Understanding customers and markets has become one of the most effective ways to empower business professionals to be more engaged and productive. Unfortunately, either building or integrating with noisy content solutions creates apps that users quickly disengage with. That is why we are pleased to announce our newest product, FirstRain API.
FirstRain Personal Business Analytics™ has become the most effective tool in the decision making process among business professionals. With FirstRain API, it is now easy to deliver just-in-time analytics, designed to increase customer engagement and grow revenue, within your own enterprise mobile, e-tablet and web applications.
FirstRain API now provides enterprise developers with real-time data-level and/or application access to our powerful proprietary business graph – generated using big data analytics across millions of sources, documents and social media from across the global web. The FirstRain business graph extracts the deep, interconnected relationships between companies, businesses and markets.
With FirstRain API, your users can see and engage with their own personal and predictive analytics profile across all channels and access points that you develop. With FirstRain, you can advise your users on key developments deep in their customers that can drive growth or identify risk, all through a very personal lens and information experience.
You can read the full Press Release Here.
Interested in setting up time with one of our Sales Engineers to learn more? Drop us a line !
If you are going to Dreamforce this year, you may already know, the Dreamforce Agenda builder will be going live tomorrow, so it’s time to start getting ready to make your session selections!
Learn More about FirstRain Dreamforce 2014 Activities here Still not registered? Use our promo code EC14FRSTRN for a $100 discount!
Tips: Getting Into the Sessions I Want
Plan. Plan. Plan.
This year registering for sessions at Dreamforce will be a bit different, as only 50% of the available seats will be open for pre-registration. The others will be on a first come first serve basis. So if there are sessions that you must get into:
1. Make a list of the sessions you are interested in so you can quickly find them when the agenda builder opens up.
2. Create a calendar with all your personal travel, scheduled meetings and networking events. Have an overview of this and all other main events and conference timelines available for when you start selecting your sessions. Use this handy guide that we have put together to get started!
3. Do not stress out if a session fills up! Check back every day or so- attendees switch sessions all the time. Push comes to shove, you can go wait in line right before the session starts!
Schedule Time for Expo Hall
The Cloud Expos are the best way to get the most out of Salesforce products and solutions. Make sure you schedule some time to make your way to the Salesforce Campground to get your hands on all the Salesforce products and solutions.
FirstRain is a Silver Partner again this year and we look forward to meeting you. We will be in Moscone North Booth 2128 and have a lot of fun activities planned, so come on by to get a demo, visit our Drink Serving Robot and meet the FirstRain Team!
Attend our FirstRain Sessions!
There are over 1,100 sessions currently available to pick from! Join our sessions and learn why FirstRain salesforce.com solutions are used by some of the world’s largest Salesforce customers.
GE Capital: Driving More Sales Opportunities with Personal Business Analytics
Date & Location: Monday October 13th 12:00pm-12:40pm, Club Room, Marriott Marquis
JDSU: Drive Salesforce Adoption and Custom Engagement with Just In Time Analytics
Date & Location: Wednesday October 15th – 3-3:40pm, Yerba Buena, Salon 10-11-12
Flextronics: Increasing Customer Value and Sales Productivity
Date & Location: Wednesday October 15th 4:30pm-5:10pm, Century Theater 7
Want to learn more about FirstRain? Meet with us at Dreamforce!
This post was written by Fjorela Dardha our Marketing intern from Bolzano Italy through the M31USA, internship placement program:
I am Fjorela, a student of Masters of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Free University of Bolzano in Italy. As part of a project funded by the European Social Fund, I was given the unique opportunity to visit Silicon Valley for six weeks in order to get an insight into ways of doing business in the world leading hub for high-tech innovation.
In particular, I had the chance to do a month-long internship in the Marketing department at FirstRain. From the very beginning, I was warmly accommodated and walked through the team’s overall responsibilities and upcoming projects. What really impressed me was how much people cared to make sure my experience in this start-up would be as beneficial as possible. They involved me in different meetings and group activities and were always asking about what I was doing in Italy, curious to hear about my impressions on the differences between European and American culture.
