An Interview with Bobby Martin,
President and Co-Founder of First Research

As a sales leader with Bank of America during the early and mid 1990s, First Research president and co-founder Bobby Martin was responsible for selling to multiple companies in industries with which he was not familiar. He quickly recognized that understanding his customers’ business issues was critical to his success.

This awareness became clearer in a meeting with an engineering services company, during which the CFO noted that it would be great if sales professionals understood their industry better, so that she wouldn’t have to spend her own time bringing them up to speed. Once Martin learned just how valuable industry research could be, he developed a passion for call planning and industry intelligence.

After incorporating industry intelligence into his sales cycle, Martin found that he and his teammates were much more effective. He secured new business with an auto parts manufacturer and a wholesale oil company by leveraging industry intelligence. There was clearly a connection between the overall success of his sales call and the amount of time he spent preparing for a meeting by learning about the client’s business and industry conditions.

However, Martin found that getting and organizing the industry research he needed was clumsy and difficult. “It was often written from varied perspectives, such as investing, or it was scattered, out of date or difficult to absorb,” says Martin. So, he began creating cheat sheets that included call preparation questions to compile industry research and more efficiently prepare for all of his sales calls. “The Call Prep Sheets became so valuable that I decided to build a company devoted to improving the sales cycle with industry intelligence and call preparation tools,” says Martin. “As I was garnering success with these tools, I knew that others could benefit, too,” he says.

Martin teamed up with Ingo Winzer, an industry research expert and a graduate of MIT. Winzer wrote the research while Martin offered advice about what their Industry Profiles should contain and how they should be written so that sales professionals could understand and fully benefit from the information. Both Martin and Winzer believed in the idea and knew that it would be a winning venture.

The new First Research team spent six months creating, marketing and selling 20 Industry Profiles to prospects. “Our first customer was SouthTrust Bank of North Carolina and we’ve been growing ever since,” says Martin. First Research is now used by over 50,000 sales professionals and the company holds such high-profile accounts as Bank of America, Microsoft, Merrill Lynch and more.

First Research has become even more than Martin and Winzer initially envisioned. “We’ve hired selectively, choosing brilliant people with educational backgrounds and talents that complement the company vision,” says Martin. The company has also expanded its offerings to encompass nearly 200 industries, perfected their Call Prep Sheets, as well as added Email Alerts and State Profiles to create a comprehensive suite of Industry Intelligence Sales Tools professionals can use to understand the industries of their clients and prospects.

“Building First Research has been an incredible journey,” says Martin. “I’m thrilled to be able to share First Research Industry Intelligence Tools with our customers and to help them find their own path to success.”

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First Research Executive Team
First Research Products