One of the more frequent feature requests we have received from our customers is the ability to enforce a specific sequence of activities – sometimes called 'forced order.' Well, I'm happy to say that we have heard our customers and have now added this very useful bit of functionality to Revelation! We call it Activity Chains and it's now live!

Activity Chains are sequences of activities that participants are required to complete in a prescribed order. Participants must complete the first activity in the chain before being able to work on the second, complete the second activity before the third, and so on.

Activity Chains can contain any type of Revelation activity including group discussions and mobile activities.

Activity Chains are super useful for:

• Activities that build on each other
• Testing concepts
• Any time you want to carefully control the release of activities to participants

I want to say thanks and take a moment to say great job to our talented engineers and other key people who worked on this feature:

Andrew Kurtz

Seth Englehard

Drew Woods

John Greet

We've got more great stuff coming this Spring and Summer, so stay tuned! 

Portland, Ore— January 4, 2012— Revelation, Inc., provider of Immersive Research™ software and tools, today announced the addition of a new member to its executive team. Kermit Yensen assumes the role of Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Mr. Yensen is a dynamic professional with over 30 years of experience in the Oregon business community including positions as Director, Product Marketing for Hewlett-Packard and Vice President Worldwide Marketing for Tektronix, as well as chief executive positions at iMove and Massini Group.

Launched in 2008, Revelation has been providing global market research firms and Fortune 500 customers with a web and mobile qualitative research solution that enables researchers to deliver richer consumer insights at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional research methods.

“We are extremely excited to have Kermit join the Revelation leadership team,” says Steve August, CEO. “Kermit brings to the table the skills, experience and track record in growing revenues that we need to take Revelation to the next level.”

“I am excited to be part of the Revelation team.  The company has created a game-changing offering in the online market research space and has attracted an amazing set of clients, including one of the leading consumer package goods companies, and one of the leading global market research firms.  I look forward to helping the company grow its market presence.”

About Revelation

Revelation, Inc. designs Immersive Research solutions that combine the richness of traditional research methods with the reach of the Internet. Revelation's simple, engaging software applications deliver a 360-degree view of consumers. Visit Revelation's website for more information at:http://www.revelationglobal.com.

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We are excited to announce that at the end of November we are rolling out an extended webinar program.  In addition to our Great Research Thinking webinars we are going to add Master Classes and Mini ‘How To’ webinars.  The idea behind these additional webinars is to provide our clients, partners and the industry with thought-leadership (GRT) as well as more education around our products and solutions.

The Master Classes are designed by Steve August, the founder of Revelation, and will provide attendees with the opportunity to hear from experts on Immersive Research how to use an activity-based approach to unlock the behavior and insights you are looking for.  Classes will explore the use and selection of activities, and how to sequence them to solve specific business problems – how to test new products, with insight and expertise on how to use research activities to unlock the information you are seeking.  There will be classes on product testing, finding the next opportunity or simply understanding the underlying behaviors of your consumers.

The Mini ‘How To’ webinar is a program designed to provide help, tips and tricks, best practices on how to use Revelation Project and get the most out of your research experience.  The topics will range from participant engagement, recruitment to mobile activities.  The Mini webinar will be 30 minutes in length with 15-minutes for content and then 15-minutes for Q&A. 

Revelation is looking to immediately fill a new position of a New Accounts Sales Rep. This individual will report to the Director of Business Development (acting).

Job Summary:

The New Accounts Sales Rep is the key member of the sales team responsible for acquiring new Revelation clients, and significantly increasing Revelation’s penetration of existing clients, from a targeted list of prospect accounts, in support of the overall sales and revenue goals at Revelation.

Job Responsibilities:

• Demonstrate clear understanding of market research discipline and market dynamics
• For assigned accounts, develop understanding of the client needs, internal structure and any Revelation/client history
• Develop positive, productive relationships with the key decision-makers of assigned accounts
• Meet determined sales and revenue objectives for the assigned accounts, including new account “starts”

Specific Responsibilities – for assigned accounts:

• Identify the key decision-makers / influencers, establish and maintain positive, productive relationships with these decision-makers / influencers, i.e., there may be many current and potential decision-makers within the account, but the key ones will be those that can open (or close) doors for RG across the client and / or control bulk license purchases

• Manage account planning and strategy, optimize daily activities/time management, and pipeline acceleration to facilitate customer adoption.

