FirstRain is sponsoring the new Grace Hopper Conference India in Bangalore Dec 7-9 this year. GHC has been held in the US for many years but this is the first time we (the Anita Borg Institute of which I am a board member) is organizing an international conference and I am delighted it is going to be in India since FirstRain has a develpment operation in Gurgaon, India.
And we are hiring – so if you are a software engineer going to the conference seek out our Director of Analytics Aparna Gupta! We are looking for bright engineers with expertize in either applications and algorithms to help us continue to develop our ground breaking search and analytics platform.
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:
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
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.
I am attending the Selling Power sales leadership conference in Philadelphia today – and just listened to a compelling talk by Michael Weening who is VP of Business Wireless for Bell Mobility (he’s on an erudite panel with sales development leaders from Xerox and Sophos as I type).
His main message was to focus on all the aspects of training and development that are not product – unlike many organizations that cram product knowledge into their sales guys but neglect to invest in career development, personal development and mentoring. How many sales organizations have you seen where the sales team is sped and fed by product marketing, but never have real one-on-ones with their manager beyond their latest numbers?
Some of the less conventional ideas Michael was espousing…
- he used personality indicators from a questionnaire with a sales person to facilitate development discussions between manager and sales person (not unlike the Myers-Briggs discussion I have with my team).
- he leads with a focus on the sales rep taking responsibility for their own development, and so (for example) set up a library of books on best practices both for sales and business, and anyone can take books home, and keep them if they want to. He, quite correctly, recognized that different people learn differently.
- he encourages his sales managers to take one of the selling skills books and lead a team discussion once a week on each chapter, where each week a sales rep would distill down the key lessons from the chapter
- and he talked about the critical importance that not only sales reps, but also the sales managers have personal development plans which are discussed and reviewed each quarter with each individual’s manager (whatever the level).
What was great to hear was Michael’s focus on how much he cares about the team. Obviously he cares about the numbers – of course – but his passion for how to help each sales rep have the training and support they need to develop their personal skills and business skills was great to hear.
Coming from my own experience of high growth technology companies in Silicon Valley, I have seen more development in soft skills than I think is typical in older, larger businesses. Whether you have 1 sales person or 1000, all but the top 10% of your superstars benefit from, and really appreciate, personal development.
We are holding our mid year sales meeting this week and I have brought our sales team in together for training and territory planning. And since it’s beautiful weather, and it’s summer, we went as a company to AT&T Park to watch the Giants play the Cincinnati Reds.
The team all really enjoyed the game – especially since our home team crushed the opposition! And because we had purchased a block of tickets our name was listed on the big board.
There is just no part of the current economy that is about getting lucky – and sales people know this more than anyone. CSO Insights run a sales performance study and are (not surprisingly) picking up the significant drop-off in sales performance over the last year. They find one of the keys to success is account-focused intelligence – here’s their analysis.
What’s interesting about their analysis is how big a role sales intelligence plays in the sales rep’s ability to perform. For all three keys: Knowing there is a game, Getting in the game and Winning the Game:
“sales reps are finding…They need to demonstrate a value-add in terms of knowledge of the prospect’s marketplace… failing to do so can get them dropped from the conversation”;
and “it’s critical that the salesperson is able to quickly collect the information required to go beyond having a product conversation to having a meaningful dialogue about the customer’s business”.
The fundamental key is account-focused intelligence – the ability to “identify and understand the market trends and drivers impacting your customer’s business, their competitors and how they are faring against them, your customer’s customers etc.”
So no surprise – sales reps that are willing to do the work get better results – and those that succeed understand the impact of a) doing thorough research on a prospect account then b) integrating that knowledge into a strategic account plan.
CSO Insights segmented their 2010 survey based on firms that exceeded expectations, met expectations and needs improvement based on these two aspects of selling and as you would expect – those that do strategic research and use it in their account plans do better!
As part of our announcement today of our new snapshot on Salesforce CRM we have also announced a webinar to show our sales users the power of being able to do account analysis in line when preparing for meetings or planning out campaigns. Join us!
Conduct Major Account Analysis to Increase Revenue Today
Date: July 27, 2010
Time: 1:00 PM PDT or 4:00 PM EDT
Registration Link: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/148402243
Webcast link: http://ignite.firstrain.com/Events.php
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
John Batelle, one of the gurus of Search, wrote as early as 2004 that the secret of Google’s success was its understanding of the web as a database of intentions. He described the web as “a place holder for the intentions of humankind – a massive database of desires, needs, wants and likes that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked and exploited to all sorts of ends.”
Fast-forward to the present and Batelle has observed that “web search as a pure signal has been attenuating of late – overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of data on the web, for one, and secondly by our own increasingly complicated expectations.” Batelle goes on to speculate, quite compellingly, on other new “little signals” such as who I know (Social Graph), what I am doing (Status Update), or where I am (the Check-in) that are emerging to make sense of the “Database of Intentions”. Bing and more recently Google have introduced contextual information to their searches as a way to make more sense of the web and better meet the expectations of users. Even so, Bing and Google are still operating in a web that represents a database of intentions – and the new intentions are social and status updates.
In the business world, people are interested in different signals and so require more sophisticated search capabilities than Bing or Google. I believe the compelling “little signal” in the business world is what has changed and it is generated by the detection of what I call events, which are patterns, connections and anomalies of interest to business decision-makers. What has changed about a business and it’s market is a powerful signal. When detected by sophisticated search capabilities, it can transform the web from a database of intentions to a database of actionable business insights.
Detecting the “what has changed” signal by finding, sorting and making sense of relevant events requires a new class of search technology called intelligent business search. Intelligent business search turns the unstructured, messy, duplicative and rich content available online into an analyzable data set of business ideas, relationships, facts and trends. It derives the implied business structures of companies, industries, management, markets and the relationships that connect them. And it applies trend and anomaly detection to discern what may be emerging, unusual or material.
Intelligent business search quickly returns relevant results that can create new insights and facilitate smart, fast business decision-making. It transforms the web into an incredibly valuable database of actionable insights. Tapping into that database has the potential to transform the way you sell, market, strategically plan and think about your business.
[Posted on the Huffington Post earlier today]
We’ve released a new version of FirstRain today which has a number of new features to provide our users even more depth on their companies and markets – even more quickly. You can read about all the features on today’s blog post on ignite.firstrain.com.
One of the very new, beta capabilities is Industry search and analytics. This is intended for marketing and sales people and analysts who need to quickly review an industry and what’s hot and changing in that industry — for example a salesperson coming up to speed on an industry because they have a new prospect, or analyst who wants an RSS feed of the important changes impacting the companies in an industry.
The industry brief generates top news, recent events, corporate governance indicators, industry health indicators, management turnover, top moving stocks, analyst comments etc. for the industry – all in one place – or sent to you through an RSS feed.
But more than that – it also shows you a market map for the industry – which are the top companies? What are the hot topics? What are the top business lines? All very useful to stay on top of an industry that is impacting your business. It’s up to the minute, automated and generated from the web.
Here are some images from the Internet Information Providers industry:
