Guest post: Michael Prospero, Director of Research at FirstRain
As an analyst, one of the things I struggled with was the vast amount of information coming at me each day. A large part of my job was to read anything from or about my companies, competitor companies, industry bellwethers, thought leaders and of course the overall economy.
I set up Google alerts, but depending on the companies/stocks I entered I got a lot of junk both old and irrelevant. Also, there still isn’t a way to set up the types of sources you would like to read (e.g., no press releases or wire news) — the number of sources alerts covered is relatively small. The stated information from Google is that it watches more than 4,500 English-language news sites. and the number of alerts can become annoying if you have large portfolios of companies you’re tracking.
Additionally, I would have my stock ticker service up on my screen with the stock prices of my portfolios and this would provide an icon if there was news on a stock I had set up on the screen. A large part of my day was spent reading financial publications, checking news from the alerts on my companies, talking to customers and companies. When I had time in between those tasks, I spent my time working investment ideas.
As you read, you come up with ideas (idea generation), which leads you to search for other stories to either support or invalidate your theory. To find those stories, you would of course use Google search. Obviously, Google is very good at finding content, but because it’s most every source on the internet, you have to really hunt for something interesting and timely.
Oftentimes, you will find an article that is exactly what you were looking for in your search only to realize that it’s from 2006. Google search is comprehensive, but it’s tedious and extremely time consuming to dig through the clutter of totally irrelevant as well as non-business relevant content.
It’s been nearly three years since I was an analyst now and the one thing that has drastically changed is the number of blogs (and overall number sources on the internet) and their authoritativeness. In the beginning, the number of blogs was sparse and at best the authors of them were questionable. Now, we have blogs from extremely knowledgeable, connected, intelligent people and micro-blogging (e.g., Twitter) is yet the next step in the evolution of news.
So this leads to why I am at FirstRain: I believe if a system could have gathered all of the news that was business relevant, categorize it by company and topically, and allow me to personalize its delivery along with other preferences, it would have helped my process enormously. I could have spent more time on the phone and more time working on idea generation. Time spent on new ideas rather than time spent covering your butt is the way to create alpha.
A nice post from Selling Power on FirstRain – written by Gerhard Gschwandtner:
How Major-Account Managers Stay on Top of the Growing Tsunami of Information
The role of a major-account manager is significantly different from the roles of other salespeople, since these elite sales executives manage only very few but substantially larger accounts. Their role is more strategic, and their company’s fortunes often depend on their success. …
One of the most difficult jobs in managing major accounts is to keep up with the massive amount of information within the account. Imagine being in charge of selling your company’s services to IBM, Oracle, or Microsoft. How will you be able scan and monitor the rapidly changing corporate landscape?
Read more here…
Time is the enemy for strategic sales teams.
You make money when you truly understand your customer’s business. And that means understanding your customer’s customer. What is driving their business, what are the trends that they lie awake at night about? When is the right time to call — and who?
But the time it takes to do this for large global accounts, or for a set of accounts across diverse market segments, is quite simply prohibitive and so sales people don’t do it.
I’ve worked with global teams covering accounts like IBM, BP, Toshiba, Cisco — it’s incredibly important that each member of the team understands what is happening to the market and end customers of each local division or business line that they are responsible for managing and that they bring that knowledge and understanding into the account strategy and coordinated campaigns.
Another example is one where we are currently working with a senior sales rep (at a very large software company) who has target accounts across a diverse set of industries — and his effectiveness is directly impacted by how quickly he can come up to speed on his customer’s businesses.
I was with a strategic sales manager at a large telecomm customer of ours on the East Coast last week discussing this very issue. He reinforced to me how important it is that his team can be relevant when they gets on the phone with their prospect or customer. It changes the whole dynamic of the conversation and makes the discussion about the customer’s business challenges and how you can help – not about what product you are hawking.
When you integrate a solution to this problem sales people can tie their productivity gains, and the deeper campaigns they can create, directly to revenue — and it is one of the popular ways our users leverage FirstRain.
My team is showing FirstRain at the Sales 2.0 Conference in Boston on June 28 and I’ll also be talking about the methodology to put this kind of power into the hands of a sales team on a webinar on Thursday June17 at 11am PDT – join us!
We have a history of taking on whacky athletic challenges at FirstRain – both to get and stay fit and also to play together as a team.