FirstRain is characterized by a very flat organizational structure and the team appears to be enthusiastically committed to a common goal while making the working environment a great and fun place to be in. I felt that particular attention was given to diversity, which is seen as a valuable component and is reflected in the team composition. I was unexpectedly invited to celebrate the end of their financial quarter, which offered me the unique opportunity to witness how much passion and love people can feel for what they are doing while still finding time to have fun among colleagues. During the party, I had the chance to eat and drink with the whole company, getting to meet people from all over the United States. I even got involved in a Sumo Wrestling match! “It’s an intern tradition” – they said…
Overall I consider this experience to have been extremely valuable and positive both from an educational and personal perspective. I had the opportunity to learn new tools such as Salesforce, which may turn out to be useful for my future career, and got an extensive picture of how start-ups work in the Bay Area. Moreover I was able to get some insights and real life examples of management in highly innovative environments as start-ups tend to be, where the decision making process is very quick and people have to constantly adapt to new circumstances. I consider myself very lucky for having been part of such a great and motivated team and for having had the occasion to create contacts and discover potential future career opportunities.
“Just like having a website in the 1990s, buyers are now judging the legitimacy of an organization based on their presence (or lack thereof) on social media.”
Rachel Clapp Miller over on the Force Management blog recently wrote a great piece on how to incorporate social media into your sales process. According to the research she quotes, social is proven to helps sales organizations drive pipeline by
(1) engaging with buyers earlier in the sales cycle,
(2) maintaining relationships with current customers and
(3) demonstrating valuable market insight.
Whenever you start using a new social media site, it prompts you to change your avatar, the image associated with the content you create/post. Your avatar basically represents who you are and an increasing amount of sales people are starting to use their professional ‘headshots’ across all their social business networks. This allows them to create a recognizable brand for themselves as social sellers for when they finally meet face to face with the customer. [Have you ever experienced the delight of meeting someone that you have followed and engaged with on a social network? I have many times, and it is a great feeling!]
Many companies are also starting to dictate that their employees join and engage with their customers on social networks – primarily Twitter and LinkedIn. Recently I saw a huge influx of people joining Twitter from a specific company. I found them because they were all retweeting the same corporate tweets I was tracking. However, I also noticed that many of them were eggheads. An egghead is a twitter user that doesn’t change their profile pic. As an ‘egghead’ you are surely going to be ignored–some might even think that you are a spam bot of some sort. So I asked someone that worked there about what was going on. It turns out that their CEO had announced at their annual meeting that everyone had to be on social. So the eggheads got on social, and many of them still haven’t hatched.
Remember the old mantra, people buy from people? Your buyers are not going to engage with your eggheads. However, hatching an egghead into a social seller who will provide value to their network doesn’t happen overnight. You have to put together a social media plan that will help your sellers be successful on social. This should include tools that will help them quickly share content that is not only promotional for your own company and products, but will also provide insights into subject matters that your customers care about.
With that being said, I think it is time for me to retire my very own avatar. A couple of years ago I wrote an ebook that was beautifully illustrated. It included a hand drawn cartoon of me. Since then, I have used that picture as my Twitter avatar. My network knows me as such and I am concerned that by switching I might be masking myself with … well … a real picture of myself! But that’s ok- the aim is to provide value and engagement to my old friends and my new ones as well, and a fresh look could help do the trick..So follow me to see the “new” @danielabarbosa
FirstRain has decided to take on the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge! CEO Penny Herscher and CFO Glenn Goelz took the plunge yesterday and will donate to help find a cure for this debilitating disease. Watch the videos below!
Penny now challenges Bob Carrigan, President and CEO of D&B; Jonathan Becher, CMO of SAP; Ron Black, CEO of Rambus; and Thomas Waechter, CEO of JDSU.
Penny:
Glenn:
If you are reading this post, you may be one of the lucky people out there that recently received a custom piece of art from FirstRain as part of our “Don’t Get Run Over by the Competition” campaign. According to a recent survey, over 74% of our sales and marketing users reported that access to FirstRain helps them identify competitive threats during campaigns and make sure they stay ahead of the game.
