more information, you can visit its product page or drop us a line at sales@ignite.firstrain.com.
We’re over the moon about our new product. In fact, it’s left us starry-eyed with wonder—and our early adopters are, too—we hope you’ll let us know what you think of it!
By Nora Weintraub
The year is already halfway done—take a moment to process that. You only have six more months to finish whatever you’ve put off, be it perfecting your sales pitch or identifying sales opportunities. Okay, maybe you have some grace period in January, but if you’d set out to accomplish something by the end of the year, half of your time is now gone. Now, take a breath and let that mid-year crisis feeling float away. By managing your time wisely, exercising just a few organizational skills and focusing on what you need to get done, you can reach your end-of-the-year sales goals (or any goal, really) by the deadline and start 2014 off fresh.
1. Identify Where You’re Behind
What’s lacking? Do you still have a couple outstanding sales? Did you not meet your sales goals for a few consecutive months? Did you mean to start being active on Twitter? Start off your personal program to meet those targets by taking a look at what you still have to do—even if you’d rather not. You may not have gotten everything done at the beginning of the year, but you still have another six months to accomplish it all. Carve out some time in your busy schedule and make a good old fashioned to-do list, then place it in an area you see every single day. The key is to take a look at what you still have to do on a daily basis so that it stays at the forefront of your mind.
2. Create Personal Deadlines
On your to-do list, make your own deadlines. If you need to meet a certain sales goal by October, make an effort to get it done by mid-September. In an interview with Inc., Krissi Barr, founder of consulting firm Barr Corporate Success, advised professionals to establish their own goals and make them shorter than the official deadline.
“If I think something is going to take me an hour, I give myself 40 minutes,” Barr said. “By shrinking your mental deadlines, you work faster and with greater focus.”
Knowing that you only have another two months to close a sale can help you make it a priority, even if it doesn’t have to be done for three months. You can then take that extra month to establish a strong relationship with the client or fix any issues so you aren’t struggling with numerous challenges come December.
3. Start Your Day Calm and Energized
Wake up half an hour early and go for a run or hop on your bike. Getting some exercise in the morning, even if it’s just a few stretches or walking around the block, can help you get your brain moving before you enter the office. According to the American Psychological Association, exercise enhances a person’s mood and helps him or her feel motivated for the rest of the day. It also helps condition the brain to deal with stress better, making the mind stronger in the long term. Exercising can also normalize your rest patterns, helping you to get to sleep faster and better able to tackle the next day.
4. Don’t Quit
This may be the most important item on this list—do not give up. There will be kinks in the road to reaching your goals, but don’t let them stop you. In an article for Entrepreneur, business expert Grant Cardone reminded professionals that roadblocks only mean you need to get more creative in your sales strategy. If a customer has turned down your business, take the opportunity to connect on social media or follow up a few weeks later. The will to succeed is one of the best qualities a sales rep can have.
By Nora Weintraub
It's hard to be productive when there are so many things eating up your time. A disorganized inbox, a cluttered schedule and distractions during times when you're motivated can result in lower sales numbers and revenue productivity. Optimizing your sales strategy relies on streamlining your desk and schedule. Even eliminating just a few things can make a big difference in your performance. You may even see a reduction in stress, which can lead to better client relationships. Here are just a few tips you can use to improve your sales productivity:
1. Spring Clean Your Inbox
You probably forgot to clean out your emails and to-do list in the spring, so do it now. Organizing your inbox and updating what you need to get done are often overlooked when things get busy and workloads increase simply because there isn't enough time. While it may take an hour or so to go through email, it can make a massive difference down the road when, instead of scrolling through hundreds of emails, you come across a desired message with no problem. An easy action to take is to make individual folders for each client's emails and then maintain the organization as you accumulate more messages.
In fact, many of those emails are often internal and may no longer be necessary to keep, especially those on which you were just CC'ed. Inc. suggested helping yourself by minimizing the length of your internal emails to keep clutter down.
