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Buyer Persona Series

Market Trends: Chief Data Officer, the New Kid on the Block

Jan 2016/in , , /by

 This is part of the FirstRain Persona Series.

The C-Suite has a new kid on the block; the Chief Data Officer and they are here to stay. Many had predicted the roles of VPs and Directors of Analytics would rise to the C-Suite, and they certainly have.  Forrester reports an increase of 45% in the adoption of a CDO in 2015 and predicts a 16% increase in 2016.

So why is this role on the rise?  The far-reaching collection of data in the enterprise has lead to the need for an executive leader that sits within the C-Suite to establish and preserve the infrastructure around the ever-growing volume of data, and leverage it as a weapon for business development and customer success.

In the past, strategists were left guessing what people preferred and imagination ruled over data, but the times of the Don Draper’s are gone. Now, there is customer intelligence software that reveals customers’ inclinations and can accordingly shape impactful insights that strengthen a company’s business strategy and allows them to scale quickly.

Currently, there is an array of customer intelligence tools and social media platforms that track customer likes, dislikes and measure engagement. If you feel like someone is watching you, well, they are! More than ever, business technology has become an expert in capturing human behavior.

A problem many enterprises face is, what to do with all that data. Gartner identifies this as a core issue; “Business and IT executives regularly claim that information is one of their companies’ greatest assets, but they fail to measure or fully leverage its value”.

Companies have become thorough about collecting information, but many have yet to take the extra step of recognizing data as a bargaining chip.  Too often, a gold mine of information sits in the cloud or is stored in drives waiting for someone to make use of it and connect the dots, but often it is too late.

Digital strategies evolve at a fast-pace and require real-time attention, to market trends, patterns, and changes and have created a demand for Chief Data Officers. CDOs are responsible for bridging the gap between information management and toward actionable insights. Many companies have adopted the role, but many are being left behind in the data-driving race. It’s not just about collecting data, but rather doing something about it.

CDOs are responsible for promoting data access across a company structure and creating awareness in the value within. Forrester explains, “CDOs typically address one or more of four main functions along the data value chain: data management, data governance, data analytics, and insights delivery.”

Data management and data governance

Chief Data Officer’s are responsible for setting a strong, clear foundation for data governance that will foster competitive digital strategies in the next stages of their company’s growth. CDO’s often partner up with CIOs to implement an infrastructure that facilitates data accessibility. The first step of data collection will ultimately measure the results of future business goals and initiatives and has become a key priority in the role of a CDO.

The accuracy and integrity of customer data reports rest in the hands of CDOs and can become a stepping stone to business development plans, strategies, and marketing campaigns.  If the first step of data collection is flawed, future information will have a falling domino effect.

Data analytics and insights

Chief Data Officer’s are not only responsible for the systems and practices in reading data, but also analyzing data, and using analytics to find new revenue streams and growth opportunities. Everyone has a lot of data, but how you use it can revolutionize your business and create better-informed decisions that can grow revenue.

CDO’s must partner with technology business leaders to increase agility and reduce risk but, more importantly, this partnership must be coupled with actionable insights to drive innovation. Research suggests, “As companies shift their focus from collecting data to driving innovation, new business models will emerge in which companies subscribe to insights and business outcomes rather than data and analytics solutions.”

CDO’s are not waiting for market disruptions to react but rather using business technology like FirstRain’s platform to anticipate.  FirstRain delivers relevant real-time information coupled with actionable insights and triggers that help mitigate risks and help CDOs help their employees to dive deeper into niche markets and competitors, giving them a 360-degree view of industry analysis and better preparing them for market changes.

CDO’s play a large role in the business optimization strategy. Not only does data allow a business to reach a niche audience and engage with customers, but it can propel product development teams to create a better platform, website, product and app for a target audience.

Depending on the phase an enterprise is at, the role of a CDO will foster different priorities. For a younger company, the focus might rest around growth and finding a niche customer market, producing aggressive marketing strategy and organic promotion. For a global brand, the focus might rest around customer satisfaction and engagement. But regardless of the stage an enterprise is at, one thing remains imperative; responding to analytics and reports demands the attention of a Chief Data Officer. Welcome to the club!