• Coordinate with marketing, Current Account Sales and Revelation executives as needed to develop the Revelation brand within the account including immediate follow-up on all sales qualified leads generated by the inside sales team, collaboration with inside sales on sales scripts, emails, lead follow-up, and training

• Sign initial engagements within the account consistent with objectives, including:
  i) respond to and follow up on inbound sales enquiries in a timely fashion, including develop and delivery of quotes, execute product demo’s and close business
  ii) initiate bulk order negotiations and execute bulk order agreements

• Transition initial client engagements to the Current Accounts Sales Rep for management through project execution

• Follow up, in coordination with the Current Accounts Sales Rep, on client projects within accounts, particularly for first time users, to collect client feedback to share with other departments and to motivate the client to additional use of the Revelation platform

• Monitor and report on market research and competitor activities within assigned accounts, and provide relevant reports and information as requested

• Work as a part of the sales team, including proactive coordination with Current Account Sales and Inbound Sales, e.g., participation in weekly sales meetings, to achieve Revelation sales and revenue goals

• Demonstrate disciplined use of customer relationship tools (salesforce.com) to document relevant account contact information and to track sales-related activities, leads and opportunities

• Attend trainings to continue to learn and develop relevant knowledge, techniques and skills

• Maintain current knowledgeable of sales statistics, i.e. individual clients, annual sales, monthly sales, booked sales, potential sales from open quotes, current win/loss ratio, etc.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Minimum 2 years in Market Research within the last 6 years

• Demonstrated strong skills and success in sales, negotiations, strategy and finance

• Grasps and monitors the latest market research industry trends, news and technology to ensure effective utilization of resources and discovery of new opportunities

• Ability to translate clients’ needs to sales strategy, providing concise and coherent direction to company executives and other supporting groups

• Working knowledge of, and ability to operate software, including Microsoft Office, and social media, i.e. LinkedIn, Twitter

• Ability to deal with complex issues under pressure of client demands, cost and time constraints

• Strong written and oral communication skills

• Good analytical skills

Qualities that lead to great success at Revelation:

• Love of Technology – Sincere fascination and how it can be utilized and applied

• Energy – Smart, passionate, tolerant of ambiguity, ability to structure one’s own work

• Attitude – Empathic, compassion, sense of humor, assumes the best in others, friendly, approachable

• Self-Awareness – Confident, gives and takes criticism effectively, not personally

• White Glove – Client-focused, commitment to quality

• Knowledge Sharing – Naturally curious, keeps abreast of new ideas/developments in the industry, brings new ideas to the table

• Initiative – Self-starter, self-reliant, blazing own path, courage with conviction

• Moves Forward – Decisive, comfortable with intensity

• Maturity – Collaborative, professional, handles open and frank dialogue without fear

Revelation, Inc. is fully committed to Equal Employment Opportunity and to attracting, retaining, developing and promoting the most qualified employees without regard to their race, gender, color, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, age, physical or mental disability, citizenship status, veteran status, or any other characteristic prohibited by state or local law. We are dedicated to providing a work environment free from discrimination and harassment, and where employees are treated with respect and dignity.

Immerse Yourself! Summer Promotion

Have you ever done a research study with Revelation Project?  If not, you are missing out!  Revelation offers our clients the opportunity to do Immersive Research™. Immersive Research helps market researchers and marketers unlock the ‘why’ behind consumer behaviors. 

When you know why, you know what to do!

This month as part of our Immerse Yourself! Promotion -- you can sign-up to win a FREE 3-Day license of Revelation Project (or equal cash value towards your next Revelation study).  How? Simple. Just register for our July Great Research Thinking webinar "Blended Reality Research™: Bringing Online and Real World Methods Together for Insight and Innovation". 

For those of you who want to stack your odds just ‘Like Us’ on Facebook and you’ll receive an additional entry!  If you tweet or re-tweet we’ll enter you again (please use the hashtag #getimmersed).  Be on the look out for our #getimmersed tweets.

Entry is open to all existing clients and new clients! Get Immersed!

The winner will be announced during our July GRT.  We will notify the winner via email on the 28^th of July.

To learn more about our Immersive Research read our recent blog post "Immerse Yourself! The Five Characteristics of Immersive Research".   To register for our weekly Product Demo click here.

Enter to win click here.

Rules & Regulations:

• Attendance is not required to win.  Winner will be notified on July 28.
• The 3-day license cannot be transferred or redeemed for cash value ($1500). 
• Winner may apply the $1500 value towards a larger Revelation Project, but only towards the license portion.
• The 3-day license must be used within 6 months of July 28, 2011.
• Winner will be required to sign our standard license agreement.
• The 3-day license includes up to 20 participants.

In a scene right out of Frank M. Coates’ 1947 short story “The Law,” on Friday April 1, 2011 the United States Congress voted to repeal the Law of Large Numbers.  The repeal of the Law immediately caused chaos throughout the market research industry, with many quantitative survey researchers scrambling to figure out new sampling models.  “Actually, we are kind of hosed,” said one.