2. Organize Your Desk and Computer
Your physical workspace is an essential aspect of your productivity, as a disorganized desk and computer may not only result in lost files, but even unnecessary stress. In an interview with Entrepreneur, professional organizer Jennifer Hofmann recommended professionals think of their desk as part of their workflow.
"Your desk says who you are, what you value, where you're going and what your dreams are," Hofmann said. "It's a litmus test for your life. If it doesn't portray an accurate picture, you need to change that."
3. Identify Your Most Productive Times
Do you work better at 7 a.m. than the early afternoon? Or do you need to eat lunch to really get your brain working? In sales you have a little flexibility with your schedule, but between all of the client communication and sales meetings, you have to get in other tasks when you can. Yet, if you know you perform better in the morning, organize your schedule so that you can actually get things done at that time. If a meeting time doesn't work for you, speak up and find an alternate time. Rearranging certain duties to other times of the day can help you stay productive.
4. Prioritize Your Responses
You don't have to drop everything to answer an email from a co-worker right away, no matter how much you feel like you must. Inc. suggested you think of your own time as valuable and realize that immediately responding gives others permission to continually interrupt you with unimportant things, even if they know you are busy. There are times when you need to focus on your own tasks—especially if it's during your most productive time of day—so others can wait awhile. So prioritize when you respond to a message or create a separate email account or alert where only the most important messages are received. Doing so can help others understand when you can talk and when you need to be productive.
By Nora Weintraub
With so many professionals turning to social media, it made fiscal sense for tech giant Microsoft to acquire enterprise networking tool Yammer last year. And since Microsoft has started to invest in cloud computing software and placing social tools into some of its product upgrades—yes, Office 365 and SharePoint, I'm talking about you—obtaining a social media platform for professionals was a logical next step.
Financial Jabber About Yammer
After investing a cool $1.2 billion, Microsoft saw the enterprise social networking tool experience unprecedented growth. According to the updated calculations, the number of registered Yammer users grew more than 55 percent in 12 months, topping out at nearly 8 million. In fact, activity has doubled since the acquisition, with users messaging each other more than ever before.
TechCrunch reported that just last year only 20 percent of Yammer subscribers paid for services—that's still about 800,000 people. A few months shy of Microsoft's one-year anniversary with Yammer, nearly 7 million users were paid subscribers, which is a growth of 165% in less than 12 months.
Sales reps and teams that collaborate on Yammer may continue to see the enterprise networking tool keep up its significant growth. And with Microsoft's history of frequent enhancements, Yammer is also set to get a few. TechCrunch reported the social platform will become integrated with email, users may be able to access documents stored on the company's cloud, and Yammer could receive an external communication improvement.
Whether the email feature will be Outlook-exclusive or the external messaging implementation will just be with Skype, TechCrunch does not say. Whether you use Yammer or not, utilizing a social media platform can help you stay engaged with colleagues.
While social media is just one tool to connect with your fellow sales reps and marketers, it is important to note that everything you do in the digital realm should lead you to boost sales. In fact, networking sites allow professionals to share market research and customer insights quickly and easily. So as platforms like Yammer take off, you should remember that social sites help you to connect with your colleagues and get insight into how to close the sale.
Happy One Year from us and our enterprise customers happily Yammering away.
As we saw last year, there’s been a massive wave of Fortune 500 companies adopting touch-based tablets and devices. One result of that has been the proliferation of a whole range of B2B iPad and smartphone apps from companies like us and salesforce.com to enable those mobile, touch-powered professionals with the intelligence and data they need to understand and engage their customers, as well as open up new opportunities.
However, there’s a second big enterprise trend that’s picking up momentum as well: that of large companies who are developing internal enterprise apps for touch-based tablets and devices, for use by their own enterprise sales and marketing teams.
And because it’s a need that more and more of our customers are requesting every day, we’re very excited to announce this morning the launch of FirstRain for Touch, a new, powerful and yet easy way to drop highly relevant customer intelligence for your sales and marketing teams into your enterprise iPad app—and the first enterprise customer intelligence solution built for the Salesforce Touch Platform.
