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escape velocity

SCIP Silicon Valley Presents Escaping Velocity with Michael Eckhardt

Feb 2017/in , , , , /by

Recently, FirstRain had the opportunity to sponsor a dynamic event on leaving the competition behind, hosted by the Silicon Valley chapter of Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP).

SCIP has the mission to “be the premier advocate for the skilled use of intelligence to enhance business decision-making and organizational performance to create competitive advantage.”

Michael Eckhardt Speaking

Photo by Jop Baylon

This recent event included information on SCIP by the Silicon Valley chapter head, Alok Vasudeva, and a presentation on escaping velocity by Michael Eckhardt. Eckhardt, Managing Director & Senior Workshop Leader for Chasm Institute was also a contributing author to Geoffrey Moore’s book, Escape Velocity: Free Your Company’s Future from the Pull of the Past. You likely remember Geoffrey Moore’s name from his bestseller, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Projects to Mainstream Customers.

Photo by Jop Baylon

Photo by Jop Baylon

hierarchy of powers tweetEckhardt presented and highlighted the assessment of competitive dynamics using those frameworks and tools depicted in Moore’s book.  According to Alok Vasudeva, this chapter event was one of SCIP’s best attended in number, with a global audience ranging from Canadians to Brazilians.

Appreciative of the opportunity to hear Eckhardt speak, we dove into note taking, live-tweeting the whole way. The Hierarchy of Powers outlines 5 ‘powers’ a company must align in order to escape velocity. We challenge you all to evaluate your own powers.

A convenient example, and no stranger to Moore, Apple once analyzed seems to have a solid 4 out of 5 powers in action.

    • Category Power: Digital music, smart phones, and digital media consumption
    • Company Power: iTunes and Apple’s Appstore
    • Market Power: None currently being leveraged
    • Offer Power: From great products to brand legacy
    • Execution Power: Known to ‘stay its course’

revenue drivers tweetGiving us a glimpse into the future, Eckhardt outlined the top 9 tech trends that will be driving the next $1,000,000,000,000 of revenue for 2017-2018.

Because of our own industry focus, it was exciting for us to see the words “Analytics”, “Big Data”, and “Real-Time” in big letters as top revenue drivers. However, we’re still plenty excited about the trends outside our direct space that many of the attendees at the event are top leaders in. With the security and privacy market trending almost daily on every news forum from the national to the tech-specific, we’re looking forward to watching the major changes innovative companies will bring to the table.

After this event, we’re looking forward to finishing Escape Velocity and using it in customer conversations. We don’t want to give too much away but here’s a final teaser on the strategic wisdom strung throughout Moore’s pages,

“Leadership is about being in service to a higher cause; management is about ensuring that service is appropriately rewarded. Both are necessary. You just can’t put the focus on rewards first.” – Moore (p.13)

A big thank you to Alok Vasudeva for organizing, and for inviting FirstRain to participate in and sponsor, this engaging and enlightening Silicon Valley chapter event. We had a lovely evening and look forward to participating in future SCIP events.

Eager Learners

Photo by Jop Baylon

If you are interested in learning more about how FirstRain can help you in your go-to-market strategies please contact Daniela Barbosa, our VP Marketing and Partnerships, to schedule a demo or to get more information.

Buyer-Persona-image-5

Market Trends: The Hunt for Revenue Streams

Apr 2016/in , /by

 This is part of the FirstRain Persona Series.

Every company needs an executive leader with a lion mentality.  One that won’t shy away from a tough deal, someone that has mastered an intuitive awareness of how and when to nurture new business, and one that can lead the rest of the sales pack with a clear vision. And across many enterprise C-suites, Sales now has a direct seat at the table.

With today’s fast moving digital marketplace, the objectives of a sales executive continue to transform the traditional sales role. Sales responsibilities are inheritably linked to revenue goals and the tasks have brought on new members to the C-suite, such as the Chief Sales Officer, Chief Commercial Officer and Chief Revenue Officer. To keep things simple in this persona post, we will refer to these C-Suite level lions as the Chief Sales Officer.

Today, CSOs are constantly leveraging a sales strategy and market trends that will create the most impact for the enterprise, evaluating ways for new revenue streams, analyzing market disruptions and always, always on the hunt for business opportunities.

