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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
battleground

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?

energy industry

Current example of a sales team using FirstRain to stay ahead

Oct 2009/in /by

Got email from a client last week really pleased with the information they had found on FirstRain to help them with a campaign.

Here’s the story: A small software company selling to a large energy utility. They sell software to help automate and improve customer communications.

In this case the sales team was doing a detailed business process analysis to show the utility how much money they could save by upgrading their customer communications, and how they would also improve their quality.

Friday afternoon – meeting with the CIO to present their findings. The CIO walks in, out of sorts, the company had just been in the news as losing customers because of their inability to invoice customers correctly (right in the sweet spot for this sale). On a break during the meeting the sales team looked for the news story – wanting to make sure they understood the severity of the issue and how to use it in their sales cycle. They looked on Google – not there – then on FirstRain – straight to the link and then able to use the research engine to understand the background.

The sales team is now using their additional knowledge to help the customer get on top of their billing issues quickly – and sent us an email saying “Thank you FirstRain”.

(the story is anonymous until they win the contract – then we can name them)

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