Last fall, at their annual Dreamforce ‘12 conference, along with their high profile launch of Salesforce Touch, salesforce.com also announced the launch of the similarly named (but very different) “Salesforce Touch Platform.” And unlike Salesforce Touch—which is a downloadable app for iPad, iPhone and Android created for their users to easily access salesforce.com data and capabilities on their devices—the Salesforce Touch Platform is a Software Developer’s Kit that developers within a large enterprise can use to create their own, internal touch-device apps for their sales and marketing teams.
Our new FirstRain for Touch solution is an elegant and personalized set of components that have been optimized for use on touch-based devices, and can be easily dropped into enterprise apps created by companies, just like those developed using the Salesforce Touch Platform SDK. And the demand has been notable. For example, we have at least 3 large, current customers (all in the Fortune 500) who are each planning or have already created and deployed their own iPad apps for use by their own enterprise sales and marketing teams.
But perhaps one of the nicest aspects of this launch has been the opportunity to work with the great folks at salesforce.com. We have lots of clients in common and solutions that have always been highly symbiotic, and so this area is just one more place where we find common opportunity to help each other succeed. Our thanks to Clarence So, their Executive Vice President of Mobile Strategy, for his kind comments about our release: “It is exciting to see the rapid innovation that partners such as FirstRain are delivering on our trusted mobile platform, FirstRain for Touch will provide customers with the right intelligence to help them connect with their customers in entirely new ways and accelerate business success.”
If you’re interested in more information about FirstRain for Touch, let us know!
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!
It was the 12th anniversary of FirstRain India and all the Rainmakers contributed to make it an unforgettable event.
The celebration started with a cake cutting ceremony inside the office premises and then we all headed to the party venue “The Woods.” The sunny winter day, pool side view and non-stop great food added to the mood.
The fun started with games among the six event teams followed by a treasure hunt. Funny props were very popular throughout the event.
We were amazed to see how each team performed in the individual performance round. I must say we do have great talent at FirstRain.
Singing, mimicry of FR superstars along with enacting live moments from the office added color to the celebration.
After the well-spent hours in the sun with games and performances, it was the time to get recharged again so we all headed to the party hall. The evening was a BLAST! Awesome variety of drinks and snacks aside, there was great music which very quickly moved everyone to the dance floor. The energy was amazing and no one seemed in any hurry to head out for dinner. Finally, FirstRain India MD, Aparna Gupta had to announce a final 15-minute dance session with everyone on the floor before dinner. The dinner and dessert did not disappoint at all either. It was a perfect end to a rocking party.
The full day event brought us a great opportunity to interact with each other in an altogether different setting and also highlighted the hidden talent within each of us apart from performing best at our workstations. Each of us was handed a memento—a soft photo frame with a group photograph from the event.
In the end, we must say…
At FirstRain, it’s not only about working hard, it’s also about having fun at work!
Keep going Rainmakers.. Make the ‘FirstRain kite’ fly higher and higher across the roaring wind.
We had a very exciting day at the office in December. FirstRain India celebrated a group of employees who have been with FirsRain for over seven years! Each employee was honored for their commitment and hard work with a bouquet of flowers and a special lunch.
The event was a complete surprise to most of the team. On December 19th, around lunchtime, Chitra, our HR Manager announced a list of people who each were given a bouquet of flowers from Aparna Gupta, our India MD. The rest of the team really had no idea why they were receiving flowers until we suddenly looked around and realized who was being recognized. All of the people called out, had been at FirstRain the longest.
The lunch was very special, full of memories and nostalgia. We went through the hard times and the good times, but most importantly—the fun we have had through the journey of building FirstRain to what it is today. Interestingly enough, the majority of the recognized joined FirstRain as single people and now most are married with kids! They have been through many different roles, working with different managers throughout the company and truly have grown over the years.
In the midst of our tight work schedules, releasing deliverables, promising product outlook and anticipation of FirstRain becoming REALLY successful, this came up as a great surprise.
Congratulations to all of you for being a part of the core team of FirstRain and thanks a ton FirstRain for making us feel special!
