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FirstRain Customer Intelligence System

Announcing FirstRain’s New Enterprise Customer Intelligence System

Feb 2012/in /by

Today is a very exciting day for FirstRain, as we accomplish yet another important milestone in delivering groundbreaking intelligence solutions to our customers. This morning we’re announcing the launch of the first ever Enterprise Customer Intelligence System.

The news today is the release of our new workflow and integration system that lets you use FirstRain intelligence on your customers and market wherever you are: it doesn’t matter if you’re on the road, at a customer site, on your iPads (see the FirstRain iPad App in action here), iPhones or Android phones, via email, or integrated directly into company CRMs or social enterprise portals such as Salesforce.com, Jive or Microsoft SharePoint - it’s all easy now.
We are seeing two huge waves of change impacting sales and marketing teams today: the introduction of Social Enterprise platforms and the iPad, which over 90% of the Fortune 500 are deploying or evaluating right now. Our new solution is intended to make it easy for you to use FirstRain seamlessly in your new workflows and so grow your revenue and market share.

This new system is an extension of the powerful semantic analytics technology you may already be using, but now it’s an end-to-end integrated solution for highly personalized, yet easily managed, customer intelligence across your entire enterprise. This is the information that customers like you already rely upon to continuously stay aware of the critical developments that impact revenue growth and renewal in your business—it’s what we call Enterprise Customer Intelligence (ECI).

We’ve been working on this version of the system for over 2 years – first we went after the quality of the customer and market intelligence our customers are already using – and now we have released the workflow to match your enterprise. We have developed it in collaboration with many of our leading enterprise customers in technology, communications, life sciences, materials and financial services.

If you’re one of the customers who has helped us develop and hone this exciting innovation, thank you! And if you’re one who has not yet had the opportunity to see how our new ECI System can help your organization get even more out of the great FirstRain intelligence you receive today, please, drop me a line.

 

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CRM Magazine talks about FirstRain and sales intelligence

Feb 2011/in /by

Check out the article in the March issue of CRM magazine talking about sales reps, and whether or not companies were willing to expand their sales teams. The article refers to a study by CSO insights in which they showed that companies who gave their reps access to sales intelligence (SI) had significantly shorter ramp-up periods. Given that 78% of the companies they surveyed said they are planning to add sales people this year – sales intelligence and productivity is a big issue.

“… the level of insights coming from a new generation of SI companies, such as FirstRain, InsideView, OneSource, and ZoomInfo, has expanded dramatically. Today, employing Web-crawling and other data-gathering methods, SI solutions constantly gather information about the marketplaces into which reps are selling, the competitive landscape, and details on prospect accounts and key stakeholders.

Think of it this way: Each sales rep has his own digital research assistant constantly to track key news and events in his territory. Let’s say a new executive gets hired in a prospect firm you are targeting, or a company reports an earnings surprise (good or bad), or a merger is announced in one of the industries on which you focus. The SI system immediately would notify you about any of those developments. Then that information could be appended to contact and opportunity records in the CRM system you are using to manage your pipeline.”

CRM magazine maintains that it’s worth it to invest in such intelligence; the knowledge that it provides is invaluable—and in many cases, unexpected. So if you’re looking to shorten the ramp-up period in expanding your sales team, check out our products!

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Free snapshot of FirstRain account intelligence is now on Salesforce AppExchange

Jul 2010/in /by

We’re making a snapshot of FirstRain intelligence available for free on Salesforce.com AppExchange today – so everyone can get access to intelligent business search results within their accounts, contacts, opportunities etc.

Today’s announcement is the new free applet – a snapshot – that shows What’s Hot for each account. What are the most important business topics impacting the customer? (for example breast cancer in the Pfizer example below) What are the most recent management changes? Who are the top competitors and what are the latest developments with them?

The snapshot is designed to help the sales person figure out what to say on a call or in a meeting – how to help the sales person make their conversation relevant to the customer and their business. Arming the sales person to talk about the changes impacting the customer’s business (and how he/she can help) rather than speed-and-feed a product.

Why should you care? Because unlike typical databases, FirstRain uses the web as the most dynamic, real time source of updates and intelligence for your sales campaigns. But unlike typical web search it extracts out the events that are impacting your customer… and de-junks, filters and ranks what’s hot for you, so you only see what matters. This means you can

- Prepare for a call instantly
- Understand your account in context
- See competitor events and top news and blogs
- Know the top hot industry topics impacting your accounts
- See key unannounced management changes
- Link into deeper intelligence and reports

=> Know what you should know — but never have the time to research

We have a number of customers who have already downloaded the applet and they are telling us that not only is the information immediately useful – but also downloading the applet was easy and it runs fast! Great to hear.

Here’s a link to the press release….. and here are some samples of how the applet works inside salesforce CRM. As you would expect – it also has many links into FirstRain so licensed users can easily jump into company briefs and deeper views of their customer’s business to use during meeting and campaign planning.

You can see a demo and screenshots – or download the app for yourself – on our page on AppExchange.

“What’s hot” smart summary – FirstRain chooses what goes onto the front page of the snapshot based on where the hot activity is for the account
Who are the top competitors – and what’s happening with them?
What are the hottest issues in the industry and what’s been happening?
What is the trend in management turnover – who recently joined and left – plus a link through to extracted management team lists
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Why Salesforce buying Jigsaw is just the first shot in a new battleground

Apr 2010/in /by

We find and analyze management for our customers. It’s one of the most popular things we do. So we know that helping users get a better, richer picture of who matters in the companies and markets they care about is valuable intelligence.

Enter from stage left: Salesforce.com buys Jigsaw.com today.

Jigsaw has a mixed reputation – from Michael Arrington of Techcrunch originally calling them evil in 2006, and then in 2009 just calling them amoral – to the New York Times describing them as driven by users self interest. They’ve been growing, but not like LinkedIn; revenue has been doubling, but was it enough to go it alone? But whatever you may think about their business model, and your “friends” revealing your contact information into a central database, the net result is more than 1.2 million members and more than 22 million contacts.

Salesforce has positioned this as entering the $3B data services market – and creating “new opportunities” to partner more closely with other data providers like D&B, Hoovers and Lexis Nexis. But I think this is a classic misdirect. I agree with Michael Maoz – what’s really going on here is the convergence in the needs of CRM and the social process.

Users want dynamic, current data. They know that today the most up-to-date information is on the web. It’s in networks, it’s in blogs, it’s living in the thousands of phoenixes (or should that be the correct Latin phoenices?) rising from the ashes of the breakdown of traditional journalism. They don’t want to get data from databases built from manual processes and filings – they are simply always out of date.

And so for Salesforce, the ability to pick up a dynamic contact list and the continuously updating process behind it (since we have to assume LinkedIn was not for sale) is a way for them to bring that dynamism into their CRM platform and into their moves into social media. It’s a smart move. But I do wonder what the long term impact is for the traditional, static databases. I know at FirstRain we are replacing Factiva today because our intelligence is richer, fresher (and easier, but that’s another story) – will Salesforce end up competing with Hoovers et al?

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