Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So, that’s your primary user interface, Jive or Chatter or whatever?

Penny Herscher: Jive, Salesforce. It’s typically Salesforce.com CRM, Chatter, Jive, SharePoint, or the iPad.

SM: OK.

PH: Or a push in email. Then clients think they’re getting it in Outlook. Salespeople don’t need another tool. What they need is a workflow where everything is in one place. I think the CRM system or social enterprise is going to end up being that place. And it’s going to end up being built into the iPad in the end.

SM: I still maintain that the sales management does need another tool to deal with the flow that’s happening in Twitter and elsewhere in social media. It’s probably the same technology as you’re applying, but it’s cut differently.

PH: No, the ability to manage the direct messaging would be a different technology.

SM: It’s not just the direct messaging. People are contacting you on the Twitter message stream, people who would be considered leads. Not to digress. What is the adoption in your Fortune 1000 customer base? What’s the level of awareness, and how have you seen that evolve in the past few years of these kinds of technologies?

PH: I’d say there’s still pretty low [awareness] that it’s possible to do what we do. We find when we engage with potential customers, because we’re usually dealing with customers that have more than $5 billion in revenue, we’re engaging with a sales enablement team or strategic marketing team, and there’s often a step of surprise. Wow, you can actually do that. And often, they’ve tried something else. They’ve tried Inside View and found it isn’t very good, or they’ve tried Hoover’s and found it isn’t very good, or they’ve tried Factiva, which is excellent if you’re a librarian but not good for your sales team. Or they’ve tried Google Alerts, and they’re spending days and weeks and trying to make sense of Google Alerts. There’s a high level of awareness of the need for a solution, and there’s an increasing but still low awareness that it’s actually possible to solve it. That’s what Ryan is working on right now, raising the awareness that it’s possible.

What we find is that our sales cycle is fun at the moment because we’ll get and have an initial engagement, maybe do an initial sale to a small team, and then it grows really fast to be thousands of seats because once people believe it’s possible, they want everybody to have it. Our sales cycles often go from 30 seats to thousands or even five seats to thousands because of the nature of the quality of what we do.

SM: What does it take to raise the awareness? If you look at media, they’re covering social media like maniacs right now. Everybody’s talking nonsense about social media. In that noisy environment, how do you tell your story?

PH: We use our technology to reach out to the customer. Because we can analyze and deliver to you interesting content, interesting intelligence about your market, when we send you an email that says, “Are you aware that your customer, XYZ, has these developments?” We have an extraordinary response rate. We do it by vertical. Go after one industry at a time, and then we go to customers inside the industry. We reach out to them, and the response rate is extraordinary, the program that Ryan’s running.

We use the technology. We’re doing a little bit of press, but that’s the old way of doing it. We use the technology to reach out to the customer.

SM: Sales ops, is that where you’re selling?

PH: We’re selling to the head of sales or the head of marketing. We have a number of customers where it’s the CMO who is trying to drive some level of cultural change or awareness change. There are many CMOs out there who, if you talk to them about their customers’ customers, will tell you they’re trying to solve that problem. We could be brought in by the head of marketing, who’s servicing sales. So, it’s head of marketing with a customer marketing department, or it’s the SVP of sales. I went to an SVP of sales with a big communications company, and he got so excited not only because of the level of intelligence. He also said, “You mean I could use this to get my sales guys come to Salesforce? This could be the candy that they come to Salesforce for?” I said, “Absolutely. Not only would they be better educated, but they’ll also come use Salesforce.” We’re a carrot for people to come into Salesforce. Salesforce.com looks like, oh, I have to go report to my management what I’m doing. If you put candy in there, they’ll come.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain
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