Today’s Facebook’s IPO although a more consumer focused interest story then what most of our customers are interested in, brought a huge amount of tweets on the subject as expected. (I would even venture to say that it was more then a ‘consumer interest story’ but rather a ‘human interest story’). None the less, being that FirstRain is a Silicon Valley based company, the buzz is also being felt strongly outside the digital world for those of us that live here and have friends and acquaintances that are being directly impacted by facebook’s IPO. Exciting times.
Yesterday, prior to Facebook’s IPO we ran some stats using our FirstTweets™ technology and then redid the same exercise at the close of the market today. FirstTweets™ uses our patented FirstRain technology to uncover and deliver only high-quality, business-relevant tweets to sales and marketing professionals across the enterprise. Our analysis shows that less than 0.1% of daily tweets contain quality, business-related content, yet this still represents more than 200,000 tweets per day of business-focused intelligence.
The picture painted by the stats that we captured, aren’t surprising but are interesting and illustrative on why our customers are seeing value in our FirstTweets- as YY Lee our COO tweeted this morning allowing them to “cut through the frenzied roar to net out the actual business discussion…”.
On the day before Facebook’s IPO:
At the close of Market on the day of Facebooks IPO:
This week’s FirstRain’s announcement of FirstTweets a solution for B2B users delivering “business-quality Twitter intelligence on thousands of global companies, industries and topics relevant to the specific business lines of your customers, industry and competitors”- was an exciting one for our team and our customers.
I have been on a couple of client calls where we previewed this new content stream and across the board the enthusiasm and spark of ideas around FirstTweets from them has been very inspiring. These are companies of all sizes across various industries- some that have been extremely active supporters of using Social Media as part of their strategies (e.g. Customer Care centers, tech support, brand monitoring etc) and others that are just starting out.
For example, some of these companies have tried to use their existing social media monitoring and measuring tools to ‘push’ relevant business content to their sales team, but none have been able to crack the code using their existing systems that are great for monitoring their own brands and customers using keywords- but can not deliver precise business focused content on thousands of companies and industries that their salesforce covers or their market intelligence teams needs to keep track of competitors and new business trends. Some have tried other ‘sales intelligence’ solutions that push social media buzz into their CRM systems- all based on keywords with low hit business relevancy results- turning off most users.
Now i have been an active user of Twitter for a bit over 5 years, just when the little twitter bird began chirping. i use Twitter outbound and to listen quite a bit. I would estimate that i have spent hundreds of hours, curating content, selecting people to follow (and unfollow!) , creating lists, monitoring client issues, company employees and general news. i am one of those 9% of digital news consumers that sees the news Break on Twitter.
I use Twitter effectively and teach others how to at any chance i get- but hundreds of hours of my time has been invested, and will continue to be since Twitter is not a set it and leave it information flow.
Is that the level of time investment that most companies want for their employees that are not responsible for monitoring and measuring social media??? Do companies want staff especially Sales who can benefit greatly from business intelligence found in Twitter- spending the same amount of time i have over the years??
I would venture to say no.
Now, i think that EVERY employee should consider using Twitter to engage with their peers in their industry, their customers and of course their friends and family- but i don’t think the processes that i have developed over the years is sustainable for most sales and marketing people- especially as your markets become more competitive and the budget dollars to spend on the solutions you sell decrease.
And that is where i see the biggest promise for FirstTweets- delivering intelligence to better understand your customers’ end-markets, strengthen relationships and improve overall sales strategy.
The customers i have talked to agree.
Note: Today April 18th is the official launch to existing FirstRain customers, i have been using FirstTweets in our Sandbox environment for about two weeks- and have found many gems that i would never have found using the various tools i use in my Twitter day to day use- so it wasn’t built for “me”- but i sure will benefit from it!
And now today is another big day at FirstRain—but it’s also a big day for the social enterprise platforms like Chatter, Yammer and Jive because now, for the very first time, Twitter is useful for B2B professionals.