For further reading on C-Suite persona:

 

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Dreamforce 2015 // Lightning. Thunder. FirstRain?

Oct 2015/in , /by

You saw Lightning. You heard Thunder. Did you discover FirstRain?

For our fifth year running, the FirstRain team was a force to be reckoned with at Dreamforce, with the mission of sharing FirstRain’s brand new product release, a powerful analytics platform called Orion.

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Marching through the crowd, our astronaut met and took pictures with many conference attendees and was even featured on KPIX Channel 5 news.

As a part of our Discover FirstRain initiatives, we held Exploration Sessions where executives toured our platform and learned how to use FirstRain to tap into their customer’s world through real-time analytics of their markets, competitors, critical events and developments in key sectors and product lines.

The attendees had a chance to preview our newest families of analytics that create even richer business insights, a newly designed user interface that allows to both get a bird-eye view of the industries and markets that the sales rep sells into, and do a deep-dives into topics and markets that help them make smarter decisions.

In good Dreamforce spirit, of course we had to raffle off something. Sorry, it wasn’t a Tesla Model X—maybe next year. But Jessie, who attended one of our Exploration Sessions, won a GoPro, courtesy of the FirstRain marketing team. Congratulations Jessie! We are looking forward to collaborating with you in the future. Send us some videos of your adventures with it!

FirstRain is proud to be on the forefront of today’s business analytics technology platform and enrich the Salesforce experience right inside CRM workflows. While Salesforce helps you manage leads, pipeline and forecasts, FirstRain provides personalized high precision insights on your accounts, end markets and competitors. The custom analytics are flexible, manageable, extensible and easy to understand and act upon. Our technology brings together dynamic categorization of the global enterprise data sources including web and social that are highly relevant to each user and augmented with real-time scoring and ranking across all sales rep’s accounts.

Interested?
Visit us on the Salesforce AppExchange or Contact Us for a demo.

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Blog-Rewind

Rewinding Big Data

Aug 2015/in , /by

Today, we have Big Data and dynamic, sophisticated visualizations to help our businesses bloom with insight into predictive analytics that identify risks, specific market trends, and relationships. How did the business world unfold and understand information before the use of big data? The remarkable tools used before big data evolved may not be receiving enough credit. These tools incorporated logic, intuition and most of all great minds. Of course, where we are today propels far beyond the expectations of the scientist before our time.

Before the evolution of big data, scientists relied on data visualization in order to present data and information. Data visualizations ranged from wood blocks, to images, to tables and charts. Some of the world’s greatest thinkers gained tremendous insight and changed the world simply by organizing and deciphering basic data sets in new ways.

Edward Tufte, a statistician and artist, and Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Statistics, and Computer Science at Yale University, wrote, designed, and self-published 4 classic books on data visualization. The New York Times described ET as the “Leonardo da Vinci of data,” and Business Week as the “Galileo of graphics.” ET teaches a one-day course on Fundamental design strategies for all information displays: sentences, tables, diagrams, maps, charts, images, video, data visualizations, and randomized displays for making graphical statistical inferences. Gaining knowledge of the past critically influences the future.

Read More here. 

SIIA Buying and Selling Content

FirstRain to Sponsor SIIA’s Buying & Selling Content 2015 Conference

Jan 2015/in , /by

FirstRain is proud to sponsor SIIA’s Buying & Selling Content 2015 conference taking place on Thursday January 22th in New York City. The Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA), is the principal trade association for the software and digital content industries. No stranger to SIIA events, FirstRain was the winner of the SIIA Lighting Round Competition at its Strategic & Financial Investment Conference last summer.

With a packed full day agenda,the Buying & Selling Content conference will address how big data, social media, highly globalized markets, and other fast-moving developments are impacting the ways in which companies buy, sell and market digital content. The conference will feature a range of business leaders with perspectives from different industries – including finance, health care, and publishing. Through presentations and discussions, the event will address digital content issues involving data licensing, copyright, international licensing, mobile apps, SaaS platforms, marketing, and more.