Yesterday was no exception, although we were a small team this time. Three of us competed in the Splash and Dash in the Stevens Creek Reservoir in Cupertino CA. It was supposed to be a 1.2 mile swim and 3 mile run.
Well, it turned out a little different than we had expected. First off the water was really cold – which meant we were gasping for the first leg as we got accustomed to the temperature. And then the swim was not 1.2 miles – it was closer to 1.6-1.7 miles. We only knew this because it took me so much longer than last time I did it and so we asked around some of the more experienced competitors who estimated the distance for us based on their swim times.
It’s no wonder that at the end we didn’t run. We’d had enough. But we enjoyed it, we didn’t come last, and we are signed up for two more races this year!
Here we are before the race (we didn’t look as good afterwards!)
Eugene, me and David
We’re running two webinars in 2 weeks – one for marketing on June 15th and one for sales on June 17th. Each one is focused on how our successful “rainmaker” customers use FirstRain to sell more to their leading customers.
If you know more about your major accounts than anyone else, and if it takes you just a few minutes a day to have that knowledge, you can provide better service to your customer. You understand their business better than your competitor does. You spot opportunities to help them, and you are prepared for every conversation.
Our webinars will show techniques to use FirstRain to do this. Join us here.
We’re holding two educational webinars in June on how to use strategic intelligence to accelerate revenue – both for marketing or for sales – and Pete Krainik posed a few questions to me for the CMO Club website last week. This is just a preview – if you’d like to join us for a live discussion on June 15th you can register here. And if you are a CMO you can join an interesting community of your peers at http://www.thecmoclub.com/.
Pete: What’s really available on the web today to help CMOs understand their market? Isn’t it just a lot of noise?
Penny: That’s a great question because I think many people do wonder if the web can help with strategic issues. It’s well understood how to look for PR coverage in the web, but the reality today is that the web is also the most current, up-to-date view of companies and markets – it’s more current than databases of company and market data because they just cannot stay up to date – and if you can detect the patterns in it the web holds a rich wealth of critical information about how companies and markets are changing.
Pete: What types of questions can be answered real time?
Penny: Some examples of the questions that can be answered real time from the web are:
- What are the new developments around a hot industry topic – and what companies are being impacted?
- What are the visible management changes at a company, whether or not they are announced?
- Who’s competing with who? (real time, not out of date relationships)
- What’s impacting my customers customer’s business – and how can it impact my strategy, my sales team and my revenue?
- What’s the context of a competitors announcement – and how is the broad market of influencers and bloggers reacting to it?
This type of strategic intelligence is absolutely present in the web, but the high levels of junk and duplication make it almost impossible to find quickly without a research engine designed to find and report on company, industry, hot topic and management information. But as a CMO you know you want your strategic marketing team and sales teams to have it, and not have to spend time looking for it.
Pete: What are the most frequently requested reports today?
Penny: The most common report is configured by CMOs for their specific intelligence space. You select the companies, related competitors, related industry topics and business topics that impact your market and a rich report on the latest developments is emailed to you, or you can subscribe in an RSS reader and see it on your phone, or push it into your internal company portals. In addition, FirstRain staff will always help CMOs do this if you need help and can add hot industry topics into the application if you are looking for a new narrow area of coverage.
The second type of report is a Company Brief. This is an auto-generated contextual report about a company – and includes the ecosystem (business lines, competitors, hot topics) around the company, recent management changes, lists of detected management and their bios, recent events for the company – and also for it’s competitors and it’s industry. Because this brief extracts material changes and events, rather than a stream of unfiltered news, it is a very efficient way to quickly see the market events that are impacting a company and it’s business. We see both marketing and sales people use it to prepare themselves, or their management, for customer meetings and calls.
Pete: So why can’t I do this with consumer tools like Google and Bing?
Penny: Google and Bing are truly excellent at extracting structure and getting you to the right answer for typical consumer questions – like shopping, travel, movie times or local store information. Even Yahoo Finance is good at getting you recent news from the most popular news sites. But what none of these tools do is provide you with similarly well structured answers for companies, industries and hot topics. These are concepts that are hard to capture in keywords, and where the most interesting information may not even mention a company name, but the right tool can detect that it a web article or blog post is about a topic impacting a company.