For some time now, media and brand monitoring solutions like Radian6 have been tapping into Twitter so that companies can see what their customers are saying. If United Airlines loses your luggage and you gripe about it on Twitter, United can see that. But solutions that provide consumer tweet monitoring are hopeless if you are a B2B professional trying to find useful and breaking industry news in Twitter about specific companies, products or business lines.
We’ve now solved that problem, and are announcing FirstTweets today. This is the world’s first solution for extracting business-relevant Twitter Intelligence. FirstTweets™ is a part of our FirstRain Enterprise Customer Intelligence System. It is a technology breakthrough that solves the Twitter problem for business executives: how to get business value and intelligence out of the 250 million tweets that Twitter produces daily.
Our analysis shows that more than 99.9% of all Twitter is non-relevant to business professionals, making it effectively impossible to get to the still more than 200,000 tweets per day of daily business intelligence buried inside.
Now, by using FirstRain’s patented semantic analytics, our system provides the ability to easily and effectively access the business intelligence hidden within the Twitter stream. FirstTweets™ collects and organizes real time industry and customer-specific information to uncover revenue opportunities, including customer developments, industry trends, news, market analysis, emerging themes and so much more.
FirstTweets™ will be available to all users this Wednesday and will be included for FirstRain subscribers. It’s another exciting innovation by FirstRain, and I look forward to hearing what you think.
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.
There is a world of difference between news aggregators like Google News, Moreover and Meltwaterand a true customer intelligence system like FirstRain. All have the ability to deliver some news from the Web but the similarity ends there. Keyword-based news is OK if you want a simple cut of everything, but they are absolutely insufficient if you want your enterprise sales team to drive revenue by deeply understanding their customer’s business.
An enterprise customer intelligence system like FirstRain:
1. Uses semantic analysis to categorize all content (Web, social media, etc.) to a high degree of specificity—well beyond the specificity possible with keywords. For example: Using analytics, FirstRain can track and filter on topics as specific as “Diabetic Nephropathy”, “Enterprise Telecom Services Market” and “Solar Energy Farms Capacity Expansion”, which means the sales team will receive customer intelligence with a much higher degree of relevance than any other solution.
2. Searches the global Web, identifying and extracting only business-focused content (including news, press releases, company Web sites, government filings, industry sources, blogs and much more), while filtering out the consumer, entertainment and other noisy content routinely delivered by Google Alerts and news aggregators. This filtering has many layers to it—at the source, content and model levels—to ensure that only high quality business content makes it through to the end user.
3. Prioritizes all content using multi-factoral algorithms that push the most significant intelligence to the top (based on the user’s own workflow at the time), then de-duplicating it so you only see each important development once, all greatly improving the relevancy of the intelligence each user sees. This saves time and money for enterprise sales and customer marketing teams, eliminating the hours spent combing through search results (and often still missing key developments), and reducing it to seconds reviewing only the most important developments impacting their customers and their customers’ business
4. Delivers this highly personalized content wherever and however the team needs it: on their iPad, iPhone, Android device, directly into the social enterprise portal or CRM, or simply via a daily email intelligence brief. FirstRain’s apps allow the sales and marketing team to collaborate using this powerful customer intelligence database quickly and easily from any device, at any time, all integrated into their own daily workflow.
The patented technology that goes into the creation of this enterprise customer intelligence system is the result of years of algorithm development, customer collaboration and fine tuning—and it’s why most vendors of basic Web content can’t match it. But it’s these differentiators that are helping FirstRain deliver our users the kind of customer intelligence that actually grows and renews revenue in their businesses.
There is nothing that feels as good as an email from a customer like this one we received today. This is from a company who wishes to remain confidential – but suffice it to say they are a large customer and have 9,000 employees using FirstRain intelligence. Well done Cory, Sagar, Ashutosh, Sweety and the rest of the support team. And thank you Jeff for your support of my team.