Combining content with deep data science, FirstRain’s patented information-modeling analytics platform integrates into almost any third-party environment. Our analytics are used by Fortune 1000 enterprises around the world and also integrated into leading platforms like Fidelity.com, Mergent and Dun & Bradstreet where we deliver deep, actionable insights across millions of users. The FirstRain API provides enterprise developers with real-time, data-level access to the powerful proprietary FirstRain business graph – generated using real-time big data analytics of millions of sources, documents and social media from across the global web. Unlike many other general business data services, FirstRain analytics run on a sophisticated, infinitely scalable big data platform that enables millions of users to have an unmatched view of their global business world.

If you would like to learn more about how you can leverage FirstRain analytics in your platforms and applications, please find us at the conference or contact us directly.

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Techniques for driving a truly personal information experience

Oct 2014/in , /by

This week FirstRain’s COO YY Lee gave an advanced-level class to Big Data TechCon conference attendees on how to develop and drive personalization of information experience in a Big Data world. Personalization is quickly becoming an assumed part of technology UX. These rapid advances, also affected by increased expectations set by flagship consumer apps create a need and an opportunity for enterprise software to deliver personalized experiences inside traditional applications and workflows. YY’s class covered data and analytics techniques for building user profiles, leveraging explicit and implicit factors into the process, and addressing the challenges of user behavior and expectations in order to create a highly adaptive, individualized information experience.

As part of her class, YY spoke to the fact that the application of information science techniques is core to creating a very personal mobile era user experience. She shared some of the lessons learned by the FirstRain R&D team, who are pioneers in developing and introducing our customers to an adaptive and pragmatic semantic information space model – a model that allows for the marriage  of deep data science and personal business analytics. FirstRain technology understands human perspective, awareness and preferences to deliver analytics with each user in mind. YY advised what factors can be leveraged to build profiles and nuanced understanding of users including: building rationally-derived/real life characteristics; isolating real–time, structural, transient, in the moment user preferences; leveraging common personal tendencies; etc. “We are successful when a person looks at the application and thinks: Wow, this is me! This is exactly what I need to do my job today’, said YY.

She also talked about the importance of developing and applying skepticism filters to discover, for example, whether any given case ‘in-doubt’ is an opportunity for a non-linear development or if the system really got it wrong and needs to be re-educated. She also mentioned the importance of human analyst inputs in the process of building precise personalization models to further refine information and adopt it to deliver better results each time. Other methodologies in developing personalization were discussed such as correlations, pattern recognitions, network relationships, leveraging external data, etc.

During this class, YY highlighted that the best opportunity to create the user experience that says “this is about me, my job, and what I need to know at this moment” is to develop a fine balance of information space modeling and user data modeling in your apps. She wrapped up an engaging discussion by sharing her team’s advice for some simple ways to get started personalizing your data delivery:

1. Find easy ways to customize – learn and refine your work. Users often have little appetite to providing input, therefore the developer needs to carefully select their points of engagement.

2. Start with easy tricks to customize by making the UX feel personal, such as simply adding a profile picture.

3. Start with the personalization characteristics that are easy and obvious to your user and how they use your apps: what role the person is in, what place they live, etc.

4. You don’t have to start by solving really big problems

5. Moderation and balance are important in providing suggestions. Change is sometimes difficult for a user. Too many choices may be annoying. Learn the art of  notification by selecting things with the right information density.

5. Minimize the mysteries to minimize risks. Explain where the content is coming from: ‘I am showing you this because of X”

6. Inject small reminders for personalizations through the whole user so that the user can be in charge.

If you are interested in having YY come to your next event to talk about driving truly personal information experiences, please contact us!

Introducing the FirstRain API

It’s All About Them. Time to Delight Your Users with FirstRain API

Sep 2014/in /by

Understanding customers and markets has become one of the most effective ways to empower business professionals to be more engaged and productive. Unfortunately, either building or integrating with noisy content solutions creates apps that users quickly disengage with. That is why we are pleased to announce our newest product, FirstRain API.

FirstRain Personal Business Analytics™ has become the most effective tool in the decision making process among business professionals. With FirstRain API, it is now easy to deliver just-in-time analytics, designed to increase customer engagement and grow revenue, within your own enterprise mobile, e-tablet and web applications.