In addition to finding and filtering web information to generate useful intelligence, the other critical functionality for marketing is reporting suitable for strategic readers (like marketing, sales and executives). Time is money and the right reports, producing just the critical intelligence that is impacting a product line or market take users directly to critical strategic intelligence in seconds.
Pete: What is one piece of advice you would give CMOs in the club as they look to the web to help them understand their markets?
Penny: Focus on the efficiency of how your marketing and sales team use the web. The costs of the time it takes to use consumer tools are enormous but they are hidden and with the tools like Google (which is where everyone goes first today) the web is a huge time sink and distraction to your team. You need the strategic intelligence the web provides, but you need to get at it efficiently so I recommend you focus on the timeliness, quality and relevancy of the intelligence you pull out – and how long it takes your employees to retrieve it into their decision process.
Click here to register for upcoming CMO CLUB Roundtable Webinar with Penny on “How Do Top Marketing Teams Use Up-to-the-Minute Intelligence to Accelerate Revenue”: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/827670465
Click here for more information on FirstRain: http://ignite.firstrain.com/Marketing.php
We’ve formally announced the research engine to the press today – you can see the press release here.
I’ve been briefing editors for a few days now, and expect I will be through this week to. It’s the first time we’ve talked with the press about our new capability and the category “intelligent business search” – although our customers have been using it for several months now. We decided to wait to announce it until we were very confident of customer adoption and that the value we had planned to build was actually being experienced by our customers. And we’re there today!
Customers are telling us how much they like it:
- the helpfulness of the information and the time it saves sales in finding new opportunities and preparing for meetings
- the time it saves marketing in staying on top of everything happening in their market
- the ease of configuring for all our users – just what they want to see in the form they want to see it
- the freshness of the management change data, especially in comparison to traditional tools
- the freshness and breadth of intelligence because the web is the source, especially in comparison to the market intelligence services most users have access to today.
Bottom line – you can find higher quality intelligence in minutes instead of hours, and exactly what you need for your job. If you want to try it you can request a free trial here.
Google just entered the world of faceted search, following in Bing’s footsteps, and it’s a good move. John Battelle, wrote a strong piece on what they are doing “Google Steps Gingerly Toward Search As Application” and on why this is a necessary move for Google — to deliver search as an application rather than as purely simple keyword search. I couldn’t agree with him more.
It’s good that Google is taking this step for the consumer, and it’s a step professional search based applications have already taken – they just have to be a great deal higher productivity than consumer applications, because in the office time is money.
If you are a FirstRain user you know the benefits of this approach are to get you instantly to the businesses, ecosystem and analytics around your question to help you make a decision quickly. The wind power example Google used in it’s announcement is a good one to look at.
In the Google case here are the results you get:
The results include news and information from traditional media sources, nongovernmental organizations and online sources such as Wikipedia. The left-hand navigation offers the ability to refine results by time and by news, blogs, images, books and more. Related search terms such as solar power, hydropower and geothermal energy are also listed. It’s definitely a big improvement over early technologies.
But for a sales or marketing person what you need is fresh, business relevant results and navigation for the businesses in the industry and the ecosystem of companies engaged in the wind energy industry — wind power generation and distribution. Recent events, industry trends, people-related changes and management turnover are all detectable and attached to the search results. For example, users can identify planned commercial wind-turbine installations; track key components, parts and raw materials used in their construction; and identify suppliers poised to benefit from investments in wind power. Up-to-the minute reports can be delivered regularly via email or mobile phone so that users stay on top of new developments.
Here’s the contrasting screen shot – and in FirstRain you can navigate through management teams, competitors, hot topics and all the other elements of the ecosystem from here – which is what intelligent business search can give you.
There’s a great example of the impact of a rising trends on companies and regions on the stock research page of Fidelity.com today. You can get to this page here.
First look down on the right hand side – you can see the hot topics rising on the web. Not surprisingly Oil and Gas Ecological Issues is the hottest topic.
What you can now do is click through on the rising topic and see which companies are being impacted by it. Clearly BP and Transocean since they are being held accountable, but also the spill over (!) into positives for alternative energy sources like wind which will benefit companies like GE and Siemens.
Scrolling down on the Fidelity.com research page you can see a long list of interesting articles to read which give you a good in-depth view of which companies are impacted most by the tragedy.
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?