Clearly, the role today involves more than managing sales teams and includes strategic goals such as finding niche market opportunities and enterprise solutions to better position the company’s products and services. With characteristics of a true pioneer, they are always steps ahead and on the quest to competently execute a sales plan and turn value propositions into business deals.

In the Venture Beat article, “The Rise of the Chief Revenue Officer: Silicon Valley’s new secret sauce,” the author states, “A great CRO must be able to wedge into any aspect of the company to lay the underpinnings of a scalable revenue engine and tune everything for execution.” CSOs must continually assess and re-assess the current marketplace and then look for avenues to implement acute strategic business analysis to meet and exceed revenue goals.

Identifying what will create the strongest impact for the enterprise is the first step; deciding what steps to take next requires setting both, short-term and long-term goals; does the company continue to make deals more profitable and lower cost of sales, does it need to expand current contracts or scale products and service offerings into new industries, does the company leverage cross selling, does the company win in competitive situations, does the company provide thought leadership, does the company create sustainable teams and of course, they must execute.

Quarter after quarter CSOs must measure activities, technology and marketing strategy campaigns and understand what works, what doesn’t and ensure that they are introducing their products with the most compelling value proposition and approach into the market. The mindset is results-driven and efficiently integrating activities that will ignite results, both short-term and long-term is a must.

In addressing the need for a CSO, Greg Alexander of Sales BenchMark  Index (SBI) writes, “A CSO understands how change ripples throughout an organization. They understand how decisions affect organizations, markets, product lines, competitors and business units.” – CSO’s leadership style must demonstrate an intuitive understanding of industry analysis, region, contract deals and clearly match them to the appropriate team members that will get the job done. They must always strategically seek, nurture and create business relationships for the profitability and product expansion of the business.

CSOs must find ways to connect the dots within an enterprise and bring more revenue streams in a constantly changing market.  Relentlessly, they solicit new ideas to approach more streams of business and strengthen value propositions within different industries, often partnering with the Chief Marketing Officer to present the strongest, sometimes aggressive, go-to-market-strategy into play. Together, they will assess the strength of a business deal, with the aid of marketing campaigns, and deploy salespeople to initiate contact, and work together with product development to ensure that the product presentation maximizes value factors for the end markets.

Today’s CSOs must understand disruptions and their competitors, and be agile with a clear mindset, bold attitude and a keen insight of the best marketing strategy. They are responsible for connecting the dots; finding sales intelligence and new value propositions to better target go-to-markets and finding ways to move enterprise solutions forward, making the business profitable and expanding value in the product offering.

Partnering with other members of the C-suite is crucial to the successful growth of the enterprise.  To transcend value through different industries in today’s digital marketplace, CSOs need competitive intelligence tools that show them the way, like FirstRain, that uses modern day technology not only to predict business opportunities but rather align business deals with real customer needs. FirstRain’s dynamic platforms aligns:

  • industry targeted coaching for sales reps with reasons to call and reasons to check-in
  • market analysis intelligence that identifies threats and accelerators that will leverage sales teams’ agility around business deals
  • industry knowledge to better position sales deals, that is intermingled with internal and external content
  • trigger events of when deals require attention or  when a new target and acquisition plan is taking place

The responsibility for the growth and acquisition of new business is heavy, but with the successful integration of competitive intelligence tools and a solid marketing strategy, CSOs can propel a company forward.

CSOs do a lot of talking to nurture business relationships, but at the end of the day, their role is all about measurable results. True, successful sales leaders have a sixth sense of where profitability and business development must stand within their company’s initiatives, and partnering with sales intelligence tools that deliver them a cunning, comprehensive view of their customers and markets, allows them to execute on their sales acumen with real smart data.

Like a lion on the hunt, sales executives must have an acute awareness of their environment, and understand what small step will cause a disruption, when it is best to go in for the kill and when it is best to act patiently and wait for a bigger meal.

To read additional posts on FirstRain buyer Personas:

FirstRain Buyer Persona

Market Trends: Chief Digital Officer

Jan 2016/in , /by

 This is part of the FirstRain Persona Series.  

Customers are demanding more of a digital experience, and the rise of a Chief Digital Officer (CDO) has soared to fulfill the need.  Providing customers with the most valuable digital experience is a CDO’s primary objective.