FirstRain API now provides enterprise developers with real-time data-level and/or application access to our powerful proprietary business graph – generated using big data analytics across millions of sources, documents and social media from across the global web. The FirstRain business graph extracts the deep, interconnected relationships between companies, businesses and markets.

With FirstRain API, your users can see and engage with their own personal and predictive analytics profile across all channels and access points that you develop. With FirstRain, you can advise your users on key developments deep in their customers that can drive growth or identify risk, all through a very personal lens and information experience.

You can read the full Press Release Here.

Interested in setting up time with one of our Sales Engineers to learn more? Drop us a line !

Gigaom-Box

Gigaom Structure Data: It’s a FirstRain Wrap

Mar 2014/in /by

It’s been a week since Gigaom Structure Data wrapped up, and I’m still processing a lot of what we learned, the great conversations that we had and following up with people we connected with.

It was a great conference! Here are the top 3 things that attendees learned about FirstRain when they stopped by our booth:

    • When you’re running Corporate Business Strategy, you need a way to look at market-moving technologies (probably why you went to Gigaom event!). Many of our customers are Fortune 500 companies, using FirstRain personal business analytics to monitor and deep dive into how emerging technologies can drive their business.
    • For sales, what I like to call ‘Creepy Big Data’ is extremely valuable—data points to help you figure out where the buyer is in their buying journey. But you better have a talk track beyond those data points when you get on the phone, so you need to truly understand your customer’s business so you can become a trusted partner in their journey. Our customers use FirstRain Customer Insights to do just that.
    • We also had the chance to talk to some marketing leaders at the event who are thrilled with access to all this data (a marketer in a candy store of data!). Our own customers take advantage of FirstRain Market Insights to target their go-to-market based on the shifting buying roles of buyers— helping them get a jump on their competitors.

I’ve also gone back through the full video archive (thanks Gigaom!) and selected three videos that I’ve been sharing with my colleagues and some of our enterprise B2B customers thinking about big data projects:

 

Thanks again to all who stopped by! If you didn’t have a chance to stop by our booth, email d.barbosa@ignite.firstrain.com, so we can setup a time to discuss how FirstRain Personal Business Analytics can give you a big-data view on your customers and markets.

Gigaom-Box

Personal Business Analytics to be at Gigaom Structure Data

Mar 2014/in /by

FirstRain is excited to announce that we are participating in this year’s Gigaom Structure Data Conference! The conference will be March 19-20 at Chelsea Piers in New York.

900+ big data practitioners, technologists and executives will descend on NYC to explore “how big data can drive business success.” Personal Business Analytics(TM) fits squarely into that subject matter, as we’re creating an area of big data analytics that is largely new to the customer intelligence landscape: getting highly personalized, relevant and timely information to business users. Our customers can now get a 360-degree view of their customers, markets and competitors, increasing revenue and solidifying their strategy.

You can also get a 25% discount on registration through FirstRain! Use code SPONSOR25 when you register, then come by and say hi!

We can’t wait to show the big data community what personal business analytics can do!

app exchange

Customer Insights Expands on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange

Oct 2013/in /by

For more than three years, FirstRain has been delivering big data insights to our Fortune 500 customers through the power of the Salesforce’s Sales Cloud. Today, we are excited to announce an expanded partnership with Salesforce and an upgraded version of FirstRain Customer Insights on their AppExchange.

 

The more than ten thousand FirstRain enterprise sales and marketing customers that access our service through Sales Cloud will now enjoy an even richer and more deeply embedded customer intelligence experience within salesforce.com. And the deepened relationship between our two companies means enterprise sales and marketing professionals can more effectively tap into the power of social and mobile cloud technologies to accelerate their businesses.

 

Our expansion into the AppExchange will not force our users to learn a new way of working; FirstRain’s Customer Insights are streamed and embedded directly into the salesforce client to help drive revenue by making every salesperson as informed as your top 10% achievers.

 

We’ll be showcasing the newly expanded Customer Insights solution at Dreamforce 2013, November 18-21, in San Francisco, California. See you there!

 

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