With that information in hand, our marketing team brainstormed ways to communicate this benefit with our customers, and decided that they would appreciate a one-of-a-kind gesture. So we put one of our summer interns, Doug Huynh, to work. Doug is a graphic design student studying at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and has extensive artistic experience.
Inspired by our own users who use FirstRain on a daily basis to identify competitive threats, Doug designed and hand crafted unique pieces of art using bike tires and paint. Using tires of different treads and widths, he hoped to create a visually appealing mix of textures and effects. The results are cool, one-of-a-kind pieces of art that not only look good on your desk, but also provide a good reminder to always be aware of what the competition is up to!
Feedback from recipients has been positive so far. If you are one of the lucky ones, turn the artwork over and go ahead and tweet out with hashtag #FirstRainArt the custom number of your piece! We’d love to hear from you.
Interested in one of these custom pieces, but haven’t received one? Drop me an email at dbarbosa@ignite.firstrain.com and, if there are any left, I will mail one to you!
We are proud to announce that FirstRain has won this year’s Bronze Stevie Award for Most Innovative Company of the Year in the US and Canada! Stevie Award winners were selected by more than 250 executives worldwide who participated in the judging process from May through early August.
The International Business Awards are the world’s premier business awards program. All individuals and organizations worldwide—public and private, for-profit and non-profit, large and small—are eligible to submit nominations. The 2014 IBAs received entries from more than 60 nations and territories.
We’re so happy that the world is recognizing the value FirstRain brings to our customers, as we help them drive more revenue by truly understanding what’s affecting the customers and markets they care about most. We’re constantly striving to bring the best and most advanced experience to our users, so this recognition from the Stevie Awards is a wonderful validation of the value we bring to our customers.
We’re all moved into our new office! Even though some of us are still getting lost in the hallways, you can feel the positive energy in the building.
More space for us also means space to add more people. We have a bunch of open positions; if you think you’re a good fit, send us your resume! Check them out here
Lots of space!
Spacious, classy new foyer
Our awesome kitchen loaded with snacks!
We are happy to announce the beta launch of mobile calendar integration for FirstRain! To help our users be as prepared as possible for every meeting, our algorithms will prioritize the most important customer insights, delivering a different personal insight experience tailored to each user and their role prior to any calendar event.
We’re excited to empower our customers with the mobile calendar integration by helping them increase the quality and frequency of customer engagement, guide activities to drive more opportunities and reduce risk through real-time understanding of customer and market events.
In conjunction to the calendar integration, we’re also introducing the FirstRain Labs program to accelerate innovation between FirstRain and our users. We always want to make sure that the personal insights and the functionality of our solutions help and empower our users as much as possible—and what better way to understand that than from the users themselves?
FirstRain Labs will grant participants beta access to capabilities that are currently being researched and developed, as well as to focus groups where they can share ideas with the FirstRain R&D team and the larger user community. We’re actively recruiting lab participants—sign up here!
We are excited to announce that we’re continuing the momentum from the beginning of the year and are finishing Q2 on a high note by winning 2 awards this month!
FirstRain Customer Insights has just won the DataWeek + API World 2014 award for Most Innovative Customer Intelligence Solution.
Customer Insights was selected by crowd vote, where thousands of people voted on the top Data + API technologies of 2014.
As DataWeek + API World awards recipients, our team will be attending and participating in this year’s conference & expo. We’re offering 50 free OPEN passes (for the Expo, Keynotes, and Open Talks) to our community. Register here to get your pass!
https://dataweek14.eventbrite.com/?discount=dw14-award-guest
We were also named a finalist in the 2014 Stratus Awards. The Business Intelligence Group today announced the 2014 winners of the Stratus Awards. The inaugural industry awards competition recognizes those companies innovating in the Cloud and providing innovative offerings that are truly differentiated in the market.
We work hard to provide the most relevant, personal customer insights to our users to help them meet and exceed their own revenue and customer goals. These awards denote the importance of personal business analytics in today’s world and validate the hard work we put in every day for our customers!