In the past, executives with digital oversight roles concentrated on magnifying a company’s online presence and brand.  Today, however, the role of a Chief Digital Officer is truly focused on the customer experience.

The fact of the matter is that buyers are no longer making purchasing decisions, or accessing portals solely from a desktop computer, but rather via mobile platforms, emails, and social media —on the go.  Thus, CDO’s are challenged with meeting the demands of a fast-paced consumer society that is always moving.

Customers access platforms and consume vast amounts of product information via different touch points: cell phones, tablets, emails, internal enterprise platforms, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, the web, video streams, vines, Periscope, etc. Today’s digital market demands seamless execution from all these platforms and CDO’s are leading that charge.

Coupled with a strong, robust digital strategy a CDO facilitates the customer experience, but how can that help grow your business?

A deep understanding of market trends and consumer behavior must be leveraged across all customer touch points; from small marketing campaigns, to large scale product launches.  This often involves leaders in business development, and becomes fundamental to helping a business evolve in today’s marketplace.

A recent McKinsey article on “The Transformer in Chief” stresses, “It’s up to the CDO to identify those functions where digital is critical: for example, investing in automation capabilities to rapidly respond to customer interactions, developing sophisticated reporting and analytics capabilities to interpret customer needs, building innovative interfaces to gather customer data (for example, an alternative payment method), and creating mechanisms to deliver content and offers across all relevant channels.”

Chief Digital Officers must identify the customer facing journey, drive customer engagement, and make sure that the dashboard touch points that she decides to implement for her company responds to market demands in real time. They are responsible for putting the tools in place to interpret customer insights with a main strategic goal of responding to customer engagement needs.

Customer intelligence tools such as FirstRain, helps interpret customer behavior via market trends, industry changes, and social media.  Target market analysis of what is trending in relationship to business goals and objectives are crucial for driving a business forward.  After all, the customer is always right, right?

Fundamentally understanding customer needs and how they intersect with revenue goals can make or break a digital strategy, making the role of a Chief Digital Officer pivotal for any industry.  A CDO must demonstrate agility to respond and adapt quickly to customer demands/needs, and are often faced with making bold decisions.

Wired.com asserts, “The CDO will drive the digital functional excellence from strategy to infrastructure and ensure that we have the right competence and capabilities to support and leverage the business from a digital perspective.”

CDO’s are not only the liaison between customer and product but become key partners with CIOs, CMOs, Sales Officers and CFOs.  They communicate the intricacies of market trends, new technology developments and customer behavior to create a digital strategy that is mindful of all these shifting plates, with the end goal to meet revenue objectives.

In today’s hyperactive commerce market, a strong digital strategy is necessary.  If done successfully, a CDO can move their company’s business platform to not only meet the demands of the customer, but also revenue goals of the enterprise.

For further reading from our C-Suite buyer persona series:

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:

 

oracle

FirstRain Named Key Partner in Oracle’s Ecosystem to Support Customer Success in the Cloud

Oct 2015/in , , /by

FirstRain is proud to have been named one of Oracle’s key ISV partners as part of Oracle’s Partner ecosystem expansion announcement at this week’s Oracle Open World (#OOW2015) annual conference. In support of helping customers maximize ROI from its Oracle Cloud Applications, our newest offering, FirstRain for Oracle Sales Cloud provides subscribers on-the-go access to real-time, relevant insights into the customers, competitors and markets they care about most. With FirstRain, Oracle Sales Cloud users are coached on who to call and what to say using advanced analytics and are able to quickly stay current on the critical changes impacting their customer’s business and end markets in a simple, elegant format directly in their Oracle Sales Cloud workflows.

oracle

You can read the full press release on the Oracle website or you can visit the FirstRain for Oracle Sales Cloud listing here. What to learn more? Please contact us for a demo!

gnip

Looking Back at Gnip’s Big Boulder Initiative

Dec 2013/in , , , /by

Ashutosh Joshi is FirstRain’s Principal Data Analytics Engineer. He attended The Big Boulder Initiative last month and learned some interesting things. Read on:

Last month the Big Boulder Initiative, organized by one of our vendors, Gnip came to San Francisco and I was lucky enough to go on behalf of my team. FirstRain is a Gnip Plugged in Partner and we consistently get great value from being part of the program and attending Gnip events.

