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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!)

Kevin Bailey of Symantec talking about FirstRain at the CMO Club

Nov 2010/in /by

There is nothing like hearing about how customers use a product from the customer himself. Here are two short videos about how Symantec has integrated FirstRain into their market intelligence process and platform.

First: Clips from Kevin Bailey’s overview talk (4 mins)

Second: Q&A between Kevin and me (7 mins) – describing how FirstRain is used in the intelligence flow and what it does for the user’s knowledge of their customers and market.

CMO club

On stage twice in one day: CMO Club and Astia

Nov 2010/in /by

Yesterday I had two opportunities up on stage – but talking about very different subject matters in the two.

First was on stage with our customer – Kevin Bailey from Symantec – talking about how Symantec uses real-time intelligence and FirstRain monitors to provide unique, instant customer intelligence to their sales force – and how FirstRain is integrated into their SymBrain portal. Great fun – and I get a huge kick out of customers talking about FirstRain. More to follow on this – we’ll put up some video from his talk shortly.

Kevin Bailey, Snr Director Global Market Analytics and Strategies, Symantec

One example: FirstRain powering the competitive matrix pages in SymBrain



Second was on a panel at Astia in San Francisco – speaking to a group of young women entrepreneurs about leadership. It is always both humbling and energizing to be asked to talk about my experiences and views on leadership. This panel was part of week long event for 43 women to help them get their businesses started and connect them with people who can help them raise money.

Three terrific women on the panel with me:

  • Robin Edwards who is a partner at SNR Denton,
  • Renee Knee who is WW VP/GM Commercial Sales and Growth Initiatives at HP,
  • Karen Riley who is a member of the Angels’ Forum
  • Greg Ketchum of Talent Planet (Panel Moderator)

It was fun and inspiring to talk about leadership with a hungry, smart group of young women – although as usual I was the most controversial. I do enjoy being provocative — but I was also the token CEO on the panel so I had some fun with that.

I really enjoyed listening to Robin, Renee and Karen’s perspectives. All such different backgrounds and yet we had many shared opinions on how to grow into being a leader. We talked about the importance of being confident, of setting boundaries and acceptable behaviors, of not needing to know it all yourself, how to manage stress (my input: work out and great red wine) and how to build executive teams who compliment your skills.

The most helpful for me was hearing Karen talk about how she took two years to care for both her parents as they fell ill – she cared for them herself in her house for the last 6 months of their lives – and she applied all her leadership and operational skills to make the end of their lives as comfortable as possible. As I navigate my way through the murky waters of ill parents it is comforting to realize I have skills and resources I can bring in to help make their lives easier.

Renee, Karen, Robin, me and Greg

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