[August 05, 2014]

FirstRain Introduces the First Analytics-Based Customer Insight Available Within the Sales Person's Calendar

FirstRain, the leader in Personal Business Analytics™, today announced the beta launch of its mobile calendar integration, an innovative and intuitive way for sales professionals to increase customer engagement and reduce sales cycle risk. The FirstRain calendar capability arms users before each meeting with prioritized and highly relevant developments related to the customer, their company and the market. This guided action provides sales professionals with an immediate deeper understanding of their customer. FirstRain is also introducing FirstRain Labs, a new program designed to accelerate innovation between FirstRain and its customers and users.

FirstRain's personalized business analytics create a personal interest graph based on a user's role, the product lines they are selling and to whom they sell. Now, with calendar integration, personalized, relevant information and action points are pushed to users on their mobile device to help guide the sales strategy for each meeting.

Based on how the user sells, FirstRain's multi-factored algorithms prioritize the most important customer insights for each meeting. For example, if they are a strategic account manager or, in contrast, if they are a regional sales representative with hundreds of accounts, the mobile calendar feature delivers a different personalized information experience tailored to each user and their role prior to the calendar event. The meeting brief uses dynamic analytics, drawn from the business-focused Web and social media, to recommend actions based on the customer's business goals. It also guides actions based on the challenges the customer's business is facing and the seller's own competitive landscape. This improves the seller's ngagement with the customer in the meeting and prevents unanticipated surprises, leading to new revenue growth and reduced sales cycle risk.

"Our users have told us that highly personal guidance within the moment of a sales activity, like a customer meeting or discovery call, can help them drive more effective sales conversations. FirstRain mobile calendar integration helps trigger these insights by delivering guided action, insight and customer context to users alongside the calendar application they already use to manage their daily life," said Penny Herscher, FirstRain President and CEO. "We are also pleased to launch FirstRain Labs so our users can work directly with our R&D team. Together we will innovate new ways to derive meaning from the fire hose of information now available and so help our users grow new revenue and protect existing revenue through better customer engagement."

The FirstRain mobile calendar integration empowers FirstRain users with mobile analytics by:

• Increasing the Quality and Frequency of Customer Engagement - FirstRain helps you engage your customer more often and more effectively by prompting you with the real-time changes in their business and the actions that you can take to help them. This helps you grow new revenue and protect your existing revenue with your personal view of their business and your market as it develops.
• Guiding Activities to Drive More Opportunities - FirstRain's newest mobile analytics guide you and give you context to help identify new business opportunities within the calendared event.
• Reducing Risk Through Real-Time Understanding of Customer and Market Events - The FirstRain mobile calendar integration provides relevant and actionable market and customer insights to prevent surprises during meetings and to help users understand the risks impacting their sales cycle.

FirstRain Labs was developed to support the company's ongoing mission to improve the relevance and quality of its solutions through early and direct feedback and insights from users. FirstRain Labs will grant participants beta access to other 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 to accelerate innovation based on how they use information. FirstRain is actively recruiting lab participants via the following link: www.firstrain.com/firstrain-labs.

The FirstRain mobile calendar integration is the first capability to be released through the FirstRain Labs program. During the beta period, participants will help to refine calendar features and functions.

About FirstRain

FirstRain is a pioneer and leader in personal business analytics solutions for the enterprise. FirstRain's mobile, cross-platform solutions provide sales, marketing, finance and leadership professionals analytics tuned to their specific company strategy, allowing them to deeply understand their customer's business and their markets. FirstRain's patented, advanced analytics technology finds business-focused Web and social media and then delivers it seamlessly into the world's premier CRM and social enterprise platforms, including Salesforce.com, Chatter, Microsoft SharePoint, Dynamics and Yammer (News - Alert), Jive and Oracle. These analytics are similarly incorporated into leading research platforms such as Fidelity.com, Dun & Bradstreet, Interactive Data and Mergent. Based in San Mateo, California, FirstRain also has offices in New York and Gurgaon, India.

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