The meet was attended by about 20 companies of varying size – from large companies to a few start-ups with less than 10 employees – all Gnip customers.  The conference started with Gnip CEO Chris Moody giving an introductory talk about the objectives and agenda of the conference. What was different about this conference, compared to others that I’ve attended, were its objectives. The goal of the meeting was to discuss what the biggest obstacles, current and future, facing the social-data industry and what steps could be taken to remove those obstacles (boulders). Gnip recognized that it was in a unique position to understand the concerns of both the publishers – the creators of social data like Twitter and Facebook – and the companies who, like FirstRain, use that content to deliver high-value business solutions. A main focus of the Boulder Initiative events is to reach out to its customers to identify the problems they, and the industry in general, face, and to brainstorm solutions to them.

Several problems were proposed, but the biggest that emerged were:

1.       Cost of Data

2.       Ethics of Data Use

3.       ROI to be achieved

4.       Access to data

We broke up into teams and discussed short- and long-term steps to be taken around each of these areas. The problem that I found most interesting was the problem of access to data. There is so much data out there, but the access to that data is restricted to those that can afford to license the expensive pipelines. Also, because the data is costly, the primary focus of those accessing the data tends to be turning a profit. Having freer access to the data would lead to more innovation, bringing down the cost of data creation as well–which could be facilitated if the publishers could grant limited/free access to academia or non-profits.

The social data industry is in its infancy, and is still figuring out all the advantages and pitfalls of the different decisions it makes. Gnip’s Big Boulder Initiative events are valuable because they introduce standardization around social data. This includes the different properties of data, like the chain of custody and control that each individual element – the creator, publisher and multiple levels of consumers – can have over the data at different stages of data analytics and the finished product, to the ways to access the data and the rights of the consumer. It was a great to be a part of this process of discussing and proposing standards that hopefully will facilitate more innovation in an up-and-coming industry.

Unlike many other vendor conferences I have attended, it was’t about Gnip giving us demos of their latest features and then trying to sell them with a day of presentations pushing products–It turned out to be quite the contrary.  At the end of the event, a board of 3 attendees was elected and they along with 9 similar board members from three more Big Boulder Initiatives around the country were tasked with acting on the solutions proposed in the conference. All in all, a good day for partners and, most importantly, long term for the users that use our services leveraging social data.

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!

 

startup-photos

Have You Done Your Homework Ms. Salesman?

Jul 2012/in /by

I must be a horrible target for a sales person. I don’t listen to cold call voicemails, I delete 99% of the spam emails I receive and, if a sales person is lucky enough to get me live, they have about 10 seconds to catch my attention before I tune out.

But I am not unusual. My short attention span and company-selfish interests are typical of the busy exec. And this is something too many sales people don’t take into account. They talk about their products and their needs, not my company’s needs.

In one study:

  • 82% of senior executives said they ”almost always” or ”frequently” experience
    sellers who are uninformed about the executive’s needs and the
    executive’s company — and

and there is simply no excuse for this any more!

In the recent report on Sales Intelligence the Aberdeen Group not surprisingly found that the types of intelligence that are most useful are the higher level ones — company and competitor, not the basic contact data most sales teams get equipped with. [Note: Image removed from this post by request of Aberdeen]

We see this need again and again. If you want to get through to an executive (like me) you need to understand my business. What drives my business, what I am trying to achieve, and what’s impacting my customers decisions.

Having my social profile, while cute, can actually make a salesperson annoying. Just because you contact me on Twitter or send me an Inmail is not going to make me respond— in fact if it is a cheesy message without substance I am not going to pay any more attention just because your message is on social media. On the very rare occasions an email gets through my filter it’s because it speaks to my business needs.

The solutions exist today to equip your sales team with smart customer and competitor intelligence right in their workflow. Within the CRM, tailored to the market the rep is in, configured to make it easy for the rep to review the customer intelligence and so be knowledgeable about how he/she can impact the customer’s business—and so talk about the customers need first!

So if you want to sell directly to executives, do your homework about their business first or you are wasting your time as well as theirs.

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!)

saving time

How Samantha at XL-Group has an advantage over her competition

Nov 2010/in /by

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.

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