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Optimize your Digital Strategy this Year

Jan 2016/in , , , /by

It’s a new year and everyone is looking for digital trends that will optimize business strategy this year. We trust that things are already in full swing your business initiatives and we want to recap on our favorites brought to you from our friends at Altimeter.

CEO, Charlene Li, thinks, “Agile customization of experiences becomes a priority” in 2016, and we could not agree more.

  • Data must be able to run at the pace of today’s constant moving global economy, but most importantly around your business world.  “Agile customization”, as Li puts it, is not based on “static transaction profiles”, but a combination of information, analytics, verticals, and to put mundanely, a whole lot of data.  Information crosses paths and together can illuminate your business strategy with relevant market insights and actionable industry analysis.

  • Digital organizations are more than ever depending on data that is “tied together with world-class analytics.”  Both of these tools need to be packaged together for greater optimization.  CRM tools, real-time data analytics, coupled with customization around your key business markets will optimize your digital strategy in 2016.

Industry Analyst, Ed Terpening, acknowledges a rising complexity in the digital ecosystem.

  • Customer remains king in 2016, and adhering to the Customer Experience via an array of platforms can become tricky without the right technology.  There will be an added pressure to social tools that will mandate a cross functionality to a seamless digital experience. Terpening sees a challenge the way “social experience [can] support broader CX goals”.

  • CX demands a heightened level of attention and with it will bring innovative technology that will connect the dots between digital strategies and multi channel platforms.

Today’s business world is not static and your digital strategies must address not only volume of data but recency based on the specific role and need of the ‘consumer’ of that data. That is why our FirstRain Business Web Graph continually scans the structure of the living Web and the topics, triggers and business lines continually change over time, evolving and expanding based on system input and customer feedback.

FirstRain is an enterprise leader in providing a competitive analysis of target market analysis that will help optimize your business strategy this year.

Feel free to contact us for a free demo, and show you how actionable insights can empower your digital strategy this year.

symantec-phillip-bullock

FirstRain at the Symantec Vision 2011 Conference

May 2011/in /by

Last week was a busy week – we held our Q2 sales kickoff at our San Mateo offices – but the day before we were invited to participate on a panel at the Symantec Vision 2011 Conference held at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

The panel was titled “Competitive Testing Reports Got You Confused?” and it was set up to discuss the technologies and approaches that are best practices to gather competitive intelligence about products. Our panelist was Thomas Lai from our San Mateo office who has been working closely with Symantec on the deployment of FirstRain within SymBrain to provide competitive intelligence to the sales and distribution teams.

The panel tackled a range of best practices to evaluate and report on competing products. Consultants or analysts go through deep exercises to understand competing products – but any technique can be biased so the panel tackled how to be comprehensive enough to get a complete, unbiased picture.

One area that was a surprise to us is how vendors interact with the analysis on their products. For example, an analyst might review a product from McAfee using both engineering and qualitative techniques. They then send the report to McAfee to review, for a sanity check, to potentially correct – and yet many times the vendor (in this case McAfee) does not respond. What does this imply – that the results are reasonable? or not? You can imagine a healthy debate on a panel about the techniques to get to the report and then what the lack of response really means. (No disrespect to McAfee but in this context they are a primary competitor to Symantec).

The thread of the panel, in the end, was what types of techniques can be utilized so that test results and market results — when looked at together — make sense.

Our application is used to build competitive intelligence for the broad sales team (you can see a Symantec exec talk about this here), but also in this type of competitive analysis at the product level and Thomas was speaking about the best practices we see in our customers in this context.

The conference was a lot of fun for Thomas (and I gather not all of the fun was in the panel session – it was Vegas after all!)

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