First Research enhances business intelligence for use in connection with sales calls.

• Position: New Products

The conventional wisdom is that if you want to recruit new commercial customer, you first must convince this customer that you understand his or her business. But how do you do this? One solution is to acquire business intelligence about this company prior to a sales call.

First Research Inc., Raleigh, N.C., recently announced an enhancement to its set of industry intelligence tools. The enhancement, called Executive Insight, presents specific talking points relevant to the CEO, CFO, chief information officer, human resource professionals and sales and marketing executives of the target company.

"Sales teams must illustrate a value proposition that appeals to a broad internal audience," says sales effectiveness expert Sheryl Kingstone, director of customer centric strategies at Yankee Group. "Sales professionals have to take their message and sell it directly to the CEOs and hit their hot buttons. Then to the CFOs, who care about a different set of hot buttons, along with the CIOs and other operational heads. First Research gives you the information you need to do just that."

With the product, sales and marketing professionals can pinpoint and address key business issues when meeting with a business owner who wears multiple hats, a...