Cory and Team:
I just wanted to pause and say “thank you” to each of you for the hard work you do to produce and modify the [internal name they use for FirstRain daily intelligence briefs]. Your good work is evident each and every week and our [internal] clients are very pleased with [internal name]. Please know that your hard work is not going unnoticed and that you are having a positive impact with each [one] you produce and modify on behalf of our [internal] clients.
When we take on a new employee here at FirstRain, a lot of thought and energy is put into ensuring they are a really great fit. And so, unsurprisingly, when we recently expanded our sales engineering team, in the summer, it took us a few months and a couple job description rewrites to find our ideal candidate. Through that process I realized something interesting: what we needed in our early days when the FirstRain solution was still evolving is not what we need today.
Like many growing companies, in our early days we had a great idea and strong core technology but went through a process of understanding the real needs of the market and adapting our solution over time. In such an environment, the sales engineering role needed to be focused on tinkering and crafting solutions, managing clients, demonstrating consultative selling skills, architecting solutions and acting as a product specialist—really whatever needed to get done to help our growing customer base to “seamlessly” adapt the product to their needs and get the job done!
Needless to say, finding the perfect person to fit those chameleon-like standards was a bit tricky! At that time, we focused on finding an individual who could demonstrate analytical abilities and design thinking, who would excel in flexible environments, and would thrive as part of the tight relationship between our client solutions team, product development and leadership. This was essential in order to take important customer input and feed it back into our organization for immediate development or adaptation. In other words, bending the product to the customer’s will.
Although times like that are exciting and fun, they’re not easy. There were days that made you want to hide under your bed, and others where you were thumping your chest, knowing that that you are cracking the code. At times, every couple of weeks, we’d modify the sales process to see how we can shorten the sales cycle, increase close ratios and triage the outliers. Back then, we were correcting and adjusting, correcting and adjusting, getting ever closer to a repeatable solution and support model that worked across our target markets, or sometimes, just axing a target market from the list completely.
But as we started to hire for the team again in the summer of 2011—even though we had many extraordinary candidates—something was off.
We realized: the candidates were right, it was the job description that was wrong—wrong for the kind of company we are now. Today, FirstRain has a sophisticated solution set, clear target market and crisp sales process. In this environment, we now needed a different role, a more focused role that corresponds to what our customers need us to do today: Listen & Match.
As we noted in our (now updated) job description, today’s FirstRain Sales Engineers need to:
Listen to prospects and the account executive to validate and better match the solutions offered with the prospects business challenge. Asking good questions becomes critical, executing on the deliverable and work on workflow issues with the prospect becomes paramount.
With a new job description the resumes began to roll in, and we started to interview 3-5 candidates a week, it became clear … the new candidates matched what we needed today.
As our solutions have matured, we are no longer looking for people whose main skill was “bending” the product to do whatever a given customer needed. Instead, we now need people who deeply understand the capabilities of our solution set, can demonstrate design thinking, as well as understand the business challenges our customers experience – to effectively bridge that gap, develop a rollout plan, and execute! It’s often a delicate dance, and one that still requires great flexibility. Instead of ‘Solution Benders’ we now need ‘Solution Dancers’, a role which is more nuanced, more sophisticated, and, I’m starting to find, is a lot more fun to manage.
We announced the FirstRain iPad app yesterday. Our new iPad app marries the elegance of the iPad with the precision of FirstRain’s business Web. It’s visual business monitoring – slick, fast, cool, beautiful, powerful – all the adjectives we can’t use in a press release but want to say. I truly love it and it’s now how I stay on top of my customers, our industry and everything else business wise that I need to know in a few minutes a day.
If you are in sales, marketing or purchasing, or you are a partner in a law firm, or a librarian, or a MI or CI professional, you are going to want a FirstRain subscription and this app. You are missing developments in your market, your customers, your vendors TODAY that you can now see real-time with the gentle swipe of a finger.
Living in Silicon Valley, running a software company with big ambitions I hear the question a lot. Is this another tech bubble? Isn’t is going to burst again?
The short answer is no.