In a rare show of bipartisanship, Republicans and Democrats demonstrated an equally astounding misunderstanding of even the most basic mathematical principles.   Said one Democratic Senate leader, “with the repeal of the Law of Large Numbers, we are well on our way to fixing the deficit. Those big numbers just won’t exist anymore.”  One of his Republican counterparts in the House, added, “This is a significant step in dismantling the liberal mathematical nanny state.  If our founding fathers had wanted a Law of Large Numbers, they would have put it in the Constitution. Oh, and look out Law of Averages – you’re next!”

 The big winner in all this is seen to be qualitative research, which is not dependent on probability sampling to bring consumer experiences to life and move businesses forward. However, given the recent Congressional action, attempts to verify this through polling were unsuccessful.

Happy April 1st from Revelation!

 An NGMR Top Blog

Announcing the Activity Library!

In my previous post, “Making the Leap: Activity Based vs. Question Based Research” I described a shift of thinking to help researchers adapt to the online and mobile research mediums.  While traditionally research projects have been designed as a series of questions, Activity-Based Research presents research project as a series of engaging activities.  These activities can be used to understand specific parts of a consumer experience:  Behaviors, Context, and Emotions. 

This shift can be challenging for some researchers, but once the shift is realized, the results are astounding.  From our experience over the past three years, we’ve learned that the best way to bring people up to speed on Activity-Based Research is to show them examples and describe how activities can be combined to get the deepest possible understanding. 

I’m happy to announce that we’ve just made getting up to speed on Activity-Based Research a whole lot easier.  Introducing Revelation’s Activity Library! 

Revelation’s Activity Library is a collection of tried and true activities that Revelation has designed to capture the essence of consumer experiences. The Activity Library makes it easier and faster than ever to design effective, in-depth research projects.

We have organized the activities in the Activity Library by category:  Warmups and Welcomes, Diaries and Journals, Tours and Show Me’s, Group Discussions, and Concept, Ad and Web Site Tests. 

Each activity comes with a description on how to best use and adapt to for your unique project.

Activity-Based Research has never been easier! 

To learn more about the Activity Library visit www.revelationglobal.com/activitylibrary.  There is more information and a 2-page Activity Library datasheet.

If you are a researcher who has used Revelation Project we would like to hear your ideas and feedback on how we can improve and enhance the system.

Back in 2009 we created a UserVoice powered feedback forum to maintain an ongoing conversation about our service. Since then you've submitted some great ideas for our site, cast hundreds of votes for issues you would like us to address and helped guide the development of Revelation Project.  Thanks to your recommendations, our product now has a calendar-based activity scheduling feature, an enhanced text editor and many other features.

We would like to see this continue. If you have ever conducted a study with us and thought, "I wish I could do X with Revelation" then log in and tell us about it. Even if you don't have a suggestion to share right now you'll probably find a feature you want to vote on.  

If you already have a researcher account with Revelation you can click through to the forum from your Dashboard after signing in to Studyspace.net. We can't wait to see where you take us next.

PT Sales & Marketing Ops Tech Support Engineer

Revelation is looking to immediately fill a new position of a technically adept individual with a sales and marketing mindset to serve as our Tech Support Engineer for the Sales and Marketing team. 

This individual will report to the Sales Director and the Marketing Director; this person will support the team in determining and making the best use of our systems. This individual will be the expert with all CRM and conferencing systems including Salesforce.com, iLinc and other current systems. 

In addition this individual will be tasked with evaluating new systems and making recommendations on choosing the best technology to support our sales and marketing efforts. 

This individual should come to the table with the following qualifications: 

1. Demonstrated high level of technical proficiency with software and technology 
2. Ability to learn new systems quickly 
3. Ability to evaluate and adapt systems to best support sales and marketing function 
4. Familiarity with Salesforce.com and web/phone conferencing systems a big plus 
5. Team player with a positive attitude 

Responsibilities include: 

1. Support sales and marketing team in utilizing current systems in executing marketing and sales tasks and campaigns 
2. Evaluate best practices and capabilities and implement to support best possible sales and marketing workflows 
3. Develop reports from Salesforce.com and other systems 
4. Evaluate new systems and add-ons for current sales and marketing tasks 

Revelation, Inc. is a Portland-based online market research software developer and SaaS provider. We strive to provide a healthy work-life balance and we serve some of the best coffee to be had! Everyone has a voice and is heard. Come make a difference and join a great progressive thinking and acting team. 

Hourly pay determined by experience. 

Please submit a cover letter along with your resume to: jobs@revelationglobal.com or fax to 360.838.1492. Please no phone calls. 

We look forward to hearing from you! 

Revelation is an Equal Opportunity employer.