You have a big client call or presentation coming up, and you’re up to your elbows in research. With bleary eyes and 87 browser tabs open, you’re drowning in data trying to find relevant nuggets of information. Sound familiar? We’ve been there and we’re here to show you a better way to gather market intelligence.

As a technology company, we firmly believe our tech should do all the tedious work — so you don’t have to. FirstRain does exactly that. Think of FirstRain as a personal researcher that can scour hundreds of news stories, thousands of updates, millions of tweets, and jillions of data points to give you a synthesized, tailored news brief. Your sales, marketing, and executive teams will love it. 

FirstRain’s advanced features can also get you some really powerful market intelligence on the topics of your choice. Whether you’ve just started using FirstRain or have yet to try it out, here are 5 key features that will give you loads of added value. 
 

1.  Avoid Social Media Overload

Features: Social Commentary and FirstTweets

We’re all familiar with social media’s ability to gather powerful market information. In theory, social media channels are a treasure trove of invaluable market intelligence. In reality, though, most tools that try to gather info from these channels only cause information overload. They’ll also inundate you with useless social buzz. 

FirstRain has an uncanny ability to synthesize social data, extracting meaningful information and cutting out the noise. This is just one of the reasons why it gained the trust of Dun Bradstreet, the 200-year-old global provider of business data and analytics. 

Pro Tips

Find relevant commentary from execs, employees, and analysts, in the Social Commentary panel. Click on a commentary to dive into the details. 

Apply appropriate filters to narrow down specific commentary types. 

Find important tweets from executives and key decision makers from the FirstTweets panel. It also displays excerpts of the latest business-relevant tweets around your chosen company or topic. 

Click on a tweet excerpt to reveal additional information about that tweet. 

All these features are great for gaining insightful market intelligence. They give you a better understanding of your market, competitors, and customers. They also allow you to discover opportunities and engage and add to the conversation.  

2.  Receive Personalized Email Briefs

Feature: FirstRain Briefs

Do you still get industry newsletters in your inbox? If you do, how relevant are they? One of our customers, a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company, didn’t find the information in the newsletters they were getting relevant at all. That’s one of the reasons why they shifted to FirstRain. FirstRain sends you personalized email briefs so you can get all the information you need about your clients in one place. 

Pro Tips

Configure FirstRain to email you account updates, then just check your email for any personalized news updates.

Get the latest updates on customer-related events. The briefs are also grouped into sales triggers, activities around product lines, and management changes. You can also click these items to see specific updates and details.

Click the gears icon at the top right to specify what information you want your email briefs to contain. 

Choose which channels and corresponding panel updates you want to receive emails for. Specify when panel updates should be sent to your inbox. 

Once you’re done setting those up, you can start receiving personalized email briefs at your predefined schedules and get market intelligence at your most convenient time.

3.   Find What’s Really Important

Features: Key Developments and FirstReads

It’s important to stay on top of major developments happening around your channels. You’ll also want to know when a customer achieves a milestone, so you can, for instance, send appropriate greetings before a competitor does. These are all crucial things to know aside from market intelligence, and typical research may not be enough to help you find these!

These were among the key drivers that prompted a Fortune 100 Telecommunications company to integrate FirstRain with their social enterprise software. 

Pro Tips

Conduct research on recent milestones in the Key Developments panel. Discover customer wins, recent acquisitions, new facilities, and other noteworthy events related to a particular channel. Find the highest-ranked articles in your channel in the FirstReads panel. Your role also determines these rankings.  

You need to stay on top of the latest key developments related to your customer. Doing so will give you proper guidance and context every time you communicate with them.  

4.   Get the Latest Updates

Features: Spiking Topics and What’s New

When a certain Fortune 100 petrochemical company added a new business unit, one of their immediate goals was to understand the market to jumpstart the unit. Unfortunately, the third-party services they were using failed to deliver.  

After scouting for an alternative, the company chose FirstRain. FirstRain was able to provide valuable market intelligence, and it also enabled the company to find sales opportunities with very little effort. Two features that can help accelerate your understanding of your target market and spot opportunities are Spiking Topics and What’s New. 

Pro Tips

See trending topics around a company in the Spiking Topics pane. It shows topics during a specific time frame in a bubble chart format. This presentation allows you to research and pinpoint the biggest trending topics. 

Go to the What’s New panel for the most relevant, daily updates. Here, you’ll find daily updates on relevant information. The accompanying numbers indicate the update quantity. 

You’ll always be at an advantage when you’re ahead of relevant trending topics. You can use that intel to discover opportunities and analyze competitor moves. That way, you can respond quickly to keep your edge. 

5.  Get Intel on Why You Should Call and Track Deal Threats

Features: Who To Call and Reasons To Call

Time is precious–both to you and your customers. That’s why you should only make client calls when doing so will add value to both sides. FirstRain’s Who To Call and Reasons To Call features can help you with that. Remember that Fortune 100 telecommunications company we mentioned earlier? These features were instrumental in helping that company’s sales team strengthen their customer relationships. 

Pro Tips

Go to the Accounts channel to get recommendations on who to call. You can then click on an item to get more details. This is for all accounts. 

Click on a specific account, and the Who To Call panel will be replaced by Reasons to Call. This panel also provides a breakdown of daily developments and triggers with high potential impacts on that particular account. Each item is color-coded, so you’ll already know at a glance what kind of information an item holds.

In sales, timing is everything. Features like Who To Call and Reasons To Call can allow you to make client calls at the perfect time. 

TAKEAWAYS

We’re big believers in showing up prepared, and FirstRain is our secret sauce. It gives us just the right market intelligence to stay on top of our customers, competitors, and other channels of interest. Our team loves using FirstRain to prepare for client meetings. Our clients often ask us, “How did you know that?” 

FirstRain also eliminates all the time-consuming tasks that come with doing market research. Yes, that means you no longer have to open a hundred tabs to do your research. Features like personalized email briefs, Who To Call/Reasons To Call, Spiking Topics, and others can give you all the information you need in easy-to-digest visualizations. 

If you’re already an IgniteTech Unlimited customer, you and your coworkers get free access to FirstRain via IgniteTech Unlimited, our Netflix-style subscription that gives you access to our entire enterprise solution portfolio at no additional cost.

Try out FirstRain for yourself