Pundits covering tech tend to confuse valuation with long term value. We may well be in a valuation bubble but unlike the 2000 tech bubble the companies in question have deep, sustainable revenue models.
There are certainly some high valuations – per Fred Wilson’s view of frothy valuations in April – and these are driven by investor demand. As Father Guido Sarducci so wisely said in the 5 minute university, Economics is about supply and demand. When a few companies have sky high valuations in the public and private markets VCs are chasing good ideas with too much money again and so the early stage and later stage valuations may be getting silly for most companies, but some will be worth it.
Valuation is very different than long term value. Technology, and in particular software, is where long term sustainable value is being built. And when I say long term I am thinking hundreds of years. Marc Andreesen wrote very eloquently about this in the WSJ on Saturday in his essay Why Software Is Eating the World. We are at the beginning of a long era in which technology will reshape every aspect of our lives in ways we are just now beginning to see.
Just as the Industrial Revolution developed over more than 150 years in the 18th and 19th centuries and reshaped machines, industry, transport and the very nature of where people chose to live and work, technology is now reshaping the way we communicate, are entertained, where we live and work and shop and it is rewiring our kids brains for a new world. I’ve believed this for 20 years and the ups and downs of the tech world over that period have done nothing to dissuade me from that belief because technology is steadily, consistently and dramatically changing our lives. (Want to get some perspective on the 150 year change last time around – spend a day in Ironbridge in Shropshire, England.)
It’s happening right now because the pieces are now in place. As Marc writes “Six decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.”
The cost structure is right, the technology base is ready. In FirstRain’s case we have built a highly disruptive technology that changes the way business people use the web for their critical decision making. As Roger McNamee says in his thought provoking talk “Everything is Changing”, Google’s approach to indexing has peaked. People want apps designed for their specific need (he cites his investments like Facebook and Yelp), not one app for all needs, and they want it on their device of choice – which is a smartphone or an iPad. In our case the business need is even more specific than that. Our users want a business web app so they can tap into the breadth, currency and power of the web as a data source, but they want it tailored to their specific business and role, and they want it in a cost effective way.
Marc and Roger are just two rockstars in Silicon Valley but most people here agree with them (and not just because we are all drinking the same Kool-Aid). Yes we are dealing with some higher valuations, maybe that is a bubble, but the long term value being built in technology is real, and software is where it’s at. And what makes it even better is it a continuously exciting place to build a career, or even a company.
The FirstRain office has had a full house this week with members from our East Coast sales team in town for our quarterly sales kick-off. And last night, in the spirit of fun, culture and generally getting over ourselves, the entire sales team and most of the company, headed down south to Cupertino for the final Splash and Dash race of the summer. The race consisted of a one-mile swim in the Stevens Creek Reservoir, followed by a three-mile run. We are lucky to have 13 great (or at least enthusiastic!) athletes that competed in relays – so we had 6.5 teams in the competition. The less brave joined the superb cheerleading team led by Julie and her cowbell.
Splash and Dash race @ Stevens Creek Reservoir
Aaron and Ryan finished first for the team, crediting their win to the support from our star, 5-year old cheerleader Natalie. Natalie earned her prize, keeping the shiny blue pom-poms that she used to cheer on each rainmaker.
Natalie– our star cheerleader
After the race, everyone plus families and friends and headed back to my house for a team cookout – where Thomas, Carolyn and Doug dueled over the grill (I was happy to hand off the tongs, so to speak). It was a beautiful night out, with great food and terrific company. We finished the night by celebrating Rajiv’s birthday (he is visiting us from our Gurgaon office) using our best singing voices to serenade him (in and out of tune!).
all of our FirstRain racers (minus Eugene)
The Splash and Dash race has proven to be a great team building event for FirstRain and I’m very proud of my team. The encouragement and support they show one another builds the kind of relationships that make a company great. Their ability to congratulate each other for a job well done, to help each other, to care about each other independent of their work roles is part of what makes FirstRain such a fun place to be.
